Bakunin

Author’s Appeal
TO EDITORS, READERS, AND LIBRARIANS [The author has collected nine pamphlets, Word Library, 1st Series, into one Volume, and issued them in collected form under the title Essays in Revolt.. This second series will be collected into another volume.] This collection of essays will be sent to a number of papers in all parts of the world for review. It will be sent specifically to the press in Britain, America, the American Colonies, and the British Dominions. Editors are asked, as a favor, to send copies of their papers containing review notices to the author. The volume will be sent, also, to the chief public libraries in Britain and the United States. It will be sent post free to any public library in the world on the receipt of an application from the librarian. Readers are reminded that the first editions of each of the pamphlets, revised and collected in this volume, can be consulted in the... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Bibliographical Appendix
As stated in the Foreword, the manuscript of the present biography was completed in 1934. Three years after this work had been written, Professor E.H. Carr published his magnificent book, Michael Bakunin. The publishers were MacMillan & Company, of St. Martin’s Street, London. The book consisted of thirty-four exhaustive chapters. Unfortunately, it was published at the impossible price, so far as the workers were concerned, of twenty-five shillings. No effort has been made to produce a popular addition. This militates seriously against the excellent research work of Professor Carr being popularized. Professor Carr’s study is a growth: for his Bakunin embodies chapters from his previous writings on Herzen. The reception that was accorded to Carr’s work did not make for welcome understanding. Reviews in the capitalist press stated that Professor Carr had nothing but affectionate contempt for this sinister politica... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix 2 : The Challenge Of Catalonia
The braggart, Franco, at the beginning of his mountebank career of Fascist adventurism, boasted that Catalonia would fall before his alien arms without a struggle. Such chatter was worthy of the tool of Hitler and Mussolini! It defined the extent of the man’s ignorance with a superbness of irony that no other persons could have achieved. It stamped as grotesque the knowledge, the approach, the attitude of Franco. It showed the man in action and in repose to be the one character: a clown turned butcher n order that he might clown at tragedy as well as at comedy; clown as wantonly with human misery as he had clowned hopelessly at politics. The Capitalist and Fascist powers treated this comedian seriously merely because his comedy grew into crime and his fool’s costume dripped with proletarian blood. His mirthless braggadocio regarded the conquest of Catalonia as something to be attained without struggle: a maidenly surrendered to be obtained... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix 1 : Marx and Bakunin
Many comrades have found it hard to understand the difference between Marx and Bakunin. The story is very simple and can be told clearly. During his imprisonment and exile, Bakunin was attacked by Marx and the latter’s friends. Bakunin summarized the attack: — “While I was having a far from amusing time in German and Russian fortresses, and in Siberia, Marx and Co. were peddling, clamoring from the housetops, publishing in English and German newspapers, the most abominable rumors about me. They said that it was untrue to declare that I had been imprisoned in a fortress, that, on the contrary, Czar Nicholas had received me with open arms, had provided me with all possible conveniences and enjoyments, that I was able to amuse myself with light women, and had a abundance of champagne to drink. This was infamous, but it was also stupid.” After Bakunin arrived in London, in 1861, and se... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 15 : Marx and Bakunin: An Estimate
Bakunin closed his stormy career at Berne, on the 1st July 1876. He had founded the social democratic alliance and been expelled from the Marxist International. It was decided at his funeral to reconcile the social democrats and the anarchists in one association. Fraternal greetings were exchanged between the Jura federation, assembled at Chaux-de Fonds, and the German social democratic congress at Gotha. At the eighth international congress, at Berne, in October, the social democrats and the anarchists met and expressed the desire that all socialists should treat each other with mutual consideration and complete common understanding. A banquets conclude this congress. Caferio, the disciple of Bakunin, drank to Marxism and the German socialists. De Paepe, the Marxist, toasted the memory of Bakunin. All Bakunin’s fiery words against the State, his talk of the revolution, his hurrying across Europe to boost first one then another insurrection had ended seemingly i... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Herzen's Influence
Herzen was the love child of a German mother and a Russian noble. His father recognized and cared for him from birth. In 1827 he was sent to the University at Moscow to complete the studies he had commenced at home. Reaction was striding triumphant through Russia. The Czar and his Court were conspiring to close the universities and to replace them with organized military schools. Living a century later, we are familiar with the arguments of military despotism and entrenched bureaucracy at the war with democracy and public right. Lord Trenchard gives an excellent impersonation of the Czar’s Statesmen militarizing the universities during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when he urged to-day the military reconstruction of the... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Birth, Parentage, and Descent
Michel Alexandrovitch Bakunin was born on May 8th, 1814, at the family seat of his father, at Pryamuchina, situated between Moscow and St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd a century later, and now called Leningrad. What a cycle of history these changes indicate! Bakunin was born two years after his friend, Alexander Herzen, first saw the light by the fires of Moscow. Those fires were lit by the order of Prince Rostopchin, as intelligent as reactionary a man, in order to drive Napoleon and his Grand Army out of the Russian Capital. Rostopschin considered that Russia faced a graver enemy in her idealistic nobility than in any foreign invaders. He observed that, in other countries, aristocrats planned insurrection in order to secure power for the... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Retreat of Herzen
“The slightest concession, the smallest grace and compassion will bring us back to the past again, and leave our fetters untouched. Of two things we must choose one. Either we must justify ourselves and go on, or we must falter and beg for mercy when we have arrived half-way.” In these terms, written in a mood of uncompromising Nihilism, Herzen condemned his later career. The condemnation applies to the world socialist movement. It is safe to say that the careerist labor leaders of European politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries flourished in retreat. The organization of the Labor Movement has been a long story of calculated anti-socialist conspiracy and intrigue. Should a future generation ever pause to tell the sto... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Imprisonment, Confession, And Escape!
From August, 1849, to May, 1850, Bakunin was kept a prisoner in the fortress of Konistein. He was then tried and sentenced to death by the Saxon tribunal. In pursuance of a resolution passed by the old Diet of the Bund in 1836, he was delivered up to the Austrian Government and sent (chained) to Prague instead of being executed. The Austrian Government attempted in vain to extort from him the secrets of the Slavonian movement. A year later, it sentenced him to death, but immediately commuted the death sentence to one of perpetual imprisonment. In the interval he had been removed from the fortress at Gratz to that of Almutz, as the government was terrified by the report of a design to liberate him. Here he passed six months chained to the wa... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Bakunin's Communism
In 1869, Bakunin delivered his famous speech to the League of Peace and Liberty Congress at Berne. Plechanoff has described this organization as an entirely bourgeoisie body. The history of social democratic movement that George Plechanoff defended so laboriously, has proven to be so completely counter-revolutionary that his censures of Bakunin may pass as mere words of abuse. Bakunin’s speech impeached modern civilization as having been “founded from time immemorial on the forced labor of the enormous majority, condemned to lead the lives of brutes and slaves, in order that a small minority might be enabled to live as human creatures. This monstrous inequality,” he discovered, rested “upon the absolute separation be... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)