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"Relations between Marx and Bakunin had never been warm, although it was only in the late 1860s that they erupted into open warfare. When the two met in Paris in 1844, Bakunin had admired Marx’s erudition but not his personality. Then, in July of 1848, Marx, in his Cologne newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published a report that the novelist George Sand had proof that Bakunin was a Russian government agent – a rumor that had been dogging Bakunin for some time. The paper subsequently printed Sand’s denial of the story as well as Bakunin’s protest, but the incident could not help but poison their future relations. (They met once again, in London in 1864, an encounter that was cordial but distant.) Furthermore, Marx was as scornful and distrustful of Russians as Bakunin was anti-German and anti-Semitic. Even Poland, whose independence both of them supported, drew them apart rather than together: to Marx, freedom for Poland signified a blow against Russia, the bastion of European reaction, whereas to Bakunin it represented the starting-point of Russia’s liberation. Finally, it is hardly surprising that even an international organization was not capacious enough to contain two such domineering as well as divergent personalities. Nevertheless, the personal antagonism between them should not be unduly emphasized – for Bakunin as well as Marx their conflict involved fundamental differences of principle.

The storm which had been gathering for several years finally broke at the congress of the International held at The Hague in September 1872. Marx succeeded in having Bakunin (who was unable to attend the congress) expelled from the International on the grounds, for which no convincing proof was offered, that he had continued to maintain within the International a secret Alliance inimical to the International’s objectives. For good measure, he was also accused of having engaged in fraud and intimidation in regard to his projected translation of Marx’s Capital. In order to keep the General Council out of the hands of the Bakuninists (who by now probably constituted a majority of the International), Marx had The Hague Congress agree to transfer it from London to New York. In terms of the labor movement at the time, this was the equivalent of Siberian exile, and, as Marx well knew, it spelled the death of the old International." - Marshall Shatz, "Introduction," Statism and Anarchy

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"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People's Stick."

based Bakunin

#anarchism #anarchist #anarchocommunism #anarchy #communism #egoism #bakunin #mikhail bakunin

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o, yaşayan bir çelişkidir.

karl marx - the misery of philosophy

“For Stirner, revolutionary action in the past has been a dismal failure. It has remained trapped within the paradigm of authority, changing the form of authority but not its place: the liberal state was replaced by the workers' state; God was replaced with man. But the category of authority itself has remained unchanged, and has often become even more oppressive. Perhaps, then, the idea of revolution should be abandoned: it is based on essentialist concepts and Manichean structures which always end up perpetuating, rather than overcoming, authority. Stirner has unmasked the links between human essence and power, and has shown the dangers in building a revolutionary theory around this notion. Perhaps, therefore, revolutions should be about escaping subjectification—rejecting the enforced identity of human essence and man. Perhaps, as Stirner argues, revolution should become insurrection:

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on “institutions." It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established.

It may be argued, then, that insurrection starts with the individual refusing his enforced identity, through which power operates: it starts "from men's discontent with themselves." Insurrection does not aim at overthrowing political institutions themselves. It is aimed at the individual, in a sense overthrowing his own identity—the outcome of which is, nevertheless, a change in political arrangements. Insurrection is therefore not about becoming what one is—becoming human, becoming man, as the anarchist argues—but about becoming what one is not. Stirner's notion of individual rebellion involves, then, a process of becoming. It is about continually reinventing one's own self—an anarchism of subjectivity, rather than an anarchism based on subjectivity. The self, or the ego, is not an essence, a defined set of characteristics, but rather an emptiness, a "creative nothing," and it is up to the individual to create something out of this and not be limited by essences. The self exists only to be consumed: "I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like 'Man struggling for his perfection,' but only serves me to enjoy it and consume it . . . I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself.” - Saul Newman, ‘From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power’ (2001) [p. 66, 67]

#saul newman #max stirner #bakunin #lacan #anarchism #revolution #insurrection #individual #individualism #nietzsche #post

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Every single state created after a revolution by a socialist or communist Party has resulted in a continuation of capitalism. Often, the Communists were more successful than the capitalists at implanting capitalism in “less developed” countries like Russia and China (“less developed” being a phrase that is equally coherent coming from a Party bureaucrat or an IMF technocrat).

In the USSR, already in the early 1920s the Party abandoned its limited attempts to abolish capitalism. Lenin himself admitted that what they had created was a form of state capitalism. They had also destroyed much of the broader anticapitalist movement. In 1918, the Bolsheviks killed and jailed hundreds of anarchists in Moscow to stop them from carrying out expropriations and other attacks against the local bourgeoisie. In order to keep their grasp on power, the Bolsheviks at various moments needed to ally with the bourgeoisie, showing once again that no matter the color of one’s flags, the calculations of statecraft remain the same.

— Peter Gelderloos