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Old August 17th, 2013 #1
Karl Radl
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Default Was Mikhail Bakunin anti-Semitic?

Was Mikhail Bakunin anti-Semitic?


The best known; and justly so, of Karl Marx’s left wing opponents was a man of genteel Russian birth named Mikhail Bakunin: the founder of modern anarchism. Bakunin was; as the son of a liberal Russian landowner, in many respects typical of the type of hyper-intellectual revolutionaries that dominated European left wing political culture in the nineteenth century. He was; as stated, a man who had an excellent education, did not have to work if he did not wish to (leaving him plenty of time for revolutionary/subversive writing and activities) and been heavily influenced by the ideals of the rationalists and encyclopaedists which were embodied for him in the French revolution and then the Paris Commune.

Like Marx and Engels: Bakunin was a devotee of left Hegelianism and we know attended at least one lecture with Engels. (1) Bakunin; as was fairly common among young liberal Russian nobles at the time, naturally gravitated towards a variety of socialism in his political thought. However Bakunin saw things very differently from many thinkers of his time as he focused not upon an iron historical revolutionary process as Marx and Engels theorized or suggested that it was a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism was required as Lassalle and others suggested, but rather believed that what was lacking was freedom and that freedom was acquired from the collective ownership of the means of production without a centralised government or state
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In other words Bakunin’s philosophy was somewhat similar to Che Guevara’s famous ‘detonator theory’ where class conflict created the situation for a spark to be lit that would cause freedom; i.e. freedom from the tyranny of capitalism enforced by the tyranny of central government, to burst forth in revolutionary class war.
It is then little wonder how and why Bakunin and Marx clashed so famously and viciously in the so-called ‘First International’ as well as why this conflict between Bakunin and Marx has reached out into history as the continuous war of words; and the occasional mass blood-letting, between Marxists and Anarchists. The most famous of these periodic squabbles occurred in the Spanish Civil War, (2) but there have been many similar incidents historically in; for example, Russia (3) and Cuba. (4)

Aside from Bakunin’s war of words with Marx and Engels: he is well-known to students of the far left to also be a somewhat controversial figure in his own right because of some of the things he said. This is because Bakunin; while being a champion of ‘freedom from oppression and tyranny’, said what he thought about the jews (much as Engels despised homosexuals and said so repeatedly much to the abject horror of the far left today) on several occasions and even anarchist academic historians; such as Mark Leier, do not feel able to defend his comments on the jews although they do; naturally enough, try to minimize them. (5)

To be sure Bakunin was an irascible egoist and much of his ideology; as Aileen Kelly has shown, (6) is derived from his own sense of socio-economic inferiority and inability to succeed in; and integrate with, the world around him. However his remarks on the subject of jews are largely independent of his ego and are pointed more towards the valid intellectual criticism that Bakunin tended to mix with in with his more violent diatribes.

The purpose of this article is to understand; on the basis of these remarks, whether Bakunin was; or was not, an anti-Semite. Now to be able to understand this we need to recognize that anti-Semitism is not a catch-all term for anything that is critical of the jews or Israel; as it is so often used to represent today, but rather is a specific term signifying a particular conceptual approach to the jewish question.

That approach is very simply the categorization of the jews as a biological group; or series of genetic clusters as we might say today, and argues against the jews as being a problem regardless of their religious background or profession (while anti-Judaism focuses purely on jews practicing Judaism for example) meaning that individual jews are regarded as part of a subversive biological group en bloc because of their ethnic origin.

In other words an anti-Semite defines a jew as a biological enemy, anti-Judaism defines a jew as a purely religious enemy who practices Judaism (but becomes harmless when this is not the case) and anti-Zionism focuses on opposing iewish nationalism not jews writ large.

Therefore how Bakunin viewed the jews is what defines him as being; or not being, an anti-Semite.

To begin with one of the best known quotes from Bakunin on the jews is found in his 1842 essay ‘The Reaction in Germany’ where he states:

‘And if they have nothing left to say, they say: “Yes, it is a curious thing.” ...And as it is said of the Polish Jews that in the last Polish war they wanted to serve both warring parties simultaneously, the Poles as well as the Russians, and consequently were hanged by both sides impartially, so these poor souls vex themselves with the impossible business of the outward reconciliation of opposites, and are despised by both parties for their pains.’ (7)

Now in the above Bakunin clearly identifies the jews of Poland as a subversive entity as a whole in that they tried to play both the Poles and the Russians against each other in order so that they could benefit from it. Instead they were; as Bakunin points out, judiciously executed as enemy agents by both sides.

That Bakunin dislikes the jews as a people is obvious by his delightfully vicious sarcasm about their vexation with the ‘impossible business of the outward reconciliation of opposites’. This likely means nothing to my reader, but it can be elucidated very simply by pointing out that it is a reference to the Hegelian dialectical method (which requires the reconciliation of opposites [thesis and anti-thesis] into new proposition or situation which acts as the result [synthesis]).

Effectively Bakunin here is making fun of jews in the revolutionary/socialist movement by saying that they have spent their time playing both sides in a war [thesis + anti-thesis] against each which created the situation where the jews were being executed in droves as the result of their subversive behaviour [synthesis].

Here then we can see Bakunin attacks jews in Poland writ large as being subversive; as well as delighting in their executions (all of which is also a sideways dig at jewish revolutionaries/socialists like Karl Marx and Moses Hess), and as he is attacking Polish jews as being intellectually inadequate left Hegelians (thus incomplete and ineffective revolutionaries in Bakunin’s perception) then we know he is using a biological basis to describe the jews. This is because left Hegelians rejected religion as superstition as part of their separate identity from the orthodox (or right) Hegelians who took a pro-religion position as they believed; with Hegel, that Hegelism proved and validated the existence of God. (8)

Thus Bakunin cannot be criticising followers of Judaism as being revolutionaries, but rather is referring to the jews as a national or biological group as revolutionaries (of which some practice varying religions) therefore meaning that Bakunin is being anti-Semitic.

This is confirmed when we look at his work ‘Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism’, where he rhetorically asks:

‘Has there ever been a more excruciatingly jealous, vain, selfish and bloodthirsty deity than the Jewish God Jehovah who is the merciful father of the Christians?’ (9)

While also stating:

‘The example of the contradiction or anomaly we offered is often apparent in a wider sphere: in the history of nations. To explain, for example, that the Jewish nation is the closest and most exclusive in the world. So that it is single and narrow: recognizing a unique privilege in its divine election as the main basis of its entire national existence. Israel regards herself as the most favoured of all the people of the world to the point of imagining that their God Jehovah - God the Father of Christians – has only cared for them while inflicting the wildest cruelty on all other nations having ordered the eradication by fire and sword of all the people who resided in the land promised to the Jews.’ (10)

In the two passages above we can see that Bakunin clearly identifies the jews as a nation and not as a religious group. He also writes of the jews in terms that are obviously derogatory given that he regards the jews as being the originators of the most evil of all man-made deities: Jehovah (i.e. Yahweh).

Further we should draw attention to Bakunin's specific criticism of the jews in that he regards them as a clannish endogamic tribal group that believes itself to be the divinely-appointed rulers of the earth and so accordingly inimical to his revolutionary principles.

Indeed we can quite clearly see elsewhere in Bakunin's writings that he regards the jews; ironically just as Marx himself did in his 'On the Jewish Question', as being the prototypical exploitative capitalist.

He writes as follows:

‘He found himself a very brutal, very selfish, very cruel God called Jehovah: who is the national god of the Jews. But the Jews; despite the exclusive national spirit that distinguishes them today, had become the most international people of the world long before the birth of Christ.’ (11)

In the above passage Bakunin is noting very simply that the jews have uniquely operated outside of any defined national borders and in the territories of other peoples for a very long time so accordingly have developed into the most international of peoples while still being an endogamic tribal entity.

Bakunin also mentions how the jews are able to operate in such a unique when he tells us that:

‘To move from one religion to another - unless we do it by calculation, as sometimes the Jews in Russia and Poland do: having been baptised three or four times, each time in order to receive fresh compensation - to change one's religion, there must be a grain of religious faith.’ (12)

Here we can see that Bakunin is clearly identifying the jews as a national or biological group not as a religious one as we are told that the jews change their religion repeatedly, but yet remain jews. This means they cannot be jews in the religious sense as they are changing their religion multiple times. Thus Bakunin is viewing the jews as a national community that exists irrespective of its formal or informal religious affiliation.

In summary then this tells us that; for all intents and purposes, Bakunin was an anti-Semite and regardless of what we may think of Anarchism or Bakunin himself: for his opposition to jews alone Bakunin can and should be praised.

However it is perhaps best to let the man himself have the final say in the matter:

‘This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other... This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found.’ (13)


References


(1) Mark Leier, 2006, ‘Bakunin: The Creative Passion: A Biography’, 1st Edition, Seven Stories Press: New York, p. 107
(2) See Paul Preston, 2006, 'The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge', 1st Edition, Harper Collins: London, pp. 176-178; 252-255
(3) See Leier, Op. Cit., pp. 329-330
(4) For a summary of this see Frank Fernandez, 1989, 'Cuba: The Anarchists and Liberty', 1st Edition, ASP: London
(5) Leier, Op. Cit., pp. 275-276
(6) Aileen Kelly, 1987, 'Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven
(7) http://www.marxists.org/reference/ar...on-germany.htm
(8) For a summary of this see David McLellan,1969, 'The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx', 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke
(9) Mikhail Bakunin, 1907, ‘Oeuvres’, Vol. 1, 5th Edition, P. V. Stock: Paris, p. 100; repeated in slightly different fashion in Vol. 3, p. 308
(10) Bakunin, Op. Cit., Vol. 1, p. 175
(11) Bakunin, Op. Cit., Vol. 3, pp. 99-100
(12) Bakunin, Op. Cit., Vol. 5, p. 243
(13) Ibid, pp. 243-244

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...i-semitic.html
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