Divide and Conquer or Divide and Subdivide?: How Not to Refight the First International

Leier, Mark

ISBN 10: 1629633836 ISBN 13: 9781629633831

Casa editrice: Pm Pr, 2017

Riassunto

<p>The battles between Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx in the First International (aka the International Working Men's Association, 1864&#8211;1876) began a pattern of polemics and rancor between anarchists and Marxists that still exists today. Outlining the profound similarities between Bakunin and Marx in their early lives and careers as activists, Mark Leier suggests that the differences have often been exaggerated and have prevented activists from learning useful lessons about creating vibrant movements.</p>

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Mark Leier works in the history department of Simon Fraser University. His many books include Bakunin: The Creative Passion.

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Divide and Conquer or Divide and Subdivide?

How Not to Refight the First International

By Mark Leier

PM Press

Copyright © 2017 Mark Leier
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-383-1

CHAPTER 1

DIVIDE AND CONQUER OR DIVIDE AND SUBDIVIDE?

HOW NOT TO REFIGHT THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

MARK LEIER

Since the fights between Bakunin and Marx in the First International in 1864, anarchists and Marxists have emphasized the differences between the two. Even their physical stature was different. Bakunin was large, standing six feet four inches tall and weighing perhaps three hundred pounds, with a fair complexion and blond hair. Marx was short and dark, reflecting his family nickname of "The Moor." Other characteristics, however, emphasize how much they resembled each other. In the few, posed black-and-white photographs that have been preserved, which, appropriately enough, look rather like mug shots, it is difficult for the casual observer to distinguish one from the other. Both adopt the formal, stiff posture fashionable for photographs of the time, and each has a portly build, unkempt hair, and an unruly beard. Both are dressed in the formal, sloppy manner befitting slightly disreputable members of the Victorian intelligentsia, and they even patronized the same London tailor for a time.

For two men who fought so bitterly, their similarities go much deeper than physical appearance, grooming, and clothing. They were close in age — Bakunin born in 1814, Marx four years later — and so grew up in a shared intellectual, political, and cultural climate. More importantly, their family backgrounds gave them similar opportunities and experiences. Bakunin's family was part of the Russian nobility, but that description may hide more than it reveals. Russia was essentially a feudal society, and the wealth of the Bakunin family came from the peasantry, the serfs who were bound to lord and land. But the family was not of the grand aristocracy. The Bakunin estate was at Priamukhino, far from the political and cultural centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg and far from the swirl and opportunities of the tsar's court. The Bakunins were not wealthy but had obtained admission to the ranks of the aristocracy through service to the tsar, in much the way Lenin's family would years later. This is not to underestimate the relative privilege of the Bakunin family or the power it held over the serfs that worked the land. It did mean, however, that Bakunin and his sisters and brothers were not part of the idle rich. There was money for education, but education was instrumental, aimed at equipping the daughters to marry well and to train the sons for service in the officer corps or government office. While the children were afforded an excellent education and cultural accoutrements of their class such as music and language lessons, money was always a concern. Pennies had to be watched, debt avoided, and sacrifices made.

Marx's family too was somewhere in the middle ranks of German society. His father owned vineyards, but it was his work as an attorney that provided the family income, and like Bakunin's family, maintaining their social position meant watching expenses carefully and investing in education to give the children what is sometimes called "social capital." Again like the Bakunin family, the Marxes were not part of the inner circles of power of German society. Born in Catholic Trier shortly after the city was ceded from France to Prussia, Karl Marx was baptized a Lutheran, but his father had recently converted from Judaism. This separated the family from the conservative, traditional elites of Prussia as effectively as the isolation of Priamukhino separated the Bakunins from the elites of Russia.

Thus both men undeniably came from privileged backgrounds, but the privilege was narrowly bound, dependent not on great wealth but on relatively modest means and the access to education those means and status made possible. As the oldest male children, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx had great expectations put on them. In Bakunin's case, a career as a military officer would open up doors in government service and give him the managerial skills to run the estate. For Marx, the hope was that he would study law. Both received excellent early educations at home, learning several languages, mathematics, and literature. They learned other lessons at home as well. Neither of their fathers were radicals or revolutionaries, but both men were products of the Enlightenment and loosely connected to progressive causes. Alexander Bakunin had associated with people with ties to the Decembrist movement, a group of army officers who agitated for a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom in 1825. Heinrich Marx too was part of a circle of reformers pushing for modest constitutional reform. Their political ideals may be characterized as cautious liberalization of their respective political regimes, changes that would give people, especially those of their classes, more breathing room, freer exchanges of ideas, and more access to power without upsetting society or causing turmoil. And both men retreated rather hastily when the conservative state pushed back. Nonetheless, they gave their children much more than an uncritical, patriotic, conservative upbringing.

Both fathers came to regret it. In 1828, Michael Bakunin was sent off to school in St. Petersburg, first to a sort of prep school then to military academy to train to become an artillery officer. He was an unhappy and sometimes unruly cadet, whose studies were marked with a great deal of indolence and frantic cramming at exam time. Despite his undistinguished performance, he was commissioned as an officer in 1832. In 1830, Marx entered high school. He graduated in 1835 with average grades, notably and ironically weak in history, and went to the University of Bonn to study law. So far, both young men seemed dutiful sons of the middle class, competent but not exemplary students with the potential for solid careers in the state and civil bureaucracies.

That illusion was quickly dispelled. The first sign was their inability to manage money. Both men piled up debts, never for the books or tutoring or school supplies their families would have cheerfully scrimped to provide, but for lavish meals, alcohol, parties, concerts, and plays. Letters begging for more money were met with parental warnings to be responsible, accountable, and above all, studious. As is usually the case in such matters, the warnings were ignored.

It got worse. After three years of service, each of which he loathed, Bakunin left the military. He did not formally resign; he simply went AWOL, leaving his parents to use what little influence they had to secure his formal resignation by falsely claiming he was ill. Marx's rebellion was less fraught but no less alarming; he left Bonn for the University of Berlin, where he hoped to become a poet. He proved no more adept at verse than Bakunin had at military service.

By 1836, each had taken up an even more disreputable pursuit: philosophy. Bakunin moved to Moscow where he became part of a literary and philosophy circle named after Nikolai Stankevich, a young poet, critic, and liberal humanist. There Bakunin was joined by his sisters, Liubov, Varvara, Tatiana, and Alexandra, who were themselves influential members of the Stankevich circle. Other members of the loosely knit critical group included the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and the political writer Alexander Herzen. Literature, philosophy, and politics intertwined and were debated long through the night. For his part, Marx started in law at Berlin, but became much more interested in the philosophy of law than formal, practical legal studies. Their parents were dismayed as their sons took up such idle pursuits — after all, what does one do with a degree in philosophy? Nor were the parents pleased when both took up the study of the most controversial philosopher of the day: Hegel.

It is difficult today to appreciate the impact Hegel had on the men and women of Bakunin and Marx's generation. Theirs was a Europe in flux, as the old verities of the feudal world were being swept away by industrial capitalism and its new forms of exploitation. Revolutions in thought and politics accompanied the transition in the economies as new groups and classes sought political power from the point of a sword and the barrel of a gun and with new ideologies and new political constitutions. Hegel championed this new world, a world not of stability and order and fixed place but one of chaos and opportunity and mobility. In his view, history, and so the future, were marked by transformation, not stasis. No political regime was fixed or unassailable, no economic system was permanent or immutable, no one's status was inevitable or fixed. History, according to Hegel, or at least some of his interpreters, was on the side of unrest and motion. This was a philosophy that appealed to those who wished to change society — as Herzen put it, Hegel had given them the "algebra of revolution" with his arguments about the evolution of humanity and its progressive search for freedom. Such a philosophy appealed greatly to Bakunin and to Marx and they soon proclaimed themselves Hegelians.

In 1838, Bakunin wrote a preface to a translation of Hegel's Gymnasium Lectures and followed this up with a two-part article, "On Philosophy," in 1840. In the essays, Bakunin asserted that history — humanity — was propelled by "the contradiction between the infinity of [humanity's] internal ideal essence and the limitation of his external existence; contradiction is the source of movement, of development, striving only towards its resolution." Humanity's ideal essence was, in his view and Hegel's, the striving for freedom, and for Bakunin, that meant more than freedom of thought — it meant political and economic freedom as well. Philosophy was important, but only to the degree that it combined with action to produce changes in real human lives.

Marx, of course, was moving in the same direction, from abstract, if critical, philosophy to politics. As members of the left-leaning Young Hegelians, a group of university students and professors, he and Friedrich Engels would later denounce abstract analysis, declaring in The German Ideology that "philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love." For his part, Bakunin observed that "noise, empty chatter — this is the only result of the awful, senseless anarchy of minds which constitutes the main illness of our new generation — a generation that is abstract, illusory, and foreign to any reality." Philosophy could not remain in the lecture hall and seminar room. It had to return to the real world, and that meant politics.

Political thought and action were much more advanced and accessible in Europe than in the tsar's Russia, and so Bakunin went to the University of Berlin in 1840, hoping to complete a doctorate and find work as a university lecturer. He fell in with an impressive group of students that included Engels, Kaspar Schmidt (better known as Max Stirner), and Søren Kierkegaard. Another was the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who would later draw upon Bakunin for the title character of his novel Rudin.

Marx too was a student there, finishing his doctoral dissertation "The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, with an Appendix." Deep in his studies, he met neither Bakunin nor Engels. Despite Marx's early promise as a philosopher, his plans for a university career were thwarted when one of his mentors, Bruno Bauer, lost his position at the University of Bonn as part of the state's repression of the Left and of Hegelians in high places.

By 1842, it was clear that neither Marx nor Bakunin would find careers in the academy. They turned to journalism and politics instead. Neither was yet a socialist; it would be more accurate to describe them as radical democrats. But their views were shifting. Each was influenced by Lorenz von Stein's book, The Socialism and Communism of Present-Day France. Originally an investigation commissioned by the Prussian government, the book was a warning against socialism, not an argument for it, but it soon became popular among left-leaning intellectuals in Germany. Von Stein was a university professor and something of a Hegelian, though a conservative one, and stressed the importance of economic matters in history and politics. Read against the grain — easy work for young dialectical Hegelian rebels — von Stein illustrated how a working-class movement had developed in France and pointed to the possibility of a more democratic and more progressive future led by workers and intellectuals. After all, while Germans argued and wrote and debated idealist philosophy, France had looked to political economy and material interests to make a successful revolution in 1789 and to launch a series of rebellions and uprisings in the 1830s, notably the June Rebellion immortalized by Victor Hugo in his novel Les Misérables.

Turning from philosophy to popular politics, Bakunin and Marx wrote for a new journal, the Deutsche Jahrbücher, edited by Arnold Ruge. Ruge was several years older than Bakunin and Marx and had been imprisoned during his student days for his political action. He was a Hegelian and that too made him a marked man. When he was denied a chair at the University of Halle, he abandoned academia and founded a series of left-leaning journals. The journals took up questions of constitutional democracy, state policy, political reform, socialism, literature, and art, usually from a liberal, democratic perspective, and were regularly shut down by the authorities, only to pop up again in another guise. Both Bakunin and Marx submitted articles to the Deutsche Jahrbücher, but only Bakunin's "The Reaction in Germany: A Fragment from a Frenchman" was published. That Bakunin beat Marx into print is surprising, for in his later life Bakunin was notorious for rarely finishing a writing project. Marx suffered from the same malady, but his life was more stable and with the aid of his wife Jenny and his friend Engels more of his work was completed and published. It brought Marx little money — he complained that he had spent more on cigars while writing Capital than he could hope to recoup in royalties. But because it was published, it was read, and that established him as an important intellectual within the labor and left movements. Bakunin's reputation after 1842 would be based less on his writing than his activism.

But until the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and Capital, published in 1867, Bakunin's article in the Deutsche Jahrbücher made him the better known and respected progressive thinker. It is in "The Reaction in Germany" that his most famous quote appears: "The passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion." While it is often cited by anarchists and used as a guide to action, Bakunin was not outlining tactics or gesturing towards anarchism; he was writing as a Hegelian, not an anarchist, in 1842 and not counseling a diversity of tactics or violence. It was, however, a call for "a total transformation" and the building of "an original new life which has not yet existed in history." In this Bakunin foreshadowed Marx's comment in an 1843 letter to Ruge, where he called for the "ruthless criticism of all that exists." Mere tinkering with the system was not sufficient for either rebel, even if the means and ends were still unclear.

The article was important for another passage as well. Previous revolutions had only replaced one small ruling group with another. Feudal lords, for example, were replaced with capitalists and kings replaced with parliaments. The next revolution, however, would be more profound and it would be made, Bakunin argued, by "the people, the poor class," who made up "the greatest part of humanity." Revolts in France and England, and even conservative Germany, made this clear; workers and peasants had been promised much by the classes that had made previous revolutions, but had received little. If they were to obtain real freedom, economic and political freedom, with neither god nor state nor capitalist, workers would have to make the revolution themselves.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Divide and Conquer or Divide and Subdivide? by Mark Leier. Copyright © 2017 Mark Leier. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Pm Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1629633836
• ISBN 13: 9781629633831
• Rilegatura: Opuscolo
• Numero di pagine: 27
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile