Basic Bakunin

by Anarchist Federation

"The aim of this pamphlet is to do nothing more than present an outline of what the author thinks are the key features of Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist ideas."

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

23 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[R. Reddebrek · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short and readable introduction to ideas of Bakunin. Bakunin has had a poor treatment in the English language, apart from God and the State most of his writing a selection of very short pieces scattered through a number of translations of sporadic quality and popularity. This is a good primer of his main ideas and provides some context to them.

[Twilight O. ☭ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I disagree strongly with Bakunin on several points, but that owes nothing to the strengths or weaknesses of this presentation of his thought. I read this to help me write a script for a video and to that end it proved very helpful!

[Maurice Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bakunin has always fascinated since I saw the Ripping Yarns episode satirising 1910s revolutionaries, and when Roger expresses his own ideas against centralised authorities, Mr Hopper shouts out "Don't listen to him, that's not Marxism, that's Bakuninite anarchism!" A critic of Marxism from a libertarian angle has to be worth knowing about too.

This succinct 32 page basic sketch of Bakunin's ideas is great for quick familiarity. Pity you would only likely ever find it on a political bookstall at a trade union do. It's not a thorough analysis of Bakunin's life and faults, but at least it admits he had some.

The fault in his ideas which the book does not directly state yet is very clear by omission when you read it, is that there is no explanation of what if anything he thought would prevent an unjust seizure of power in his proposed anarchist society after a revolution, consisting of a voluntary federation of local communes. Startlingly it would be an anarchist society with laws, locally made ones.

Explains well his critique of states leading inevitably to political elites that act in their own interest instead of the people's, and hiw he rightly predicted how this would overcome both tbe "bourgeois socialism" of Labour government and Marxist regimes. He was right about how and why it went wrong in Russia, and this revived interest in him, after in his own time he had lost out to Marx whose optimism was a more attractive sell. Bakunin's idea of an anarchist vanguard, acting non-coercively just as a pusher of ideas and a revolution's alert monitor to try to stop (how?) a state power reemerging, is distinguished from the Bolshevik idea of the vanguard party, which is exactly the thing that Bakunin's vanguard wants to prevent!