Reflections on Bakunin

René Berthier || Why talk about Bakunin at a time when real communism has collapsed in the countries that claimed to be communist, at a time when neoliberalism is undeniably triumphant and when the “end of ideologies” has been decreed?

First, because what has been called “real communism” has never represented the reality of communism; second, because an oppressive economic and social system can and must be fought; and finally, because the assertion of the end of ideologies is in fact merely the assertion of the supremacy of a dominant ideology. Now, it so happens that Bakunin has original things to say on these three points, and his analyses remain remarkably modern.

The text by Amédée Dunois presented here is a short biography of Bakunin that very honestly outlines the major debates the Russian anarchist faced. His thesis is that Bakunin is the founder of revolutionary syndicalism and, we might add, of anarcho-syndicalism, a concept that did not yet exist when the text was written. Dunois concludes his biography with some very interesting, but all too brief, reflections on Bakunin’s work. It is too often forgotten that Bakunin was only an anarchist for the last eight years of his life, from 1868 until his death in 1876. Considering that, from 1874 onward, he practically ceased all activity due to illness, this constitutes a very short period during which he could develop his ideas. Thus, Dunois’s criticism of the disjointed nature of his work is perfectly justified: “The thinker is better than the writer,” he says. “Bakunin proved himself ill-equipped to discipline his mind and order a naturally abundant and dense thought process.”

When Dunois writes that Bakunin’s socialism “evolved only with extreme slowness,” he clearly perceives that the revolutionary’s political thought was a gradual evolution toward anarchism. A conservative in the 1830s, Bakunin was a radical democrat preoccupied with the Slavic question in the early 1840s; after his escape from Siberia, he resumed the course of events as they had been before his arrest. In the meantime, the author of the Communist Manifesto had become the author of Capital. To put it another way, Bakunin was arrested during the 1848 revolution and returned to the political scene on the eve of the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). The Slavic question still occupied him, but, living in Italy, he became one of the principal founders of the socialist movement in that country. He still believed it was possible to rally the radical bourgeoisie to the cause of socialism. His experience in the League of Peace convinced him of the futility of this path.

Thus, on December 22, 1868, Bakunin wrote to Marx a letter in which he paid tribute to the action the latter had carried out over the past twenty years; he recalled that he had made “solemn and public farewells” to the bourgeois of the League and affirmed that he now knew “no other society, no other milieu than the world of workers […] my homeland now,” he added, “is the International, of which you are one of the principal founders. You see, therefore, dear friend, that I am your disciple, and I am proud to be so.”

It is therefore significant that it was in a letter to Marx in 1868 that he decided to dedicate himself solely to action within the working class. This letter can be considered the birth certificate of anarchism as an organized current of the international working class.

Authoritarian Communism

Bakunin’s critique of “authoritarian communism” was distorted by several errors of perspective.

• The first point concerns the very term “authoritarian.” At the time, it was a new concept with roughly the same meaning as “bureaucratic” today. Marx’s authoritarian practices within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) were bureaucratic practices. In almost all of Bakunin’s writings, the former can be replaced by the latter to grasp the meaning of his critique. It is true that sometimes the term “authoritarian” is also understood in its psychological sense, insofar as Bakunin also attacked Marx’s authoritarian temperament. The context allows us to understand in what sense the term is used. The libertarian movement, through a kind of semantic shift, would eventually come to understand the word only in its sense of “authoritarian temperament,” with opposition to “authority” sometimes taking precedence over opposition to exploitation.
• The other error in perspective is that Marxists today (but also anarchists) tend to forget that the Marxism Bakunin criticized was essentially parliamentary. His critique of Marxism is first and foremost a principled critique of parliamentarism, that is, of the abandonment of class struggle; a critique of the substitution of power that replaces direct action by the working class and of the formation of a body of professional politicians who lose touch with the realities on the ground.

The critique of Marxism is thus a critique of the consequences of the parliamentary action of the workers’ movement, whose leaders are forced into unnatural alliances with certain factions of the bourgeoisie. Bakunin does not oppose universal suffrage in principle, but rather criticizes its class character when exercised in an exploitative society.

From this perspective, the question of the working class seizing political power is almost secondary. According to Bakunin, the critique of authoritarian communism is valid precisely because it is in reality a centralized seizure of power by a minority in the name of the working class. What Bakunin advocates is the collective and decentralized exercise of social power by the mass of the working population.

A Principled Critique of Parliamentarism

Daily experience shows that representative democracy brings together two conditions indispensable to the prosperity of large-scale industrial production: political centralization and the subjugation of the sovereign people to the minority that represents them, which in fact governs and exploits them.

In a regime that enshrines economic inequality and private ownership of the means of production, the representative system legitimizes the exploitation of the vast majority of the population by a minority of property owners and by the professional speechwriters who are their political expression.

Universal suffrage, considered on its own and operating in a society founded on economic and social inequality, will never be anything but a delusion; it will never be anything but a hateful lie, the surest instrument to consolidate, with an appearance of justice, the eternal domination of the exploiting and owning classes.

The anarchist critique of representative democracy is not a principled critique of democracy, understood as the participation of those concerned in choices concerning their existence, but a critique of the capitalist context in which it is applied.

The opposition of anarchists to the participation of the workers’ movement in the parliamentary institution is based on what they consider to be its class character; on its function in modern capitalist society; on the perversion of the workers’ program resulting from the unnatural alliances that this participation imposes; on the growing gap between the elected official and the voter; and finally, on the negation of international solidarity that inevitably arises.

The brutality of the relationship between the two fundamental classes of society is, however, tempered first by the fact that there are many imperceptible intermediate nuances between them, which sometimes make it difficult to distinguish between the propertied and the non-propertiated, but also by the emergence of a new social category, which Bakunin calls the “bourgeois socialists,” and whose function seems essentially to be to promote the representative system among the proletariat. Coming from the fringes of the bourgeoisie, these “exploiters of socialism”—philanthropists, socialist conservatives, socialist priests, liberal socialists, and disenfranchised intellectuals—use the workers’ movement as a springboard and the parliamentary institution as an instrument to try to rise to power, or at least to carve out a place for themselves. Bourgeois socialism corrupts the workers’ movement by “distorting its principle, its program.”

The participation of the workers’ movement in the electoral process cannot affect the essential point, namely the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.

Since representative democracy is for the bourgeoisie only a mask – which it easily discards in favor of Caesarism, that is to say military dictatorship, when necessary – any democratically decided encroachment against property will inevitably provoke a violent reaction from the dispossessed ruling classes.

Participation in the parliamentary institution, where citizens, not classes, are represented, inevitably means the implementation of political alliances with parties representing certain strata of the moderate or radical bourgeoisie:

“All the experiences of history demonstrate that an alliance between two different parties always benefits the more reactionary party; this alliance necessarily weakens the more progressive party, diminishing and distorting its program, destroying its moral strength and self-confidence; whereas when a reactionary party lies, it always finds itself, more than ever, in its truth.” (Bakunin,Letter to La Liberté,August 5, 1872,Collected Works,Champ libre, vol. III, p. 166)

The proletariat must therefore organize itself “outside of and against the bourgeoisie.”

The most ardent democrats remain bourgeois: a mere “serious affirmation, not just in words, of socialist demands or instincts on the part of the people is enough for them to immediately throw themselves into the camp of the darkest and most senseless reaction,” universal suffrage or not. This is the phenomenon that Bakunin calls Caesarism, and that Marx calls Bonapartism, which establishes “state, military, and political despotism” under the “most innocent forms of popular representation” (Champ libre, vol. IV, p. 294). The parliamentary system is not an obstacle to state, military, political, and financial despotism. It is a parliamentary system that charters flights for immigrants, that expels a Tunisian man with AIDS who had been living in France for fifteen years, that will require the population to declare the presence of a foreigner in their home to the authorities, and that criminalizes hospitality.

The bourgeoisie needs a strong state that ensures a dictatorship disguised as national representation, allowing it to exploit the masses in the name of the people themselves. The representative system is the means the bourgeoisie has found to guarantee its position as the exploiting class. The demands and program of the working class are thus diluted within the fiction of national representation.

The true function of representative democracy is not so much to guarantee the freedom of citizens as to create the conditions favorable to the development of capitalist production and financial speculation, which require a centralized and strong state apparatus, the only one capable of subjecting millions of workers to its exploitation. Representative democracy rests on the fiction of the rule of the popular will as expressed by so-called representatives of the people’s will.

“The entire lie of the representative system rests on this fiction: that a power and a legislative chamber emerging from popular election must absolutely, or even can, represent the true will of the people.” (Champ libre, tV, p.62)

There is, however, an internal logic to every government, even the most democratic, which drives, on the one hand, the growing separation between voters and elected officials, and on the other hand, the increasing centralization of power. But the internal logic of the representative system is not enough to explain why democracy within it is a fictitious entity. There is a “technology” of power that excludes the masses from any formulation of its political projects. Consequently, even if the institutional conditions for political equality are met, the latter remains a fiction. Election periods provide candidates with the opportunity to “pay homage to His Majesty the Sovereign People” (Bakunin), but then everyone returns to their own affairs: “the people to their work, and the bourgeoisie to their lucrative businesses and political intrigues.” Bourgeois politics legitimizes inequalities by presenting them as inevitable; its discourse consists of asking for the voters’ trust and promising to try to limit the damage. It is by no means a question of questioning the masses about their desires, of synthesizing them and of implementing the means to realize them — even if it is not possible to realize everything immediately.

Most matters that directly concern the people are carried out over their heads, without their knowledge; they let their elected officials, who serve the interests of their own class, act with impunity and present the measures taken in the most innocuous light. Bakunin said:

“The system of democratic representation is one of perpetual hypocrisy and lies. It needs the foolishness of the people, and it bases all its triumphs on it.”

Bakunin’s main objection to representative democracy concerns its class nature. As long as universal suffrage “is exercised in a society where the people, the mass of workers, are economically dominated by a minority holding property and capital, however independent or free it may otherwise be, or rather appear to be, from a political point of view, it can only ever produce illusory, anti-democratic elections that are absolutely opposed to the needs, instincts, and real will of the people.” (Free Field, Vol. VIII, p. 14).

Despite the considerable evolution undergone by the capitalist economy since the first anarchist critiques of the representative system, despite technological changes and the sociological transformations of the working class, which is no longer limited to factory workers, many points remain relevant: the suitability of representative democracy to capitalist rationality; the technical nature of parliamentary tasks, which precludes any real democracy; and the reduction of representative bodies to the role of rubber-stamping decisions made by the state apparatus or outside of it. In fact, parliamentary democracy does not serve to represent the people to the government but to represent the government to the people: it is its public relations agent, its agent of legitimation. The penultimate paragraph of Amédée Dunois’s text clearly demonstrates his complete adherence to Bakunin’s analysis.

State Communism

Many authors, even Marxists, acknowledge Bakunin’s premonition of certain developments undergone by the workers’ movement. Few of them go so far as to recognize that these developments were the result of methodical analysis and reflection, most attributing these premonitions to flashes of intuition in an otherwise muddled and unmethodical thought process.

The concept of “red bureaucracy” is among these supposed flashes of insight. It appears in a letter Bakunin wrote to Herzen and Ogarev on July 19, 1866, where he refers to “the vilest and most dreadful lie that our century has engendered: official democracy and the red bureaucracy.” His target is clearly the political strategy of Marx and of parliamentary German social democracy, which fuels the phenomenon described by Bakunin. Parliamentary action, he argues, inevitably leads to political agreements with bourgeois radicals. However, it has been demonstrated that this kind of agreement always results in the alignment of the program of the most radical party with that of the most moderate party. Moreover, parliament and the state are institutions specific to the bourgeoisie. Participating in these institutions is an unnatural act. What Bakunin sees as a rejection of bourgeois politics is interpreted by Marx and Engels as a rejection of politics in general. According to Bakunin, revolutionary politics consists of replacing bourgeois politics and the class organization of the bourgeoisie—the state—with proletarian politics and organization.

Finally, the men who participate in parliamentary action will necessarily be corrupted by the maneuvers and concessions they will be forced to make before seizing power, and by the exercise of power afterward. Marxists say:

“But this minority will consist of workers. Yes, certainly, former workers, but who, as soon as they become rulers, will cease to be workers and will begin to look down on the lowliest proletarian from the heights of the State, will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their claims to govern them.”

This new class, that of the “directors, representatives and officials of the so-called people’s state”, this “new and very restricted aristocracy of real or supposed scholars” will put in place a system whose features Bakunin perceives very precisely: there will be, he says:

“[…] an excessively complicated government, which will not be content with governing and administering the masses politically […] but will also administer them economically, concentrating in its hands the production and just distribution of wealth, the cultivation of the land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally, the application of capital to production by the sole banker, the State. All this will require immense knowledge and many brilliant minds in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, the most despotic, the most arrogant, and the most contemptuous of all regimes.” (Free Field, vol. III, p. 204)

It is obviously difficult, upon reading this account, not to think of the state communism established in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. However, we must be careful not to artificially impose our contemporary experience onto a text dating back more than a century to claim that Bakunin “foresaw Stalinism” and that it was “contained in Marx.” This kind of “demonstration” can, at best, only be an anachronism, at worst a falsification. Moreover, stating that one cannot artificially transpose a text from 1870 into today’s reality does not detract from Bakunin’s foresight.

The rise of this red bureaucracy, it should be noted, was not, in Bakunin’s eyes, an inevitable occurrence: he stated, in fact, that this “fourth governing class”—another term he used [1] —would only appear “if order is not put in place in the interest of the great mass of the proletariat.” In other words, the bureaucracy would succeed the bourgeoisie if the working class proved incapable of assuming its role in the proletarian revolution—another remarkable premonition.

Capitalism

The reader will understand that we do not share Amédée Dunois’s opinion that Bakunin “stirred up a great many ideas, but relatively few of them were his own.” There is, however, one area where this is true: the critical analysis of capitalism undertaken by Proudhon and Marx, [2] which Bakunin took for granted. Indeed, Bakunin owes a great deal to these two authors on this subject.

Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx are not outside of time, they are only situated in a lineage of theorists who preceded them and from whom they borrowed: among these we can mention Saint-Simon, Victor Considérant, which explains undeniable common achievements in the thought of Proudhon, Bakunin and Marx:

1. Social contradictions are a consequence of the ownership regime of the means of production;
2. Capitalism, by monopolizing the means of production, condemns the proletariat to wage labor;
3. Surplus value (or windfall, for Proudhon), defines what both call capitalist theft;
4. Work is the sole creator of value, therefore profit is a part of work itself;
5. Profit is a portion of labor that is unpaid and appropriated by the capitalist;
6. The end of exploitation requires the destruction of capitalism;
7. The state is the organization that defends the interests of the bourgeoisie;
8. The capitalist system, by creating a divide in “civil society” (a Saint-Simonian term), therefore condemns itself historically.

From the outset, Marx’s Capital was considered by Bakunin himself and his associates, including James Guillaume, as an indisputable theoretical achievement, an irreplaceable work explaining the mechanisms of capitalist society.

Referring to “Mr. Charles Marx’s magnificent work on Capital,” Bakunin declares:

“It should have been translated into French long ago, because none, to my knowledge, contains such a profound, illuminating, scientific, decisive, and, if I may put it this way, ruthlessly exposing analysis of the formation of bourgeois capital and the systematic and cruel exploitation that this capital continues to exert on the labor of the proletariat.”

It is a perfectly positivist work, Bakunin continues: “in the sense that, based on a thorough study of economic facts, it does not admit any logic other than the logic of facts.”

However, the Russian revolutionary adds that:

“Its only fault […] is that it was written, in part, but only in part, in a style that is far too metaphysical and abstract […] which makes it difficult to read and almost inaccessible to the majority of workers. And yet it is the workers above all who should read it. The bourgeoisie will never read it, or, if they do read it, they will not want to understand it, and, if they do understand it, they will never talk about it; this work being nothing other than a death sentence, scientifically justified and irrevocably pronounced, not against them as individuals, but against their class.”[3]

Thus, we see that Amédée Dunois is perfectly justified in saying that “Bakunin is not only linked to Proudhon; there is a whole Marxist element in his thought,” although we would not formulate things in this way, unless we were to say that there is also a whole Proudhonian element in Marx’s thought. The problem, it seems to us, is not one of one aligning with the other’s theses, but rather one of creating a common theoretical foundation in revolutionary thought.

Volume I of Capital had been given to Bakunin by Johann Philipp Becker. Bakunin recounts:

“The old communist Philippe Becker […] gave me, on behalf of Marx, the first volume, the only one published so far, of an exceedingly important, scholarly, profound, though very abstract, work entitled “Capital.” On this occasion, I made a huge mistake: I forgot to write to Marx to thank him.”[4]

It is unknown why Bakunin did not thank Marx for sending him his book in September 1867, but Marx resented it, as evidenced by his wife’s letter to Becker, published by Die Neue Zeit. [5]

The anarchist Cafiero wrote an “Abridged Version of Karl Marx’s Capital.” Cafiero had been close to Engels, but disgusted by the latter’s methods, he later converted to Bakuninism. This work aimed to address the shortcomings of the book highlighted by Bakunin and to make the main ideas developed by Marx accessible in a small booklet. Thus, despite the disagreements between anarchists and Marxists within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), the Bakuninists recognized Marx’s merits for the “immense services” he rendered to the cause of socialism, in Bakunin’s words, and as a critic of capitalism. “Bakunin and Cafiero had hearts too high to allow personal grievances to influence their minds in the serene realm of ideas,” says James Guillaume in the foreword.

It seems useful to show that the two currents of the workers’ movement, beyond differences in principle, tactics, or organization, agree on the essentials. Capital is indeed one of the rare points of convergence between anarchism and Marxism, undoubtedly because it starts from a scientific and explanatory intention and contains no organizational or programmatic suggestions, except for very general ones.

History has accustomed us to seeing the relationship between anarchism and Marxism as nothing more than an irreconcilable opposition between two currents of the workers’ movement, separated by everything. Certainly, this opposition cannot be underestimated, much less ignored. But a century later, it is time to approach the matter from a dispassionate perspective.

It would be simplistic to view Bakunin’s assessment of Volume I of Capital solely as an alignment with Marx’s positions. The theoretical work of thinkers like Proudhon, Marx, and Bakunin must be understood within the context of the slow, 19th-century intellectual movement that sought to develop an analytical framework for understanding the mechanisms of capitalist society. Activists and theorists alike were preoccupied with the same problem: understanding in order to act more effectively. Their actions and research constitute the shared heritage of the workers’ movement. This, at least, is how the first major anarchist activists viewed things.

Ideology

Bakunin denounced both the fiction of state communism, which leads to the formation of a new ruling class, and that of the representative system, which the bourgeoisie presents as the ultimate form of democracy. These two seemingly opposing systems, according to Bakunin, share a number of similarities that are worth highlighting, stemming from common ideological postulates based on the idea of ​​the masses’ inability to govern themselves and on the need of the ruling classes, or those aspiring to rule, to legitimize their power.

If “each new generation finds at its cradle a world of ideas, imaginations and feelings which is transmitted to it as a common heritage through the intellectual and moral work of all past generations,” if this world presents itself first of all as “a system of representations and ideas, such as religions, such as doctrine,” human representations acquire, in the collective consciousness of a society, “this power to become in turn productive causes of new facts, not strictly natural, but social. They modify human existence, habits and institutions, in short, all the relationships that exist between men and society.” [6]

Once established, human representations can become material determinations: this is a key point in Bakunin’s theory of ideologies. Each generation finds in society “a world of established thoughts and representations that serve as its starting point and, in a way, provide the substance or raw material for its own intellectual and moral work.” This starting point can also be that of a “new critique.”

It therefore appears that the dominant ideology of an era is not merely an illusion; it becomes a material fact. This is why it constitutes a matter of paramount importance for any ruling class. It is, to the same degree as brute force and weapons—and perhaps even more so—an instrument of oppression and exploitation.

“However deeply Machiavellian the actions of the ruling minorities may have been, no minority would have been powerful enough to impose, by force alone, these horrible sacrifices on the human masses, if there had not been within these masses themselves a kind of dizzying, spontaneous movement that drove them to immolate themselves for the benefit of one of those terrible abstractions which, like historical vampires, have never fed on anything but human blood.”[7]

Bakunin did not perceive the phenomenon of submission to an unjust system as a simple effect of force exerted by a superior power over the “human masses.” He saw a complex dialectic at play in which the dominated are led to accept the discourse of power as legitimate. As for the function of ideology, Bakunin defined it just as clearly: “the more unjust and inhumane an interest is, the more it needs sanction,” that is, justification.

The point is that while the power of the state and the ruling classes is founded on a superior right, on an undeniably more powerful “organized force,” on “mechanical, bureaucratic, military, and police organization,” this “mechanical organization” alone cannot suffice. The society of privilege needs to appear legitimate in the eyes of the masses, for it cannot function in a state of permanent conflict: it must establish a consensus based on an illusion of law. Indeed, a dominant class cannot hope to maintain its position through permanent repression: it is necessary to convince the dominated classes of the legitimacy of the privileged class’s rights. It is necessary to establish a law that guarantees and justifies the permanence of domination. The idea that force alone cannot guarantee power permanently is a constant in political thought.

The bourgeoisie, the ruling class, is also imbued with a sense of entitlement. This is a crucial issue in the ongoing ideological struggle against the exploited. This aspect of the class struggle is less apparent, but it is a vital condition for any class aspiring to economic and political domination, because a ruling class needs to justify its right to domination, both in its own eyes and in the eyes of the dominated classes. The scope of ideological action is perfectly described by Bakunin:

“The State is force, and it has on its side above all the right of force, the triumphant argument of the needle gun, the Chassepot. But man is so singularly made that this argument, however eloquent it may seem, is not enough in the long run. To impose respect on him, he absolutely needs some kind of moral sanction. Moreover, this sanction must be so obvious and simple that it can convince the masses who, having been subdued by the force of the State, must now be brought to the moral recognition of its right.”[8]

Thus, the analysis of the discourse of power appears as a determining element in the critique of power. A power, a society, cannot be accepted without the consensus of a large part of the population; the function of ideology is to obtain the acquiescence of the oppressed. Ideology is thus assigned a dual task: the denigration of the dominated class, which must have a partial, false image of itself that confirms its subordinate condition; and the exaltation of the dominant class, to which a cheap sense of righteousness and a justification for its domination must be provided.

This dual task obviously falls to specialists who master the instrument enabling it: language. They are thus designated by Bakunin: theologians, politicians, jurists, lawyers, priests of the legal religion, metaphysicians; such are the “official and unofficial representatives of all these beautiful abstractions”, and they contribute with greater effectiveness than brute force to maintaining the masses in acceptance of their fate.

One of the agents of the transformation of force into law is that social stratum which Bakunin designated as “bourgeois socialists,” who have massively infiltrated the socialist movement and for whom knowledge, rather than material possessions, is the legitimizing source of power. These bourgeois intellectuals, deprived of prospects in capitalist society, have penetrated workers’ organizations to take the lead of the labor movement. These are people who see in socialism a formidable rising force and who hope, through it, to restore the waning and decrepit vitality of their own party, says Bakunin, who also calls them the “exploiters of socialism.”

This is a new social category whose function seems essentially to be to promote the representative system among the proletariat. Coming from the fringes of the bourgeoisie, these “exploiters of socialism”—philanthropists, socialist conservatives, socialist priests, liberal socialists, and disenfranchised intellectuals—use the workers’ movement as a springboard and the parliamentary institution as an instrument to try to seize power, or at least to carve out a place for themselves. Bourgeois socialism, Bakunin says, corrupts the workers’ movement by “distorting its principle, its program.”

Adopting a distinctly Bakuninian perspective, Jean-Pierre Garnier and Louis Janover today refer to these social strata as the “second right” or “neo-petty bourgeoisie,” tasked with:

“The supervision and conditioning of the dominated classes, a function sublimated in most of its members into valued ‘missions’: education, training, information, communication, social action, animation, creation, theoretical development.”[9]

These strata constitute “the subordinate agent of the reproduction of the system.” They have not succeeded in seizing power, but they contribute effectively to helping the bourgeoisie maintain it by defusing struggles, inhibiting the feeling of the right to revolt in the masses, and theorizing the idea of ​​the end of the class struggle.

Today more than ever, control of society’s ideological apparatus is a crucial element of any strategy aimed at maintaining the system of exploitation. But one can hardly speak of an “ideological counter-revolution” insofar as the capitalist system is itself a permanent ideological counter-revolution.

The ultimate weapon of this counter-revolution is probably the idea that the notion of antagonistic classes, of class struggle, is outdated. This idea is in the air, and is even being taken up by a segment of the labor movement. Those who defend this thesis base their argument on the fact that the working class is undergoing profound transformation, which is hardly debatable, that the criteria by which the working class can be defined are no longer the same as they were fifty years ago, and that the distinction between productive and unproductive labor is tending to blur. It is clear that ideology is an effective material weapon in the hands of the ruling class; it is an indispensable instrument for the subjugation of the masses. Nevertheless, the class struggle is never as fierce as when the bourgeoisie has succeeded in convincing the working class that it no longer exists.

Revolutionary Organisation and Project

Poverty and harsh living conditions have never been the trigger for a revolution.

The “revolutionary disposition of the working masses,” says Bakunin, depends not only on the greater or lesser degree of misery they suffer but on the confidence they have in “the justice and necessity of the triumph of their cause.”

“The feeling or awareness of rights in the individual is the effect of theoretical science, but also of his practical experience of life.”[10]

This sense of entitlement, according to Bakunin, is awakened in a particularly vivid way through the experience of striking. He says:

“The strike is war; it throws the ordinary worker out of his isolation, out of the monotony of his aimless existence; it unites him with other workers, in the same passion and towards the same goal; it convinces all workers in the most striking and direct way of the necessity of a rigorous organization to achieve victory.”[11]

This opinion will be taken up without reservation by Amédée Dunois and his revolutionary syndicalist comrades.

The strike is part of a gradual strategy based on:

“cumulative progression where partial struggles are understood as training for general confrontation and where improvements obtained through action are like a prefiguration of the society to be built.”[12]

Thus, Émile Pouget could write in 1907:

“In the crucible of economic struggle, the fusion of political elements takes place, and a living unity is achieved, which establishes trade unionism as a revolutionary coordinating force.”[13]

The question, therefore, is not whether workers can rise up, but “whether they are capable of building an organization that gives them the means to achieve a victorious end,” says Bakunin, for whom the questions that would later arise in the libertarian movement about the necessity of organizing would appear monstrous. It is not enough for workers to oppose the exploitative society with the means at their disposal, strikes, or insurrection; they must develop a theory that expresses their aspiration for justice. The body in which this new right is developed, according to Bakunin, is the International Workingmen’s Association, whose program “brings with it a new science, a new social philosophy, which must replace all the old religions, and a completely new politics.” [14]

The main enemy of the proletariat is bourgeois exploitation: the State, with all its repressive power, in whatever form it exists, Bakunin specifies, is today nothing other than the consequence as well as the guarantee of this exploitation.

This is why the proletariat must seek “all the elements of its strength exclusively within itself; it must organize itself entirely outside of the bourgeoisie, against it and against the State.”

According to Bakunin, there is a direct and necessary link between the objective and the means employed to achieve it, which implies a thorough reflection on the forms and nature of the objective. Marx had stated that he did not wish to provide the recipe for the revolutionary pot. On this point, Bakunin was perfectly aware of his divergence from Marx and the social democrats. The difference in approach is perfectly expressed by the Russian revolutionary when he writes that “a political program has value only when, moving beyond vague generalities, it precisely defines the institutions it proposes to replace those it wants to overthrow or reform” ( Writings Against Marx).

The forms of action and organization advocated at that time by German Marxists were, in Bakunin’s eyes, perfectly suited to the goals they were pursuing, and they defined their limits: the establishment of a republican and “so-called people’s” German nation-state through elections. To achieve this, they were obliged to ally themselves with the progressive bourgeoisie, as had been the case with the Zurich sections of the International, which had adopted the program of the German Social Democrats and become “instruments of bourgeois radicalism.”

In Writings Against Marx, Bakunin cites the case of a certain Amberny, a lawyer belonging to the Radical Party and the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), who, in 1872, supposedly guaranteed publicly “before his fellow bourgeois citizens, in the name of the International, that there would be no strikes during that year.” James Guillaume reports that Amberny, a candidate for the Grand Council, had persuaded the cantonal committee of the IWA to have the working-class electors vote in his favor. Construction workers were at that time considering going on strike because their employers had lowered their wages. The Jura federation had protested against this bargaining. Kropotkin, who was then in Geneva, wrote:

“It was Outine himself who made me understand that a strike at this time would be disastrous for the election of lawyer MA”[15]

It is therefore not without some reason that at the same time Bakunin wrote a long letter “to the comrades of the Jura federation” in which he said that:

“Whenever workers’ associations ally themselves with bourgeois politics, it can only ever be to become, whether they like it or not, its instrument.”[16]

The strategy advocated by German social democracy—parliamentary action—inevitably leads to the conclusion of alliances, of a “new political pact between the radical bourgeoisie, or the bourgeoisie forced to become such, and the intelligent, respectable minority—that is to say, duly embourgeoisified—of the urban proletariat.” [17]

Bakunin’s general idea is that the organization of workers, in its current form, is not modeled on the organizations of bourgeois society, but is founded on the internal necessities of the workers’ struggle and, as such, constitutes a prefiguration of socialist society. The mode of organization of the proletariat is imposed by the particular forms of the workers’ struggle in their place of exploitation; the basic unit of workers’ organization is located where they are exploited, in the enterprise. From there, the organization expands horizontally (or geographically, if you will), by locality and region, and it rises vertically by sector of industry. This view was bound to provide Marx and Engels with ample opportunity for numerous snide remarks against Bakunin, whom they accused of being “indifferent” to political matters.

Engels, however, had perfectly grasped the essence of Bakunin’s thought, beyond the distortions of the polemic. He wrote to Theodor Cuno: “Since Bakunin’s International is not to be formed for political struggle but to be able, upon social liquidation, to immediately replace the old state organization, it must come as close as possible to the Bakuninist ideal of the future society” ( Letter to Th. Cuno, January 24, 1872). Believing he was engaging in polemics, Engels perfectly summarized Bakunin’s point of view and that of what would later become anarcho-syndicalism. If we set aside the common misconception that Bakunin’s opposition to parliamentary action is equivalent to a principled opposition to political struggle, Engels is saying nothing more in this passage than this:

1. the organization of workers must be constituted in a manner as close as possible to that of the societal project which the working class carries within it;
2. The destruction of the State is nothing other than the replacement of the class organization of the bourgeoisie, the State, by that of the proletariat, the Association.

In short, the class organization of workers, which is the instrument of struggle under capitalism, constitutes the model of social organization after the revolution.

This is a basic idea of ​​Bakuninism and, later, of anarcho-syndicalism, unanimously rejected by all Marxist theorists, with the notable exception of Pannekoek who took up this idea several times in his writings:

“Since the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and its organs is inseparable from the workers’ control of the apparatus of production and its extension to the social product, the form of organization uniting the class in its struggle simultaneously constitutes the form of organization of the new production process.” (Pannekoek,Workers’ Councils,EDI, p. 273)

This is a perfect definition of anarcho-syndicalism.

According to Bakunin, it is through daily struggle that the proletariat constitutes itself as a class; therefore, the mode of worker organization must conform to this necessity. Marx, for his part, advocates the formation of national political parties with the objective of winning parliament. It is here, says Bakunin, that we completely diverge from the Social Democrats of Germany.

“Since the goals we propose are so different, the organization we recommend to the working masses must differ essentially from theirs.”[18]

Let’s summarize Bakunin’s point of view:

1. The mode and form of workers’ organization are a product of history; they are born from the practice and daily experience of struggles. All rising classes have built the forms of their organization within the very regime that dominated them.
2. The organizational form characteristic of the bourgeoisie groups citizens on the basis of an electoral district; it corresponds to the capitalist system of production, which only recognizes isolated individuals. Thus, true power, which derives from the control of the means of production, remains in the hands of the owners of those means of production.
3. The class organization of workers does not bring together citizens but producers. Whatever name is given to this organization: trade union, workers’ council, factory committee, the structure remains that of a class organization.

A class organization is an organization which, at a given historical time, groups together all or part of a social class on the basis of the role that each individual of that class plays in the relations of production.

In any class society there generally exist two antagonistic forms of organization, founded on different bases because they correspond to different roles and interests.

Between these organizations there can be no common ground, alliance, or merger without implying the subordination of the dominated class to the dominant class.

As such, class organization allows the class it unifies to defend its interests against the encroachments of the antagonistic class.

When the class it represents is dominant, it determines the model and forms of the political organization of society. When the class it represents is dominated, it foreshadows the forms of social organization that this class carries within it.

The logic of the transition from one exploitative society to another cannot be the same as that of the transition from an exploitative society to a society without exploitation: this is one of the great lessons Bakunin offers us, drawn from his reflections on the French Revolution. The revolutionary strategy of the proletariat cannot be modeled on that of the various exploiting classes that have succeeded one another; it cannot be imitated from the model of the French Revolution to which Marx, in particular, constantly refers.

All the revolutions in history, “including the Great French Revolution, despite the magnificence of the programs in whose name it was carried out, have been nothing but the struggle of these classes among themselves for the exclusive enjoyment of the privileges guaranteed by the State, the struggle for the domination and exploitation of the masses” (Letter to Liberty).

For Bakunin, since the State is the specific form of organization of an exploiting class, the working class cannot adopt a logic of state power seized by a minority, but of collective social power seized.

Proletariat and Organisation

From the various texts where Bakunin deals with the question, it appears that he conceives of the organization of workers in the form of two complementary structures, one vertical, the other horizontal; the first is an industrial structure, the second has an interprofessional character.

In the first, the workers are brought together and organized “not by the idea but by the fact and by the very necessities of their identical work”.

“This economic fact—that of a specialized industry and the particular conditions of its exploitation by capital—the intimate and unique solidarity of interests, needs, suffering, situation, and aspirations that exists among all the workers belonging to the same trade union section, all this forms the real basis of their association. The idea comes after, as the explanation or equivalent expression of the development and reflective awareness of this fact.”(Protest of the Alliance)

The trade sections

The trade sections follow the path of natural development, beginning with facts and arriving at ideas. Indeed, as Bakunin said, only a very small number of individuals allow themselves to be determined by pure, abstract ideas. Most, proletarians and bourgeois alike, are swayed only by the logic of facts. To interest the proletariat in the work of the International Workingmen’s Association ( IWA), one must approach them not with general ideas but with a “real and living understanding of their real suffering.”

Of course, the thinker conceives of these everyday ills in their general aspect; he understands that they are the particular effects of general and permanent causes. But the mass of the proletariat, forced to live from day to day, and which “hardly finds a moment of leisure to think about tomorrow,” grasps the ills from which it suffers precisely and exclusively in this reality, and almost never in their generality.

To gain the trust and support of the proletariat, one must begin by speaking to them, “not about the general ills of the entire international proletariat, but about its daily ills.”

“We must talk to him about his own job and the conditions of his work specifically in the locality where he lives, about the hardship and excessive length of his daily work, the inadequacy of his salary, the wickedness of his boss, the high cost of food and the impossibility for him to feed and raise his family properly”(Alliance Protest).

We must offer him ways to improve his situation, but avoid, initially, mentioning revolutionary methods. Indeed, he may, under the influence of religious or political prejudices, reject these ideas: on the contrary, we must “offer him means such that his natural common sense and daily experience cannot fail to recognize their usefulness, nor reject them” (ibid.).

Revolutionary consciousness is therefore not a natural phenomenon, it is not spontaneous, but for Bakunin this word has a particular meaning, which has caused many misunderstandings. [19] It is acquired gradually, through daily experience; for it to become effective, it is necessary for the worker to rid himself of his political and religious prejudices. It is not possible to instill this revolutionary consciousness abruptly: it requires education, which is achieved through lived experience and contact with the collective of organized workers. Revolutionary consciousness is not spontaneous (the thesis of the workerists who attribute to the proletariat all sorts of virtues it does not possess) nor is it brought from the outside by a self-proclaimed vanguard (the thesis of the Leninists); it is the result of an interaction between the experience of struggle, the practice of solidarity, and collective reflection.

It is only through contact with others that the “neophyte” worker learns that the solidarity which exists between workers of a section also exists between sections or between trades of the same locality, that the organization of this broader solidarity, and “embracing indifferently the workers of all trades, has become necessary because the bosses of all trades agree among themselves…” (ibidem).

The practice of solidarity constitutes the first step towards class consciousness; this principle established, everything else follows as a natural and necessary development, stemming from “the living and tragic experience of a struggle which becomes wider, deeper, more terrible every day”.

The dramatic nature with which Bakunin describes the working-class condition of his time is not exaggerated.

From 1866 onwards, a wave of strikes spread and intensified throughout Europe, and the often fierce repression only served to increase the influence of the International Workingmen’s Association, founded just two years earlier. The strikes, which until then had been sporadic, became genuine class struggles, allowing workers to experience firsthand the solidarity that sometimes came to them from abroad.

• Strike of Parisian bronze workers in February 1867, collections organised by the IWA  ; strike of weavers and spinners of Roubaix, March 1867; strike of the mining basin of Fuveau, Gardanne, Auriol, La Bouillasse, Gréasque, April 1867-February 1867, accession of the miners of Fuveau to the IWA  ; the main activity of the French sections from 1867 onwards will consist of supporting these strikes and in solidarity actions to support strikes abroad.
• In Belgium, a miners’ strike in Charleroi was harshly repressed by the army, leading to a strengthening of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA)  ; weavers in Verviers went on strike, wanting to keep their mutual aid fund within the IWA  ; and sailmakers in Antwerp went on strike; the IWA supported the strikers with funds. The entire industrialized part of Belgium was affected by the IWA.
• In Geneva, a construction workers’ strike, launched during a favorable period of full employment, was well-managed and ended successfully. Effective international solidarity was demonstrated. A delegate to the IWA congress in Brussels declared: “The bourgeoisie, even though it’s a republic, were more vicious than elsewhere; the workers held firm. They were only two sections before the strike; now there are twenty-four sections in Geneva with 4,000 members.”

These events can be compared with Mehring’s observation, again: wherever Marx’s strategy was applied, the IWA disappeared.

“Wherever a national party was created, the International disintegrated.” (Karl Marx,Social Editions, p. 533)

This was precisely the danger that Bakunin had constantly denounced.

The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) often advocates moderation, but it is forced to take on increasingly numerous and violent struggles. Its very existence, bolstered by a few initial successes, creates a domino effect, a cumulative effect. The violence of the repression itself pushes workers to organize. With each military intervention, the reformists lose ground, and little by little the International becomes more radical; this radicalization, it should be noted, is not the result of ideological debate but rather of experience gained through both the struggles themselves and the practical application of international solidarity on the ground.

There is therefore undeniably a split within the international workers’ movement, of which the Bakunin-Marx opposition is not the cause but the expression. It cannot be stressed enough that the anarchist theory formulated by Bakunin between 1868 and his death in 1876 is entirely based on his observations of the workers’ struggles of that era.

The split between Bakuninists and Marxists within the International Workingmen’s Association ( IWA) has been presented either as a personal conflict or as a reflection of varying levels of consciousness within the working class: the more politically aware German and English workers sided with Marx, while the others sided with Bakunin. The degree of capital concentration has also been cited: workers in large-scale industry sided with Marx, while workers in small artisanal enterprises sided with Bakunin.

In reality, the problem is not who is with whom, but which segments of the working class can hope for an improvement in their condition through parliamentary action, and which have nothing to hope for. The theoretical, organizational, and strategic developments of any given thinker ultimately only add to these real situations. It is understandable, however, that Bakunin could write that, through the tragic experience of the struggle:

“The least educated, least prepared, and most meek worker, drawn ever further by the very consequences of this struggle, ends up recognizing himself as a revolutionary, anarchist, and atheist, often without even knowing how he himself came to be so.”(Protest of the Alliance)

The central sections

In Bakunin’s view, only trade sections—understood as structures established in the workplace rather than corporatist groups in the narrow sense—were capable of providing their members with practical training. They alone could transform the IWA into a mass organization, “without whose powerful support the triumph of the social revolution will never be possible.”

The central sections (today we would call them local unions), on the other hand, do not represent any particular industry, “since the most advanced workers from all possible industries are gathered there.” In today’s terms, this is an interprofessional structure. The central sections embody the very idea of ​​the International. Their mission is to develop and promote this idea: the emancipation not only of the worker in a particular industry or country, but of all countries. They are active centers where “the new faith is preserved, concentrated, developed, and explained.” One does not join as a specialized worker in a particular trade, but as a worker in general.

If there were only the central sections, they might have succeeded in forming “popular conspiracies,” they might have gathered together a small number of the most conscious and convinced workers, but the mass of workers would have remained outside: but, to overthrow the political and social order of today, says Bakunin, “the support of these millions is necessary.”

The role of the central section is decidedly political. Established locally based on geographical factors, it brings together workers regardless of their profession in order to provide the trade sections with a vision and perspectives that extend beyond the narrow confines of the company. First and foremost, it allows all workers in a given area to be informed of their respective situations and, if necessary, to organize support. It is also a place where reflection naturally takes place. Finally, it is the center from which the impetus for organization originates.

Unlike the trade sections, which proceed from fact to idea, the central sections, following the path of abstract development, begin with the idea and arrive at the fact. If there were only the central sections, the IWA would not have developed into a real force. The central sections would have been nothing more than “workers’ academies” where all social questions would have been endlessly debated, “but without the slightest possibility of implementation.”

Historically, the central sections are an offshoot of the main center that had formed in London, Bakunin said. It was they that enabled the International Workingmen’s Association ( IWA) to develop, by reaching out to the masses where they were, “in everyday reality, and this reality is daily work, specialized and divided into trades.” The founders of the central sections had to address workers already more or less organized by the necessities of collective work in each particular industry, in order to create around them “as many trade sections as there were different industries.” It is in this way that the central sections, which everywhere represent the soul or spirit of the IWA, became real and powerful organizations.

The central section, and by extension the general organization of central sections internationally, is therefore the structure that gives workers’ organization its profound meaning, offering broader perspectives to the workers who join it. It is this structure that defines and constitutes the proletariat as a class by affirming and practicing the principle of solidarity of workers’ interests. The craft section is what unites workers according to the principle of materiality, while the central section unites them according to the principle of knowledge.

Bakunin asserts a correspondence between these two processes, between these two organizational bodies, and it is their synthesis that constitutes class organization in the forms that will allow it to serve as a substitute for state organization. This process took shape in France at the time of the merger of the Bourses du Travail (labor exchanges), which were an interprofessional body, with the CGT (General Confederation of Labour), which was an industrial structure.

Whereas in bourgeois society vertical (productive) and horizontal (decision-making, political) structures are separate, meaning the subordination of the latter to the former; whereas in state communism they are completely merged and concentrated, implying the subordination of the parts to the center, Bakunin envisions these structures as complementary, where each level is autonomous within its responsibilities and where there are counterweights to the center’s seizure of power (since the principle of autonomy removes from the center the very substance over which authority can be exercised), and safeguards against centrifugal forces.

the affirmation of the principle of solidarity of the parts to the whole.

Anticipating the positions of the proponents of “pure syndicalism,” Bakunin states that many believe that once their mission is accomplished—the creation of a powerful organization—the central sections should dissolve, leaving only trade union sections. This is a grave error, he says, because the task of the IWA “is not merely an economic or simply material undertaking, but at the same time and to the same degree an eminently political one” (Protest of the Alliance), and the central sections are by definition political bodies.

It is therefore unambiguously the horizontal, i.e. geographical, organization that gives the organization its political character, the originality of Bakunin’s point of view being to establish a fusion of this with the vertical, claim-based organization.

In other words, Bakunin refuses to limit the mass organization of workers to a mere function of economic struggle [20]  : by removing the central sections from the IWA , one would deprive the organization of the space where political development can take place, the essential reflection by workers on the aims of their action. Initially uniting workers on the basis of their immediate interests, the class organization is also the space where the politics that will lead to their emancipation are developed and implemented. Can Bakunin still be accused of political indifference?

Revolutionaries and Organisation

In a way, it was Lenin who vindicated Bakunin. It is well known that the Bolsheviks were initially opposed to the “natural” structures of the proletariat, namely the workers’ councils, formed during periods of struggle. They even accused these councils of duplicating the functions of the party and demanded their dissolution during the 1905 revolution. The Petrograd party committee issued the following ultimatum to the councils:

“The council of deputies and workers cannot exist as a political organization and the social democrats should withdraw from it since its content is detrimental to the development of the social-democratic movement.”

But Lenin understood that the driving organizational structure was one where the population was in direct contact with the problems of the struggle—soviets, factory councils. If the party had followed an orthodox Marxist policy, the Bolsheviks would have been nothing more than the radical wing of the Russian parliamentary left.

The ninth of the twenty-one conditions for admission to the Socialist International, a few years later, constituted yet another de facto recognition of Bakunin’s ideas, and broke with the practices of socialist parties by establishing the party’s basic structures within workplaces. From then on, every communist party had to create factions within the mass organizations of the working class which, “through conscious and tenacious work, must win over the unions to the communist cause.” These factions were made up of communist activists who determined, before any union meeting, general assembly, congress, etc., the line they would defend. These practices had not been used previously and took revolutionary syndicalist activists by surprise. They had not thought of setting up counter-factions, the only effective means of countering the communist factions.

The system of company cells was established in France in 1924-25 during the “Bolshevization” of the party. Until then, the basic unit of party organization was the local branch, located at the municipal level, which served as the framework for electoral activity. In the Bolshevized party, this unit became the company, the arena where the “two fundamental classes” of capitalist society clashed.

“The factory is the nerve center of modern society, it is the very heart of the class struggle. That is why the factory must be for you, communist, the center of your efforts, of your activity as a communist” ( To the New Member, preface by Jacques Duclos, p.5).

Pierre Sémard, at the 5th Congress in Lille, declared:

“The section was a bit far removed from management, a bit far removed from capitalism, but the cell is much closer.”

If the establishment of company cells as the “basic force of the party organization” aims to eliminate the electoralism stemming from the Second International and the Marxist wing of the IWA, it is also about constituting an instrument of struggle against revolutionary syndicalism, partly heir to the Bakuninist wing of the IWA.

At the Third Congress of the party, in 1924, during which the possibility of creating cells was discussed, Pierre Monate, then a member of the party, firmly opposed it, showing that it was only a measure intended to subordinate the union to the party.

Since then, periodically, the party has had to condemn the tendency, which regularly manifests itself among rank-and-file communist activists, to consider trade union action as a priority:

“This practice, ultimately based on a misunderstanding of the party’s decisive role in the company and on the old, oft-condemned notion that ‘the union is enough for everything,’ is highly detrimental.” (La vie du parti,October 1966, p. 3)

It was therefore necessary to wait until the mid-1920s for Marx’s heirs to understand this elementary Bakuninian principle that exploitation, and therefore the struggle of workers, takes place first and foremost in the workplace, and that this is the center of gravity of the struggle and the basic structure of the workers’ organization.

When one reads the proceedings of the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, for example, one sees the extent to which Marxism is completely identified with reformism, with legal action. Leninism will introduce a completely new mode of intervention by Marxists within the working class, which will be interpreted, for a short time, by libertarians as an endorsement of their positions. A new, unprecedented type of relationship between minority and working class will be established, which, as we shall see, revolutionary syndicalists will be unable to cope with.

Bakunin was aware of the limitations of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in the context of the time. The IWA gave workers a starting point for organization outside the borders of states and outside the bourgeois world. It contained “the first seeds of the organization of future unity.” But it was not yet a sufficient institution to organize and lead the revolution.

“TheInternationalprepares the elements of revolutionary organization, but it does not accomplish it.” (Nettlau, p. 287)

It organizes the public and legal struggle of the workers. It carries out the theoretical propaganda of socialist ideas. The IWA is a favorable and necessary environment for the organization of the revolution, “but it is not yet that organization.”

It brings together all workers without distinction of opinion or religion, provided that they accept the principle of workers’ solidarity against exploiters: in itself this condition is sufficient to separate the working class from the bourgeois class, but it is insufficient to give the former a revolutionary direction.

Bakunin is indebted to Proudhon for his sociology of social classes. In * The Political Capacity of the Working Classes*, Proudhon delivers his political testament, and it is a remarkable exposition of the situation of the workers’ movement at the time (1860). He outlines the conditions necessary for the proletariat to achieve political capacity and concludes that not all of these conditions have yet been met.

1. The working class has come to self-awareness “from the point of view of its relations with society and with the State,” said Proudhon; “as a collective, moral and free being, it distinguishes itself from the bourgeois class.”
2. She possesses an “idea”, a notion “of her own constitution”, she knows “the laws, conditions and formulas of her existence”.
3. But Proudhon questions whether “the working class is able to deduce, for the organization of society, practical conclusions that are its own.”

He answers in the negative: the working class is not capable of creating the organization that will allow its emancipation.

The action of the proletariat is not spontaneous; it is determined by the conditions of its actual development. The forms and strategy of the struggle depend on this actual development, on the relations that exist between the working class and other classes. In Proudhon and Bakunin, we find the method for analyzing these relations, a method that anarchists after them often forget, replacing it with magical incantations.

Bakunin, for his part, analyzes the emergence of the workers’ movement in a dialectic of three movements:

1. The proletariat gains class consciousness with “the real and living understanding of its real evils”;
2. He educates himself through organized action against capital “which convinces all workers in the most striking and direct way of the need for rigorous organization to achieve victory”;
3. Through the freedom of political debate within the organization and through the experience of struggles, the proletariat will then build “its real unity, economic first, and then necessarily political.”

The working class, Bakunin believed, had not yet reached a sufficient stage of maturity to do without a revolutionary minority. The proletariat was fragmented by different languages, cultures, and levels of development, as well as by political and religious prejudices. The International Workingmen’s Association ( IWA) was the irreplaceable instrument for unifying it, which is why Bakunin opposed the establishment of a mandatory political program within the organization. He believed that the experience of struggle and the practice of solidarity would naturally create this unity. In the meantime, the most politically aware segment of the proletariat and the intellectuals who had joined its struggle must organize themselves to accelerate this process of unification.

“One can commit no greater error than to demand more from a class, an institution, or a man than they can give. By demanding more of them, one demoralizes them, hinders them, kills them. The International, in a short time, has produced great results. It has organized, and will organize every day in an even more formidable way, the proletariat for the economic struggle. Is this a reason to hope that it can be used as an instrument for the political struggle?” (Writing Against Marx,Champ Libre, Vol. III, p. 183)

An organization bringing together a structured revolutionary minority is essential. This organization is the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy, founded in 1868, on the last day of the second congress of the League for Peace and Freedom, an organization of bourgeois democrats from which Bakunin had just resigned. The Alliance, which then had 84 members, is not the first closed organization created by Bakunin, but it has a different character, as evidenced by a letter he wrote to Marx on December 22, 1868. He states, in effect:

“Better than ever, I have come to understand how right you were in following and inviting us all to walk the great road of economic revolution […] I am now doing what you began to do more than twenty years ago. Since the solemn and public farewell I gave to the bourgeois at the Berne congress, I know no other society, no other milieu than the world of workers. My homeland now is theInternational,of which you are one of the principal founders.”

And Bakunin concluded:

“I am your disciple, and I am proud to be so.”

Bakunin thus acknowledges that he entered the class struggle twenty years after Marx. His adherence to revolutionary socialism can be dated to 1868, after a very brief period during which he thought he could win over some radical bourgeois. Certainly, he was already a socialist—he had begun to take an interest in the movement as early as the 1840s—but the emancipation of the Slavs had been his priority until then. It was in 1868 that he decided to dedicate all his efforts to the workers’ movement.

However, one must be careful not to take this letter of “rallying” at face value. Indeed, Bakunin’s intention was to appease Marx into accepting the Alliance as a section of the International. Nevertheless, one cannot doubt the sincerity with which Bakunin acknowledged the crucial role played by Marx. Despite the profound differences between the two men, Bakunin always chose the class criterion when faced with a significant choice in the political debates between the various factions of the International Workingmen’s Association ( IWA). Thus, he allied himself with Marx against Mazzini, and later against the Proudhonian mutualists who advocated private property. He urged the Slavic workers of Austria, if no other option was available, to join the Social Democratic Party rather than the Slavic nationalist parties. Bakunin did not underestimate the significance of his disagreements with Marx, but he chose to postpone as long as possible the moment when he would be forced to publicly expose them.

Bakunin, far from denying the need for a separate organization for revolutionaries, is undoubtedly what distinguishes him from some of the French revolutionary syndicalists of the early 20th century, including Amédée Dunois. While Dunois certainly did not deny the necessity of an anarchist organization, the level of his intervention at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam reveals the alarming regression suffered by the movement. His speech is largely dominated by criticism of individualists. He is reduced, in his address, to trying to defend the very principle of organization, and to stating that “the essential and permanent objective of an [anarchist] group would be […] anarchist propaganda.”

“Individual action, ‘individual initiative,’ was supposed to be sufficient for everything. The study of economics, the phenomena of production and exchange, was generally considered negligible, and even some of our own, denying any reality to the class struggle, only agreed to see in present-day society antagonisms of opinion for which ‘propaganda’ was precisely designed to prepare the individual.”

Whereas during the Bakunin period the very principle of the organization was not at all called into question – the anti-authoritarians of the IWA being closely linked to the working class -, the anarchist movement of the beginning of the century had lost all contact with it:

“It was a time when anarchists, isolated from one another, and even more isolated from the working class, seemed to have lost all social feeling; when anarchism, with its incessant calls for the reform of the individual, appeared to many as the supreme flowering of old bourgeois individualism… The time is not far behind us when the majority of anarchists were opposed to any thought of organization. At that time, the project we are discussing would have provoked countless protests among them, and its proponents would have been suspected of retrograde motives and authoritarian aims… Anarchist organization still raises objections. But these objections differ greatly depending on whether they come from individualists or syndicalists. Against the former, it suffices to refer to the history of anarchism. Anarchism emerged, through a process of development, from the “collectivism” of theInternational,that is to say, ultimately, from the workers’ movement.” It is therefore not a recent, more perfected form of individualism, but one of the modalities of revolutionary socialism. What it denies, therefore, is not organization—quite the contrary—but government, with which, as Proudhon told us, organization is incompatible. Anarchism is not individualistic; it is primarily federalist, “associationist.” It could be defined as: integral federalism.[21]

Certainly, Dunois affirms the necessity for anarchists to be “the most audacious and liberated fraction of this militant proletariat organized into unions,” to be “always at its side and to fight, alongside it, the same battles.” But the libertarians within the unions did not constitute an organized and homogeneous current, and were unable to counter the factions outside the unions that attempted to seize control.

This is why we can say that, even if revolutionary syndicalism is to a very large extent the heir of Bakunin, it is not it but anarcho-syndicalism, at the beginning of the twenties, and in particular from the constitution of the second form of the IWA , in 1922, which can really claim the Bakuninian legacy.

Conclusion

Reflection on the organization of the revolutionary minority in the time of Bakunin and Marx, but also at the beginning of the century, must avoid the anachronism of approaching the question in the terms in which it presented itself with the appearance of the radical wing of social democracy, Bolshevism, at the beginning of the 20th century.

It must be borne in mind that the debates which marked the break of revolutionary Marxism with the Second International have not yet taken place; it must also be remembered that Marxism as it appeared at the time was essentially parliamentary.

In the years 1860-1900, there were several unsuccessful attempts to establish a revolutionary organization. No one at the time had found an acceptable solution. While Bakunin wavered between public and secret organizations—it’s important to remember that workers’ organizations were illegal in France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium—the secret organizations in question were more of a network of activists corresponding with each other than an entity claiming to represent the international proletariat. The main objective was less to structure the proletariat within these organizations than to try to regroup active and committed militants in order to form revolutionary cadres, a task that, chronologically, seems natural when one wants to give a certain direction to a mass organization.

Bakunin raised the problem of the organization of revolutionaries and their relationship with the masses. He posed it in opposition to Marx’s electoral and parliamentary political strategy. During the 1848 revolution in Germany, a revolutionary organization existed, the Communist League, whose central committee was chaired by Marx. He and Engels had, from the very beginning of the revolution, effectively put it into dormancy. Finally, Marx, using the full powers entrusted to him, dissolved the League, considering its existence no longer necessary since, under the new conditions of freedom of the press and propaganda, the existence of a secret organization was no longer required. Marx had also opposed its reorganization in February 1849. This stance reveals that the idea of ​​a revolutionary party was still far from being a given at the time.

However, the German workers’ movement was then undergoing a strong surge, which certainly would not have been enough to make it a hegemonic element in the revolution, but which would have provided it with the experience of an autonomous practice.

To a large extent, this was a period of trial and error, and the methods of organization of the revolutionaries did not appear with the clarity and certainty — not necessarily fruitful, moreover — that a Lenin would later develop.

It is worth noting that the core of Lenin’s critique of German social democracy, which forms the basis of Bolshevism, had already been formulated thirty years earlier by Bakunin. Bakunin did not find a solution to the problem he posed. We now know that Lenin did not either.

The fact remains that Bakunin developed an analysis of the society of his time, a reflection on power and a theory of the organization of the proletariat which deserve better than the reductive simplifications of his adversaries and also, it must be said, sometimes of those who claim to be of the same current as him.

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Footnotes

[1] By reference to the theory of the evolution of modes of production, which posited the succession of ancient society with slavery, feudalism with serfdom, and capitalism with wage labor. The workers’ bureaucracy is thus destined to succeed the bourgeoisie if the proletariat does not truly take matters into its own hands. This hypothesis of Bakunin introduces the debates on the class nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.

[2] Marx himself is largely indebted to Proudhon; most of the concepts he develops in Capital and the works that prepared it had already been defined by Proudhon.

[3] Works, Champ libre, t.VIII, p. 357.

[4] Works, Champ libre, t.II, p. 128.

[5] 1913, p. 228.

[6] Works, Champ libre, t. VIII, pp. 206-207.

[7] Works, Champ libre, t. VIII, p. 292.

[8] Works, Paris, Champ libre, vol. VIII, p. 143. In itself, power, to use the words of Pierre Legendre, is “a wild fact, something like a raw fact, and its discourse is addressed to brutes” ( Enjoying Power, Minuit editions, 1976, p.153).

[9] Jean-Pierre Garnier, Louis Janover, La Deuxième droite, Robert Laffont, p. 197.

[10] Letters to a Frenchman on the current crisis, Works, Champ libre, t. VII.

[11] Works, The International Revolutionary Alliance of Social Democracy, Maximoff edition, p. 384.

[12] Jacques Toublet, Anarcho-syndicalism, the other socialism.

[13] Le Père Peinard, n°45, 12-01-1890, p. 11.

[14] Protest of the Alliance, Stock, t.VI.

[15] Around a life, Stock, p.286.

[16] Works, Paris, Champ libre, t.III, p.74.

[17] Works, Paris, Champ libre, t.III, p.161.

[18] Works, Paris, Champ libre, t.III, p.74.

[19] For Bakunin, a spontaneous phenomenon is one that develops by its own internal determinations, without external influence.

[20] In the 1970s, in the wake of the post-1968 euphoria, at a time when the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labour) adopted a radical stance and championed worker self-management, many anarcho-syndicalist activists joined the organization and played a very significant role, contributing greatly to its dynamism. Seeking a historical connection with the workers’ movement, Edmond Maire even went so far as to claim to be an anarcho-syndicalist, though admittedly, he didn’t fool many people… The libertarians focused particularly on developing the organization’s inter-professional structures: local and departmental unions, in which they raised issues that went beyond purely demands and touched on the quality of life, on all the problems of daily existence. This activity proved effective, as these interprofessional bodies, where libertarians wielded sufficient influence, flourished, admittedly competing with political groups. The confederation leadership resolved the problem by expelling activists and dissolving numerous local and departmental unions. The question remains today whether it was wise for libertarians to engage in such militant work only to be ultimately excluded or silenced. It is important to recognize, however, that this activism at least had the effect of inspiring many anarcho-syndicalist activists who would otherwise never have emerged. A generation of activists was thus created, bridging the gap between the “old guard,” those from before the war, and those of today who were born around the same time. The experience of these activists has also demonstrated the extraordinary effectiveness of local, interprofessional action, of the horizontal structure of trade unions when it is designed not as a recruitment base for a party, but to develop the autonomous action of workers.

[21] The quotes from Amédée Dunois are taken from the excellent work published by Nautilus and the editions of Le Monde libertaire, Anarchisme & syndicalisme, le congrès anarchiste international d’Amsterdam, introduction by Ariane Miéville and Maurizio Antonioli.