Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and political philosopher who lived from 1814 to 1876. He is considered the leading anarchist revolutionary of the 19th century, and his writings helped establish anarchism as a distinct movement separate from Marxism and capitalism. His book God and the State remains in print, and his ideas influenced thinkers including Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, and E. P. Thompson, as well as syndicalist organizations like the IWW.
What was the conflict between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx?
Bakunin and Marx clashed over what should replace capitalism after a revolution. Marx argued that workers should seize the state and use it as a transitional tool until it withered away; Bakunin believed any revolutionary government would become a self-perpetuating dictatorship and argued instead for immediate federations of self-governing communes. Their conflict came to a head at the 1872 Hague Congress, where Marx had Bakunin expelled from the First International, splitting the Marxist and anarchist wings of the socialist movement permanently.
What did Bakunin predict about Marxist governments?
In Statism and Anarchy, published in 1873, Bakunin warned that Marxist states would become one-party dictatorships run by autocrats for their own gain in the name of the proletariat, not governed by the proletariat. Noam Chomsky later described this prediction as one of the few in the social sciences that actually came true.
How did Mikhail Bakunin escape from Siberian exile?
Bakunin was permitted to transfer to permanent exile in Siberia in 1857, and he escaped in 1861 by traveling first to Japan, then to San Francisco, then sailing through Panama to New York and Boston, arriving in London by the end of that year. He had married Antonia Kwiatkowska during his time in Siberia before making the escape.
What is Bakunin's book God and the State about?
God and the State argues that both the church and the state serve the same function: imposing authority from above under the pretense that ordinary people cannot govern themselves. Bakunin wrote that "to exploit and to govern mean the same thing." The book was published posthumously in 1882, assembled from a fragment found after his death, and has been widely translated and remains in print.
What revolutionary uprisings was Mikhail Bakunin involved in?
Bakunin participated in the 1848 Prague Slavic Congress and its impromptu uprising against the Austrian Habsburgs, and in the 1849 Dresden uprising, for which he was imprisoned and sentenced to death. After his escape from Siberia, he was involved in the 1870 Lyon Commune in France and planned the 1874 Bologna insurrection in Italy, which failed and proved a major setback to the Italian anarchist movement.