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A review by kev_nickells
Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy by Mikhail Bakunin
3.0
In some senses, very much a product of its time. His is often a highly racialised perspective which means anti-semitism and a very deterministic view of people's character. It's fascinating as a historical document, detailing the fractures in the international and pre-empting plenty of problems of (what became) Marxism. When he's good, he's great - foreseeing the problems of (eg) bourgeois assimilation into statism, the fallacy of a political class within states that might represent the proletariat. It's not an academic book, in many senses - there's plenty of decrying of German statism at a time when the notion of the pan-Germanic was on the rise but the counterpart to that of Bakunin's own Russia is somewhat flimsy. A lot of the political detail in this books takes place in West Europe, but (eg) the terrors of the British empire are given fairly short shrift next to his disdain for Bismarck.
Not a terrible book by any means, and not one I regret reading. For when he does talk about anarchism it's engaging and exciting - he qualifies the necessity of anarchist 'theory' as contrary to the kind of economic scientistic thinking of Marx / Engels - that is, rarely are people convinced by abstractions and theory. Rather the problem of 'theorising' Bakunin's anarchism is precisely that it resists the doctrinaire - it's more framework than dogma - so the content of Bakunin's anarchism seems to reside in a federalised free association.
I don't know what I'd recommend as a book on the subject of state and anarchism, but it's probably not this. Unless you're quite specifically into books of this style and from this time.
Not a terrible book by any means, and not one I regret reading. For when he does talk about anarchism it's engaging and exciting - he qualifies the necessity of anarchist 'theory' as contrary to the kind of economic scientistic thinking of Marx / Engels - that is, rarely are people convinced by abstractions and theory. Rather the problem of 'theorising' Bakunin's anarchism is precisely that it resists the doctrinaire - it's more framework than dogma - so the content of Bakunin's anarchism seems to reside in a federalised free association.
I don't know what I'd recommend as a book on the subject of state and anarchism, but it's probably not this. Unless you're quite specifically into books of this style and from this time.