Home

Bakunin Mikhail 1814 - 1876 (62)

From each according to his faculties; to each according to his needs


QUOTES

Statism and

Anarchy



Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (May 30, 1814 - July 1, 1876) was a Russian theorist of anarchism and a well-known 19th century revolutionary who opposed any form of state, even the socialist one. He was born in the Russian province of Priamukhino in present-day Kalinin. As the son of an aristocrat-landowner and as he was destined for a senior military career, he found himself in the artillery academy of St. Petersburg. In 1832 he became an officer but feeling trapped he soon resigned and went to Moscow to study philosophy. He learned good German to read Hegel from the original, he even translated one of his works into Russian. In 1842 he was in Berlin and came in contact with the young Hegelian movement. During this period he began to write revolutionary manifestos. He traveled in Belgium and Switzerland and in 1848 ended up in Paris. He took part in the uprisings in Paris (1848), gaining the respect of the workers at the roadblocks, as the rebellious aristocrat who embodied the anarchist ideal. He met Proudhon and Marx, and gradually composed the terms of the social revolution he dreamed of. During this period he wrote "The Call to the Slavs", denouncing the bourgeoisie as repaid and calling on the worker and the peasant to become the main lever of the uprising.

During the Dresden Revolution (1849) he was again barricaded, but was arrested and imprisoned in Austria until May 1851, when he was extradited to Russia. There he was imprisoned for another 6 years, convicted for his revolutionary writings. In prison he lost, among other things, his health due to miserable conditions. He to escaped on an American ship bound for Japan and return to England where he connected with other Russian revolutionaries and wrote the "Alarm of the Revolution" in which he clarified his anarchist ideas. In 1868, based in Geneva, he took part in the First International, a federation of working-class parties. He came into a conflict with Marx and in 1872 Marx succeeded in expelling him and his anarchists from the "International". With the "Statism and Anarchy" he wrote the following year, Bakunin's anarchism took its final form, as opposed to Marx's communism. He lived in the following years in great poverty as he had wasted all his property. He continued to write and circulate proclamations and call for revolt until the end, which came on July 1, 1876, in a hospital in Bern.