Today in Labor History May 30, 1814: Russian anarchist militant and philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was born. In Paris, in the 1840’s, he met Marx and Proudhon, who were early influences on him. He was later expelled from France for opposing Russia’s occupation of Poland. In 1849, the authorities arrested him in Dresden for participating in the rebellions of 1848 & 1849. They deported him back to Russia, where the authorities imprisoned him and then exiled him to Siberia in 1857. During his imprisonment, he lost all his teeth due to scurvy. However, he eventually escaped and made it to England.
In 1868, he joined the International Working Men’s Association, leading the rapidly growing anarchist faction. He argued for federations of self-governing workplaces and communes to replace the state. This was in contrast to Marx, who argued for the state to help bring about socialism. However, he agreed with Marx’s class analysis. Nevertheless, in 1872, they expelled Bakunin from the International.
Bakunin died in 1876 in Bern, Switzerland. He influenced anarchist movements throughout the world, but especially in Italy and Spain. He also influenced the IWW, Noam Chomsky, Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Marcuse, and Emma Goldman. Chomsky wrote that Bakunin’s prediction that Marxist states would ultimately become dictatorships was "one of the few predictions in the social sciences that actually came true." Anarchist historian Paul Avrich wrote that Bakunin's life was full of paradoxes: "[He was] a nobleman who yearned for a peasant revolt, a libertarian with an urge to dominate others, an intellectual with a powerful anti-intellectual streak." And there were numerous examples of antisemitism in his writing, too.
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