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Notes from Bakunin — 17 Comments

  1. Thanks for bringing this “anarcho-socialist” to my attention.
    I infer from your Wiki link that he never earned a kopeck his entire life, and must have lived off the “family estate” profits.

    He seems to have had as much a sense of direction as a ball in a pinball machine. Some good insights, as you cite -Ding ding- followed by nutty anarchic socialist ones-Ding ding.

    Bottom line: dead at 62, to be remembered by left-wing faculty at US elite colleges.

  2. Bakunin wasn’t the only leftist who knew;

    “Liberal institutions straightaway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.” Friedrich Nietzsche

    I suspect many on the left know the truth of Communism’s tyrannical nature. They simply don’t talk of it because its counter-productive to the indoctrination needed to recruit to the cause. They justify it by rationalizing that it is for the greater good, while most lack the self-honesty to face their own lust for power.

    “Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise. In my experience, they  were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.”   – Harry S Truman, from a 1970 interview

    Most impressive honesty from Bukunin. To paraphrase his insight; A People’s State of Marx, will demand the reign of the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars.

    American academia is overrun with those who already see themselves as part of that new class. Pretended scientists and scholars indeed.

  3. Mikhail Bakunin sounds a lot like Milton Friedman. Every economic system as a ruling class, that puts their self-interest first.

    I would argue, that as ruling classes can not be avoided, it is best to make them a broad as possible.

  4. He sounds a lot like those kooky TEA Party candidates that Boner, McCain, and Uncle Karl Rove have targeted for extermination.

  5. A few years ago we had the privilege of seeing Tom Stoppard’s trilogy “The Coast of Utopia” in its New York run at Lincoln Center. It was a terrific. Bakunin is a character in the play. A comic foil to the gentle elder of the philosophical rebels, Alexander Herzen.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coast_of_Utopia

    The source of Stoppard’s play is “Russian Thinkers” by Sir Isaiah Berlin.

    http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Thinkers-Penguin-Classics-Isaiah/dp/0141442204/

  6. Walter Sobchak:

    I had to write a paper in college comparing Bakunin and Herzen. I still have it, for some weird reason. I looked at it about a year ago; couldn’t make head or tail of it.

    If I had known, I would have tried to write a play :-).

  7. Bakunin, just as Tolstoy, witnessed the awful tyranny of Tzarist absolutist government, and desperately sought some more human, more moral alternative. Both failed, but anarchism of morally pure people was the only option they could imagine. But to make this idea work they needed first to turn these selfish, rude men into saints. Since this was and always will be impossible, both of them were full of contradictions. No wonder, really.

  8. There was another preacher of Russian anarchism, just as famous and influential as Tolstoy and Bakunin, namely Prince Kropotkin. All the three were bleeding-heart liberals from the highest ranks of Russian nobility, quite wealthy and well-connected, and in this respect closely reminded American liberals. They also believed in possibility of purify humans from all evil, like their American counterparts. But they never made a mistake to believe that government can be a solution to anything, and with a good reason: nothing good ever transpired from Russian government, so they concluded that government was the root of all evil.

  9. Geoffrey, all Russian anarchists held civilization in contempt as well as they hated government. They believed that without civilization humans would be better, not worse. Noble savages, pure children of Nature. The very concept of original sin was totally alien to them.

  10. sergey:

    Yes, that’s what always made them seem so bizarre to me, even back in college. Almost insanely idealistic. Why would anyone think that would work?

    I don’t think we studied Kropotkin, although his name sounds vaguely interesting.

    Russian Intellectual History was my favorite course in college.

  11. This insanely idealistic social utopianism run deep in Russian culture, both popular and elitist. All Russian intellectual history is full of it, from 16 century to our days. The reason? A whole treatise can be written about it, not just a play. My humble opinion is that the specific form of Christianity adopted in Russia was very conductive to it, and the failure of a number of attempts to reform it. The schism of “Old Believers” was the first, the teaching of Tolstoy – the second, but there were lots of minor attempts.

  12. Thanks for the reminder! Very appropriate given the (almost certain) future implosion of Obamacare AND the Dept of Justice’s decision to request equal punishment in schools.

  13. sergey:

    Thanks, that’s interesting. I assume Bakunin was an atheist, but I suppose even atheists can be influenced by the prevailing philosophy, be it religious or otherwise.

  14. Not only by prevailing philosophy, but even more so by prevailing culture in the most broad sense of the word. And all Russian culture was anarchistic anti-governmental, with very few exceptions. Strange enough, for Tolstoy the two most influential philosophers were atheist Rousseau and fire-breathing Christian preacher Avvakum, founder of the schism “Old Believers”. So religion was not the deciding issue in their quasi-religious crusades. They were seeking a moral truth of a deeper meaning than theological or clerical issues; like Nietzsche, they were existential philosophers before this type of philosophy got European recognition.

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