Vejas Liulevicius: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in Germany is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different trajectories it could take. And we’ll talk about it. If we return to the 19th century, you’ve said that Marx’s chief rival was Russian anarchist… Marx’s chief rival was Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” So what kind of future did Bakunin envision? Well, Bakunin in some things agreed with Marx, and in many others, disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things, not compromise, was going to be the way to get there, but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser, that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence, and rejected traditional religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies. So Bakunin is part of a broader movement of socialists and anarchists who were demanding change and envisioning really fundamental transformation, but his particular anarchist vision steers him into conflict with Marx, and he makes some prophetic remarks about the problems with the system that Marx is proposing. You should add to this that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is Russian adds a further nationalist or element of ethnic difference there. Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into a movement that hewed too closely to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies, and his anarchist convictions are not in question here. They led him into conflict with Marx, and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from The International. One of the things though that also makes Bakunin so significant is Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause, and you have to say that in every case, it ends badly for the anarchists, because the communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement. The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution. If we can take that tangent a little bit, so I guess anarchists were less organized.…

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