• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1091 0

to adopt the stateless society through reason. What Bakunin added, learning from Russia under Nicholas I, was the necessity of violent revolution. As opposed to his rival, Karl Marx, who maintained that revolution would come only from an industrial proletariat, organized and trained for the task, Bakunin believed that immediate revolution could explode in one of the more economically backward countries—Italy, Spain or Russia—where the workers, though untrained, unorganized and illiterate, with no understanding of their own wants, would be ready to rise because they had nothing to lose. The task of the conscientious revolutionist was to popularize the Idea among the masses, hitherto bound in ignorance and prejudice by the ruling class. It was necessary to make them conscious of their own wants and “evoke” from them thoughts to match their impulses, thoughts of revolt. When this happened the workers would know their own will and then “their power will be irresistible.” Bakunin, however, lost control of the First International to Marx, who believed in organization.

There was an inherent paradox within the body of Anarchism that frustrated progress. Anarchism rejected the political party, which Proudhon had called a mere “variety of absolutism”; yet to bring about a revolution it was necessary to submit to authority, organization and discipline. Whenever Anarchists met to prepare a program, this terrible necessity rose up to face them. Loyal to their Idea, they rejected it. Revolution would burst from the masses spontaneously. All that was needed was the Idea—and a spark.

Each strike or bread riot or local uprising the Anarchist hoped—and the capitalist feared—might be the spark. Mme Hennebau, the manager’s wife in Zola’s Germinal, watching the march of the striking miners under the bloody gleam of the setting sun, saw “the red vision of revolution that on some sombre evening at the end of the century would carry everything away. Yes, on that evening the people, unbridled at last, would make the blood of the middle class flow,… in a thunder of boots the same terrible troop, with their dirty skins and tainted breath, would sweep away the old world.… Fires would flame, there would be nothing left, not a sou of the great fortunes, not a title deed of acquired properties.”

Yet each time, as when Zola’s miners faced the guns of the gendarmerie, the spark was stamped out. The magic moment when the masses would awaken to their wants and their power did not come. The Paris Commune flared and died in 1871 and failed to signal a general insurrection. “We reckoned without the masses who did not want to be roused to passion for their own freedom,” wrote Bakunin, disillusioned, to his wife. “This passion being absent what good did it do us to have been right theoretically? We were powerless.” He despaired of saving the world and died, disillusioned, in 1876, a Columbus, as Alexander Herzen said, without America.

Meanwhile in his native land his ideas took root in the Narodniki, or Populists, otherwise the Party of the People’s Will, founded in 1879. Because of communal use of land peculiar to the Russian peasant, reformers worshipped the peasant as a natural Socialist who needed only the appearance of a Messiah to be awakened from his lethargy and impelled upon the march to revolution. The bomb was to be the Messiah. “Terrorist activity,” stated the Narodniki program, “consisting in destroying the most harmful person in government, aims to undermine the prestige of the government and arouse in this manner the revolutionary spirit of the people and their confidence in the success of the cause.”

In 1881 the Narodniki struck a blow that startled the world: they assassinated the Czar, Alexander II. It was a triumphant coup, equal, they imagined, to the battering down of the Bastille. It would shout aloud their protest, summon the oppressed and terrorize the oppressors. Instead it ushered in reaction. The dead Czar, whose crown may have been the symbol of autocracy but who in person was the “Liberator” of the serfs, was mourned by the peasants,