Last March 19, a seminar meeting was held at the University of Bari, in
which Mario Spagnoletti, Natale Musarra, Carlo Antonio Barberini and
Luciano Canfora participated as speakers, with the topic The Paris
Commune (1871-2024) 153 years after his birth. We offer our readers an
extract from the talk given by Natale Musarra, entitled Bakunin and the
Commune, because it describes in a clear and concise, and partly
unpublished, way the evolution of Bakunin's anarchist thought before and
after the Commune. --- BEFORE THE PARIS COMMUNE -- The Paris Commune
constituted a decisive stage for Bakunin in his path of definition and
clarification of anarchist thought. Since 5 June 1871, a week after the
end of the Commune, he has been busy writing a text (published
posthumously with the title The Paris Commune and the notion of State)
in which he traces that furrow that now definitively separates the
"socialists or collectivists revolutionaries from authoritarian
communists, partisans of the absolute initiative of the State".
It was a "turning point" regarding his previous political, strategic and
organizational thinking, as he himself admitted by writing a year later
to Nabruzzi (23-26 January), to Lorenzo (10 May) and to Morago (21 May)
of the long letters in which, on the basis of the teachings of the
Commune, he invited them to eliminate any possible contradiction between
the libertarian goals they proclaimed and the means to achieve them.
But what was the evolutionary path of the main ideas he had professed up
to then?
When Bakunin arrived in London on New Year's Eve 1862, one of his main
occupations was to reconnect with the revolutionary world from which his
long imprisonment in Prussia and Russia, and his exile in Siberia, had
kept him away. He therefore read the books published in those years by
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Comte and his materialistic friends Carl
Vogt and Ludwig Büchner. But it is above all by the great books of the
"anarchist period" of Proudhon (1848-1851) that he will be struck: the
General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century (1851) and The
Confessions of a Revolutionary (in the first edition of November 1849);
which were followed by Justice in the Revolution and in the Church
(1858), The Federative Principle (1863) and The political capacity of
the working classes (which appeared posthumously in 1865). He will draw
inspiration from it for the constitution of the secret society that he
sets up, starting from 1863, with the contribution of two ex-French
Proudhonians, Alfred Talandier and Eliséé Reclus, and his first Italian
followers.
The charters, programs and regulations produced over the years by this
secret society constituted - according to Max Nettlau and Arthur Lehning
who however overestimated their individual contribution - the most
complete anarchist work ever written by Bakunin. They were not referring
to the organizational part of the society, which until the Paris Commune
was in clear contradiction with the anarchist ideal (centralized,
hierarchical, strictly disciplined, with heavy obligations for the
members), but to its program, the so-called Revolutionary Catechism ,
where the more specifically libertarian theories are exposed.
In reality, the Revolutionary Catechism resumes in summary and in the
order of exposition the principles listed in chapter XIV of the
Confessions of a Revolutionary (first edition) which, together with
chapter IV ("On the principle of authority") of the General Idea of the
Revolution , whose composition is contemporary, can be considered the
founding text of nineteenth-century anarchism. The essential points are:
«1. Absolute elimination of divine influence in human affairs; 2.
Affirmation of human reason as the unique origin of truth; - of human
conscience as the basis of justice, - and of individual and collective
freedom as the origin and sole basis of order in humanity; 3. Everyone's
freedom is only achievable in the equality of all. 4. Absolute exclusion
of every principle of authority and reason of state. Order in society
must be the result of the greatest possible development of all local,
collective and individual freedoms. 5. The political and economic
organization of society must start from the bottom up and from the
circumference to the center, through association and federation, in
accordance with the principle of freedom. 6. Freedom is impossible
without equality; but political and social equality is in turn
impossible without economic equality. 7. Political application: Free
exercise of individual, absolute, inalienable, imprescriptible rights,
guaranteed equally for all. - Universal suffrage - Republic».
Note that the reference to universal suffrage and the Republic is not
precisely anarchic.
These seven points, taken from the Proudhonian original, are followed by
the Revolutionary Catechism with five others, the first four of which
contrast with the obscurantist positions taken on the matter by Proudhon
himself: «1. Economic application: Transformation of property, marriage
and family thanks to the abolition of the right of inheritance; 2. Free
marriage and family. 3. Women's equality. 4. Adoption of children by
society. Support, education and education of children of both sexes up
to adolescence; 5. Obligation to work for everyone. Free and associated
work. Equivalence between work and product. Work as the sole basis of
political and social rights."
Bakunin's adoption of Proudhonian anarchist principles is all the more
significant because, in the third edition of Confessions of a
Revolutionary (1851), Proudhon purged them from chapter XIV and
subsequently revised the formula "from bottom to top", seeking the
balance between one and the other of the two terms.
A curiosity: the famous concept of "social" freedom, which we find in
Proudhon's Confessions ("freedom and solidarity are identical terms: the
freedom of each one no longer encountering a limit in the freedom of
others, as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793,
but a support, the freest man is he who has the greatest number of
relationships with his fellow men») and in the Catechism, it actually
belongs to Bakunin's Appeal to the Slavs of October-November 1848 and is
fruit of the intense discussions on dialectics that took place in that
period, in Paris, between Bakunin and Proudhon. The Russian will
elaborate it further, arriving at providing, in the aforementioned The
Paris Commune and the notion of State, an anticipation of today's
theories of recognition ("For me to be free, it is necessary that my
rights and my humanity are recognized, that their image is, so to speak,
reflected back to me as if by a mirror, by the free conscience of all
others. I cannot be truly free except in the midst of men who are as
free as I am."
Starting from 1865, the Revolutionary Catechism will contain two other
key principles of Bakunininian anarchism, also of Proudhonian derivation
(it extensively deals with The political capacity of the working
classes), the revolutionary Commune and the self-emancipation of the
workers, however vitiated by a vision still too tied to an idea of
social reconstruction, in the aftermath of the social revolution,
centered on a minimal state (represented by the "Republican Federation
of Communes"), on public health committees of Jacobin origin or on the
general extension of organization of the International.
AFTER THE PARIS COMMUNE
In Bakunin's writings following the end of the Commune we witness the
repudiation of Jacobinism and dictatorship - even the "collective and
invisible" one of the secret society -, of universal suffrage and of the
State - even in the minimalist version of the Proudhonists -. Instead,
an appeal is made to popular self-organisation, to the
self-administration of citizens, to the self-management of struggles by
grassroots trade union groups, to the generalized expression of workers'
creativity and to experimentalism.
The organization of the International is no longer the only practicable
model for him, nor even the outline of the future socialist society: he
imagines a more complex structure, which acts at multiple territorial
levels and includes both the factory proletariat and the underclass and
peasants. An organism based on autonomous but interdependent structures,
under the impulse, control and protection of proven militants, so as not
to fall back into the "governmental" mentality or end up prey to state
communists.
While Marx, after the Commune, eludes himself in a series of
contradictions that undermine his coherence and continuity of thought
(for example, he refuses to apply the system of direct representation to
the internal organization of the International, with imperative,
responsible and revocable mandates , which he had also praised in the
Civil War in France), Bakunin draws new life from the Parisian events to
bring his theory of the Antistate to fruition.
First the secret society, now called "organization Y", bears the brunt
of it, which is reformed in an assembly and anti-authoritarian sense.
Bakunin and his "intimate brothers" are convinced that the sole purpose
of a revolutionary movement must be "to elevate, to bring together and
unite the popular and spontaneous forces and to organize them. Any
attempt to deceive them, substituting themselves for them and acting for
them would therefore be harmful." Any specific organization, public or
secret, of anarchist militants must be organized anarchically, with the
same anti-statist and anti-dirigiste program, with the declared aim of
pushing the masses towards social revolution and preventing the possible
penetration within them of statist and authoritarian ideas .
Even more notable is the description of the qualities that "brothers"
must possess to belong to society. Among these stands out the need that
"every international brother must have understood that the most learned
and intelligent man, even the greatest genius, can only give to the
masses what they already carry within themselves, in their real needs ,
in their instincts, in their aspirations, nothing other than the
scientific reflex form of what they feel, that consequently there are no
individuals, neither individually nor collectively, who can be
considered in any other way than as more or less midwives capable of the
revolution that the people already carries within them, and never like
the creators or authors of this revolution".
While working on the reform of the secret society, Bakunin also thought
about that of the International. To this end, he introduces his
particular theory of "organizational dualism": on the one hand the
professional sections, where the workers find themselves directly
confronting/clashing with the bosses and, "through the struggle and the
practice of solidarity, taking awareness of the radical opposition
between Capital and Labour"; on the other, the central sections, which
bring together "the most advanced workers" of all industries, and whose
mission is to develop the idea of the International and spread its
propaganda. The example was provided by the Parisian Chambers of Trade
Unions for which Eugène Varlin had worked particularly hard, which
brought together in one place the various categories of workers, mutual
aid and resistance, cooperatives and insurance, the strike fund and the
conciliation and arbitration office, and sometimes even the kitchens and
(political) social studies clubs.
The Paris Commune returns to dictate the line: «Ten, twenty or thirty
men of good agreement and well organized among themselves, and who know
where to go and what to do, will easily drag away a hundred, two
hundred, three hundred or even more. We saw this recently in the Paris
Commune. The serious organisation, just beginning during the siege, was
not very perfect nor very strong; and yet it managed to create a force
of formidable resistance. What will happen then when the International
Association is better organized; when will it have within its fold a
much larger number of sections, especially many more agricultural
sections, and, in each section, a double or triple number of members
compared to today's? What will happen above all when each of its members
knows, better than they do today, the final aim and the true principles
of the International, as well as the means to achieve its triumph? The
International will become an irresistible power."
But it is not only the sections of the International that Bakunin now
addresses, just as it is not only its central sections that he calls to
carry out the "political work", that is, to constitute the "active
minority". In a year of reflections and controversies, many things have
changed. In place of the A.I.T., troubled by internal divisions, Bakunin
increasingly prefers to indicate in the "popular masses", generically
understood, the terrain or, better, the mare magnum in which to "swim"
the anarchist secret society, resurrected to new life, and the
politicized vanguard of the "most advanced" workers of all industries
and fields.
As for the International, he finally clarified that it «cannot become an
instrument of emancipation for humanity until it has itself emancipated
itself, that is, when, ceasing to be divided into two groups, the
majority of blind instruments and the minority of wise leaders will have
made the science, philosophy and politics of socialism penetrate the
reflected conscience of each of its members."
The revolutionary process, in Bakunin's anarchist thought, thus
resulted, without the further contortions and tumbles of Marxist
communism, in the "extinction" not only of the proletarian state but of
all authority. One of the few reasons for concordance between the
Marxist and anarchist vision.
Christmas Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
which Mario Spagnoletti, Natale Musarra, Carlo Antonio Barberini and
Luciano Canfora participated as speakers, with the topic The Paris
Commune (1871-2024) 153 years after his birth. We offer our readers an
extract from the talk given by Natale Musarra, entitled Bakunin and the
Commune, because it describes in a clear and concise, and partly
unpublished, way the evolution of Bakunin's anarchist thought before and
after the Commune. --- BEFORE THE PARIS COMMUNE -- The Paris Commune
constituted a decisive stage for Bakunin in his path of definition and
clarification of anarchist thought. Since 5 June 1871, a week after the
end of the Commune, he has been busy writing a text (published
posthumously with the title The Paris Commune and the notion of State)
in which he traces that furrow that now definitively separates the
"socialists or collectivists revolutionaries from authoritarian
communists, partisans of the absolute initiative of the State".
It was a "turning point" regarding his previous political, strategic and
organizational thinking, as he himself admitted by writing a year later
to Nabruzzi (23-26 January), to Lorenzo (10 May) and to Morago (21 May)
of the long letters in which, on the basis of the teachings of the
Commune, he invited them to eliminate any possible contradiction between
the libertarian goals they proclaimed and the means to achieve them.
But what was the evolutionary path of the main ideas he had professed up
to then?
When Bakunin arrived in London on New Year's Eve 1862, one of his main
occupations was to reconnect with the revolutionary world from which his
long imprisonment in Prussia and Russia, and his exile in Siberia, had
kept him away. He therefore read the books published in those years by
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Comte and his materialistic friends Carl
Vogt and Ludwig Büchner. But it is above all by the great books of the
"anarchist period" of Proudhon (1848-1851) that he will be struck: the
General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century (1851) and The
Confessions of a Revolutionary (in the first edition of November 1849);
which were followed by Justice in the Revolution and in the Church
(1858), The Federative Principle (1863) and The political capacity of
the working classes (which appeared posthumously in 1865). He will draw
inspiration from it for the constitution of the secret society that he
sets up, starting from 1863, with the contribution of two ex-French
Proudhonians, Alfred Talandier and Eliséé Reclus, and his first Italian
followers.
The charters, programs and regulations produced over the years by this
secret society constituted - according to Max Nettlau and Arthur Lehning
who however overestimated their individual contribution - the most
complete anarchist work ever written by Bakunin. They were not referring
to the organizational part of the society, which until the Paris Commune
was in clear contradiction with the anarchist ideal (centralized,
hierarchical, strictly disciplined, with heavy obligations for the
members), but to its program, the so-called Revolutionary Catechism ,
where the more specifically libertarian theories are exposed.
In reality, the Revolutionary Catechism resumes in summary and in the
order of exposition the principles listed in chapter XIV of the
Confessions of a Revolutionary (first edition) which, together with
chapter IV ("On the principle of authority") of the General Idea of the
Revolution , whose composition is contemporary, can be considered the
founding text of nineteenth-century anarchism. The essential points are:
«1. Absolute elimination of divine influence in human affairs; 2.
Affirmation of human reason as the unique origin of truth; - of human
conscience as the basis of justice, - and of individual and collective
freedom as the origin and sole basis of order in humanity; 3. Everyone's
freedom is only achievable in the equality of all. 4. Absolute exclusion
of every principle of authority and reason of state. Order in society
must be the result of the greatest possible development of all local,
collective and individual freedoms. 5. The political and economic
organization of society must start from the bottom up and from the
circumference to the center, through association and federation, in
accordance with the principle of freedom. 6. Freedom is impossible
without equality; but political and social equality is in turn
impossible without economic equality. 7. Political application: Free
exercise of individual, absolute, inalienable, imprescriptible rights,
guaranteed equally for all. - Universal suffrage - Republic».
Note that the reference to universal suffrage and the Republic is not
precisely anarchic.
These seven points, taken from the Proudhonian original, are followed by
the Revolutionary Catechism with five others, the first four of which
contrast with the obscurantist positions taken on the matter by Proudhon
himself: «1. Economic application: Transformation of property, marriage
and family thanks to the abolition of the right of inheritance; 2. Free
marriage and family. 3. Women's equality. 4. Adoption of children by
society. Support, education and education of children of both sexes up
to adolescence; 5. Obligation to work for everyone. Free and associated
work. Equivalence between work and product. Work as the sole basis of
political and social rights."
Bakunin's adoption of Proudhonian anarchist principles is all the more
significant because, in the third edition of Confessions of a
Revolutionary (1851), Proudhon purged them from chapter XIV and
subsequently revised the formula "from bottom to top", seeking the
balance between one and the other of the two terms.
A curiosity: the famous concept of "social" freedom, which we find in
Proudhon's Confessions ("freedom and solidarity are identical terms: the
freedom of each one no longer encountering a limit in the freedom of
others, as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793,
but a support, the freest man is he who has the greatest number of
relationships with his fellow men») and in the Catechism, it actually
belongs to Bakunin's Appeal to the Slavs of October-November 1848 and is
fruit of the intense discussions on dialectics that took place in that
period, in Paris, between Bakunin and Proudhon. The Russian will
elaborate it further, arriving at providing, in the aforementioned The
Paris Commune and the notion of State, an anticipation of today's
theories of recognition ("For me to be free, it is necessary that my
rights and my humanity are recognized, that their image is, so to speak,
reflected back to me as if by a mirror, by the free conscience of all
others. I cannot be truly free except in the midst of men who are as
free as I am."
Starting from 1865, the Revolutionary Catechism will contain two other
key principles of Bakunininian anarchism, also of Proudhonian derivation
(it extensively deals with The political capacity of the working
classes), the revolutionary Commune and the self-emancipation of the
workers, however vitiated by a vision still too tied to an idea of
social reconstruction, in the aftermath of the social revolution,
centered on a minimal state (represented by the "Republican Federation
of Communes"), on public health committees of Jacobin origin or on the
general extension of organization of the International.
AFTER THE PARIS COMMUNE
In Bakunin's writings following the end of the Commune we witness the
repudiation of Jacobinism and dictatorship - even the "collective and
invisible" one of the secret society -, of universal suffrage and of the
State - even in the minimalist version of the Proudhonists -. Instead,
an appeal is made to popular self-organisation, to the
self-administration of citizens, to the self-management of struggles by
grassroots trade union groups, to the generalized expression of workers'
creativity and to experimentalism.
The organization of the International is no longer the only practicable
model for him, nor even the outline of the future socialist society: he
imagines a more complex structure, which acts at multiple territorial
levels and includes both the factory proletariat and the underclass and
peasants. An organism based on autonomous but interdependent structures,
under the impulse, control and protection of proven militants, so as not
to fall back into the "governmental" mentality or end up prey to state
communists.
While Marx, after the Commune, eludes himself in a series of
contradictions that undermine his coherence and continuity of thought
(for example, he refuses to apply the system of direct representation to
the internal organization of the International, with imperative,
responsible and revocable mandates , which he had also praised in the
Civil War in France), Bakunin draws new life from the Parisian events to
bring his theory of the Antistate to fruition.
First the secret society, now called "organization Y", bears the brunt
of it, which is reformed in an assembly and anti-authoritarian sense.
Bakunin and his "intimate brothers" are convinced that the sole purpose
of a revolutionary movement must be "to elevate, to bring together and
unite the popular and spontaneous forces and to organize them. Any
attempt to deceive them, substituting themselves for them and acting for
them would therefore be harmful." Any specific organization, public or
secret, of anarchist militants must be organized anarchically, with the
same anti-statist and anti-dirigiste program, with the declared aim of
pushing the masses towards social revolution and preventing the possible
penetration within them of statist and authoritarian ideas .
Even more notable is the description of the qualities that "brothers"
must possess to belong to society. Among these stands out the need that
"every international brother must have understood that the most learned
and intelligent man, even the greatest genius, can only give to the
masses what they already carry within themselves, in their real needs ,
in their instincts, in their aspirations, nothing other than the
scientific reflex form of what they feel, that consequently there are no
individuals, neither individually nor collectively, who can be
considered in any other way than as more or less midwives capable of the
revolution that the people already carries within them, and never like
the creators or authors of this revolution".
While working on the reform of the secret society, Bakunin also thought
about that of the International. To this end, he introduces his
particular theory of "organizational dualism": on the one hand the
professional sections, where the workers find themselves directly
confronting/clashing with the bosses and, "through the struggle and the
practice of solidarity, taking awareness of the radical opposition
between Capital and Labour"; on the other, the central sections, which
bring together "the most advanced workers" of all industries, and whose
mission is to develop the idea of the International and spread its
propaganda. The example was provided by the Parisian Chambers of Trade
Unions for which Eugène Varlin had worked particularly hard, which
brought together in one place the various categories of workers, mutual
aid and resistance, cooperatives and insurance, the strike fund and the
conciliation and arbitration office, and sometimes even the kitchens and
(political) social studies clubs.
The Paris Commune returns to dictate the line: «Ten, twenty or thirty
men of good agreement and well organized among themselves, and who know
where to go and what to do, will easily drag away a hundred, two
hundred, three hundred or even more. We saw this recently in the Paris
Commune. The serious organisation, just beginning during the siege, was
not very perfect nor very strong; and yet it managed to create a force
of formidable resistance. What will happen then when the International
Association is better organized; when will it have within its fold a
much larger number of sections, especially many more agricultural
sections, and, in each section, a double or triple number of members
compared to today's? What will happen above all when each of its members
knows, better than they do today, the final aim and the true principles
of the International, as well as the means to achieve its triumph? The
International will become an irresistible power."
But it is not only the sections of the International that Bakunin now
addresses, just as it is not only its central sections that he calls to
carry out the "political work", that is, to constitute the "active
minority". In a year of reflections and controversies, many things have
changed. In place of the A.I.T., troubled by internal divisions, Bakunin
increasingly prefers to indicate in the "popular masses", generically
understood, the terrain or, better, the mare magnum in which to "swim"
the anarchist secret society, resurrected to new life, and the
politicized vanguard of the "most advanced" workers of all industries
and fields.
As for the International, he finally clarified that it «cannot become an
instrument of emancipation for humanity until it has itself emancipated
itself, that is, when, ceasing to be divided into two groups, the
majority of blind instruments and the minority of wise leaders will have
made the science, philosophy and politics of socialism penetrate the
reflected conscience of each of its members."
The revolutionary process, in Bakunin's anarchist thought, thus
resulted, without the further contortions and tumbles of Marxist
communism, in the "extinction" not only of the proletarian state but of
all authority. One of the few reasons for concordance between the
Marxist and anarchist vision.
Christmas Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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