# In Theory Bakunin (I) Statism and Class Struggle



## somnambulist (Jun 25, 2011)

By Andrew Robinson

Perhaps the best-known of the classical anarchists, Mikhail Bakunin is known for his advocacy of the “urge to resist”. There is much more to his theory than is generally known or studied. A contemporary of Marx, and his antagonist in some bitter disputes within the First International, Bakunin offers an analysis of power, classes and social life which differs from Marx’s in important ways. A re-examination of Bakunin’s thought provides a basis for considering the politics of the excluded and the structure of forces of oppression and domination.

Critique of the State

Bakunin is best-known as an anarchist theorist, who poses a thoroughgoing critique of state power, in works such as Statism and Anarchy. This theory is deduced from a particular view of how states work. Bakunin believes that the state has a fundamental nature, which can be deduced from the actions of particular states.

His view of the state is heavily inflected by a strong rejection of the military, and its repressive disciplining practices. (This may have been influenced by his own time in the military). On the whole, he associates states with all situations where power-inequalities exist. The problem lies in the fact of being governed, not in a particular form of government.

Even imaginary government is to be rejected. For instance, Bakunin also devotes considerable attention to arguing for atheism. He views belief in God as the enslavement of humans to an imaginary will, the negation of reason and the basis for earthly dictatorships.

State thought: monopolising allegiance

Central to Bakunin’s view of the state is a claim that states monopolise allegiance. Bakunin claims that states impose injustice and cruelty as a duty, and mutilate humanity, so people become citizens instead of human beings. States try to break down human solidarity by positing themselves as the final point of reference for their citizens or subjects.

The state produces a state morality and reasons of state, in which good and bad are defined by what is good and bad for the state’s power. This elevates the collective egoism of particular associations to the status of ethical categories.

In order for this morality to function internationally, it must also function domestically, and the state must seek to be as powerful domestically as internationally. This is because the state needs to keep people fixated on state morality and opposed to human morality. States are thus ‘prisons of peoples’ and sites of the arts of domination and fraud. 

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