Anarchism as the Contemporary Spirit of Anti-Capitalism?: A Critical Survey of Recent Debates

Abstract

Mikhail Bakunin’s last few years — following his dynamic, productive anarchist phase, running from the mid-1860s to the early 1870s (Shatz in Bakunin, 1990) — were far from happy. In a letter to the Journal de Geneve in 1874, Bakunin wrote that he felt ‘neither the strength nor, perhaps, the confidence which are required to go on rolling Sisyphus’s stone against the triumphant forces of reaction … Henceforth I shall trouble no man’s repose; and I ask, in my turn, to be left in peace’ (in Woodcock, 1962: 169), explaining to Élisée Reclus the following year that ‘there is absolutely no revolutionary thought, hope, or passion left among the masses’ (in Dolgoff, 1972: 354). This gloom was materially well founded: the tragic end and reactionary aftermath of the Paris Commune; the acrimony and intrigue between the Bakuninites and the Marxists, culminating in Bakunin’s expulsion from the First International; the split with Carlo Cafiero (who ended his days in madness, obsessed with the idea that he might be consuming more than his fair share of sunshine), amidst charges Bakunin had mismanaged the Italian’s inheritance; the unfortunate entanglement with the nihilist Sergei Nechayev; the participation in the chaotic, doomed Bologna uprising of 1874, possibly in the hope of salvaging something with a heroic death (Joll, 1979; Marshall, 1992; Masters, 1974; Woodcock, 1962).