Bakunin: The Creative Passion

390 Pages·2006·1.86 MB·English

by  Mark Leier

Table of Contents

Praise
ALSO BY MARK LEIER
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction

Chapter 1 - WEREWOLVES, NOBLES, AND THE IDYLL OF
PRIAMUKHINO
Chapter 2 - WAR, SLAVERY, AND SERVICE
Chapter 3 - RULES, REBELLION, AND ROMANCE
Chapter 4 - SHOOTING BLANKS
Chapter 5 - THE MAIN ILLNESS OF OUR GENERATION
Chapter 6 - CONTRADICTION IS THE SOURCE OF MOVEMENT
Chapter 7 - THE PASSION FOR DESTRUCTION IS A CREATIVE PASSION
Chapter 8 - GAY PARIS
Chapter 9 - BARRICADES PILED UP LIKE MOUNTAINS
Chapter 10 - WITHOUT ORGANIZATION, WE WILL NEVER GAIN
VICTORY
Chapter 11 - LIBERTY WITHOUT SOCIALISM IS INJUSTICE; SOCIALISM
WITHOUT LIBERTY ...
Chapter 12 - THE REVOLUTIONARY IS A DOOMED MAN
Chapter 13 - HERMAPHRODITE MAN VERSUS CARBUNCLE BOY IN
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL
Chapter 14 - THE ONLY LIBERTY DESERVING OF THE NAME
Chapter 15 - WE DETEST ALL POWER

CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHIC GUIDE
NOTES
ABOUT MARK LEIER
ABOUT SEVEN STORIES PRESS
Copyright Page
Praise for Bakunin:

“Mark Leier has produced the finest work on Bakunin in the English language—a tremendously
witty, informative, and insightful study that restores to Bakunin his humanity as well as his
intellectual and political significance.”
—PAUL MCLAUGHLIN, author of Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism

“A modern biography of the father of anarchism is overdue: Mark Leier’s admirable study tells the
colorful, rebellious, and often outrageous story of the eccentric Bakunin in a style that is entertaining,
scholarly, and fresh, a biography that not only reassesses this fascinating and important character but
also provides the biography of the forgotten ideology of anarchism itself.”
—SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“The time for Bakunin—the real one, not the caricature—has come again, and Mark Leier has given
us just the history that we need. Wonderfully written, scholarly but also packed with fascinating tales
and fresh revelations, Bakunin: The Creative Passion is passion with purpose.”
—PAUL BUHLE, coeditor of Encyclopedia of the American Left and Wobblies! A Graphic History of
the Industrial Workers of the World

“The life of Bakunin (1814-1876), the Russian architect of the anarchist
movement, provides a surprisingly enjoyable introduction to the tumult of
nineteenth-century radicalism . . . A chapter on the roots of Bakunin’s thought in
German idealism provides a lucid eight-page precis of Hegel’s ideas that’s
actually fun to read. The feud between Bakunin and Marx gets ample space . . .
[Leier] brings welcome consideration to the real merits of the movement’s
theory.”
—Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY MARK LEIER
Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour
Spy

Red Flags and Red Tape: The Making of a Labour Bureaucracy

The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Tunnel and Rockworkers Union, Local
168 (with M. C. Warrior)

Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British
Columbia

To the East Kings Road Commune
INTRODUCTION
The war was supposed to be over. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was torn down and
with it went the fabled evil empire of the Soviet Union. For many observers, this
meant more than the collapse of a rival power and the end of the Cold War; it
was the end of history itself. They didn’t mean that the past had ceased to exist
or that societies would cease to change. Their point was both more metaphysical
and more banal. Simply put, history was a heroic struggle between capitalism
and communism. Locked in mortal combat, the two opposing systems used
ideas, ballots, bullets, even the threat of nuclear Armageddon, to seek the
winning advantage. The struggle, on the high plane of ideals and literature, in
steaming jungles and on dark, rain-slicked streets, sometimes open, sometimes
hidden, propelled change over time—history—as humanity lurched desperately
from left to right to an uncertain future. But with the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the West had won, using, in the words of G. B. Trudeau in his comic
strip, Doonesbury, “the basics: hard currency, cheap wheat, and good rock ’n’
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roll.” History as cataclysmic clash was over. There was some mopping up to be
done in the hinterlands, but soon they too would be quiet. At long last the
business of business could proceed smoothly, without interference or distraction,
because there was no alternative to capitalism.
That illusion was shattered on the streets of Seattle in November 1999. Five
days of protest against the World Trade Organization showed that dissent was
possible and that resistance was not futile. Students, trade unionists,
environmentalists, indigenous people, farmers, and consumers raised their fists
and voices against globalization, the surveillance state, and business as usual.
Seattle was a symbol that the struggle continued, and that history had begun
again.
The five days that shook the world were led by a movement many thought had
vanished with the flip of the switch that electrocuted Nicola Sacco and
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Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston in 1927. For the first time in years, anarchism
was a political force that rallied thousands under its black flag. As protest
flashed around the globe, from Melbourne to Mexico City to Prague to Quebec
City to Nice to Genoa to Miami, the anarchist “Black Bloc” and “White
Overalls” groups generated a frisson of fear and shock. Anarchism made the six
o’clock news. It even invaded American prime time as Toby Ziegler deplored
“anarchist wannabes” on The West Wing and Tony explained Sacco and Vanzetti
to the rest of The Sopranos. The media rushed to explore the phenomenon, and
articles on anarchism appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The
Wall Street fournal, The New York Times, National Post, Harper’s, and Time.
The Utne Reader, a sort of Reader’s Digest for New Agers, even warned its
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readers that “You may be an anarchist—and not even know it.”
The media, however, did more to obscure anarchism than to explain it.
Focusing on the street fighting and confrontations with police, mainstream
commentators were unable to understand what anarchism was or why a
philosophy with roots in the nineteenth century resurfaced with such power at
the dawn of the new millennium. Their inability to understand anarchism is not
surprising. It is often misunderstood by its opponents and even by its advocates.
The word itself has long been separated from its real meaning of “rule by no
one.” A check of “anarchism” and its cognates in thesauruses from the 1935
Roget’s to the one in Microsoft Word 2000 reveals misleading synonyms such as
“evildoer,” “destroyer,” “disobedience,” “disorder,” and “mayhem.” High and
popular cultures alike have contributed to the misunderstanding. W. B. Yeats,
appalled at the post-apocalyptic world of the Great War and the popular demand
for sweeping social change that followed, whined that “things fall apart; the
center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Since the nineteenth
century, the anarchist has been pictured as a wild-eyed bohemian, clothed in a
wide-brimmed, pointed felt hat and a long black cape that concealed a round
bomb with a sputtering fuse. Bertram Lamb and A. B. Payne’s popular comic
strip in the British Daily Mirror newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s, Pip, Squeak,
and Wilfred, featured such a character, named “Popski”—read foreigner,
Bolshevik, evil—and the strip and the animated short films that followed
popularized the portrait. Robin Williams gave a dynamite—and dynamited—
performance of just such a figure in the 1996 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent. The old image has been updated, with anarchists now
portrayed clad in black fatigues, their faces hidden by woolen balaclavas, as they
trash the storefronts of McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets and fight with police.
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Such inaccurate stereotypes persist, even in contemporary fiction.
Other events, however, soon diverted attention away from demonstrations and
street protests. After 11 September 2001, the experts now looked to anarchism
for explanations of terrorism. David Ignatius, in a widely reprinted editorial,