Abstract
This article pursues the unsettling logic that secrecy may be a tool for enlightenment, empowerment and free political action. It explores nineteenth-century anarchist Bakunin’s ideas about enlightenment, knowledge, authority and political action, and in the process offers a way to understand his seemingly contradictory positions on secret societies and revolutionary organizations. For Bakunin, humans could only act freely if exercising their own judgment; authorities such as revolutionary parties could hinder people from doing so. Therefore, true revolution could only be coordinated by those who kept their organizational affiliation secret. Explaining Bakunin’s ideas about freedom, education, authority and propaganda provokes a number of conclusions that articulate with contemporary political theorizing about transparency and its converse, secrecy or anonymity, and the relationship of each to political life. As troubling as it is to consider, secrecy may have a hand in producing free political action, and it may even be sometimes necessary.
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Notes
Originally written in 1868, this piece was published by Engels in 1873 as part of Marx and Engels’s anti-Bakunin campaign (Lehning, 1973, p. 166). Dolgoff (1980, pp. 148–155) dates it to 1869 and offers a selective translation.
Bakunin’s intense commitment to Nechaev, as well as a wonderful characterization of his revolutionary program, is in clear evidence in his letter to Nechaev (Bakunin, 1974), selections from which appear in Lehning (1973, pp. 182–194). On Nechaev and Bakunin, see Confino (1974), Shatz (1990, pp. xxiii–xxv), Saltman (1983, pp. 130–136), Pomper (1976), and Cochrane (1977).
For those unfamiliar with Bakunin’s life and writings, a brief biographical account may be helpful (drawn primarily from Shatz, 1990, pp. x–xxviii). Born in Russia in 1814, Bakunin left as a young man in 1840 for Europe where he met other revolutionaries and philosophers (including Marx and Proudhon) and participated enthusiastically in various revolts during the 1848 revolutions. After his arrest (in Dresden, in 1849) and extradition, he was held in tsarist prisons in Russia, and later exiled to Siberia from which he escaped in 1861 (12 years after his arrest), going the long way – via San Francisco – back to Europe. There, he became the greatest challenger to Marx for the leadership of the International. It is during this period, the 1860s but especially the early 1870s, that he wrote the things I treat here. He was expelled from the International in 1872 (by a threatened Marx, on charges that most agree were trumped-up), and died a few years later in 1876.
Written in February and March of 1871, the piece was only discovered and published after his death by his associates Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus, who gave it its title (Avrich, 1970, pp. viii–x; Shatz, 1990, p. xxvi).
c.f. ‘[S]cience … is the perpetual immolation of life, fugitive, temporary, but real, on the altar of eternal abstractions’ (Bakunin, 1970, p. 57). Here Bakunin wrote of science’s limitations in much the same way that, a quarter of a century earlier, another sometime-Hegelian Max Stirner (1995) complained of the abstraction of the idea of man.
Bakunin’s critique of Marx is probably best seen in Statism and Anarchy (1990, esp. pp. 136–137 and 177–179); see also Bakunin, 1970, pp. 31–32, and 1973c, p. 170.
See very similar language in Bakunin, 1974, esp. pp. 250–251.
I use the feminine ‘she’, though Bakunin clearly imagines brothers, not sisters. Bakunin sought to evade state authority, but it was less clear how he thought less formal social authorities might be evaded. Gendered power is absent in his thinking, though he did consider how social conventions limit people’s freedom (see, for example, Bakunin, 1990, pp. 206–212, 1970, pp. 42n–43n).
I cite the 2009 semiotext(e) English edition; the text was first published in French in 2007, but circulated earlier electronically.
The Invisible Committee may have sought initially to present their ideas in such terms, but the group at this point has become a kind of authority. Their ideas may never circulate in the same way that they once might have, before too much information spoiled the chances of their being unburdened by their author’s reputation.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Political Theory for their important direction and comments. Earlier versions of this study were presented at WPSA (San Antonio, 2011) and the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz (2011), and the author thanks discussant Dean Mathiowetz, director Vanita Seth, fellow panelists and audience members for their questions, provocations and corrections. Thanks are also due to Deborah Gould, Katherine Gordy and Mark Anderson for innumerable conversations, and to the author’s faculty, graduate, and undergraduate student colleagues and comrades who ceaselessly spur her thinking. Finally, Scott Soriano, who knew two decades ago that the author needed to read Bakunin, is also gratefully acknowledged. The author bears all responsibility for errors in interpretation, fact, judgment or politics that follow.
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Thomas, M. Secrecy’s use: Using Bakunin to theorize authority and free action. Contemp Polit Theory 15, 264–284 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.75
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.75