Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1183 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
Marx at first supported Prussia in its attempt to defeat a Bonapartist France he regarded as an obstacle to the working class. He wrote: ‘If the Prussians are victorious, the centralization of the State power will be useful to the centralization of the German working class … On a world scale the ascendancy of the German proletariat over the French proletariat will at the same time constitute the ascendancy of our theory over Proudhon’s.’ Bakunin on the other hand thought Prussian militarism even more dangerous than Bonapartism.
Reklam
Unlike Lenin who admired the Catechism of a Revolutionary , Bakunin would have no truck with Nechaev’s nihilism. He came to doubt the existence of Nechaev’s secret organization in Russia, and was repelled — while refusing to condemn — his political murder of a student called Ivanov. Bakunin finally broke with Nechaev after learning that his young protégé had threatened with dire punishment the publisher’s agent who had given an advance for a translation of Capital if he caused any difficulties. But the damage had been done. Their association earned Bakunin an unfounded reputation for terrorism, and the works were used selectively to justify the acts of later anarchist terrorists as well as to denigrate anarchist ideals.
Whilst in Geneva with Bakunin, Nechaev wrote between April and August 1869 a Catechism of a Revolutionary which proved to be one of the most repulsive documents in the history of terrorism. The guiding principle of this work is that ‘everything is moral that contributes to the triumph of the revolution; everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.’ It calls upon the would-be revolutionary to break all ties with past society, to feel a ‘single cold passion’ for the revolutionary cause and to adopt the single aim of ‘pitiless destruction’ in order to eradicate the State and its institutions and classes.
Nechaev, who later inspired the character Peter Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed , was an extraordinary character: despotic, power-hungry, egoistic, rude and yet strangely seductive. He exemplifies the unscrupulous terrorist who will stop at nothing to realize his aim.
Bakunin could not stop himself from being seduced by someone who seemed to have his own extreme energy and dedication, and that despite his tender years. He appeared to be a reincarnation of the legendary Russian bandits Stenka Razin and Pugachev.
The orthodox Marxist view is that Bakunin tried to seize control of the International and was motivated by personal ambition. A Russian emigré called Utin in Switzerland fuelled the controversy and rumours were circulated from Marx’s camp that Bakunin was a Russian spy and unscrupulous in money matters. Yet Bakunin still admired Marx as a thinker and even took an advance from a publisher to do a Russian translation of the first volume of Capital. The real dispute was not between an ambitious individual (Bakunin) and an authoritarian one (Marx), or even between conspiracy and organization, but about different revolutionary strategies.
Reklam