“God and the State” by Michael Bakunin, 1882 / 1970
This is Bakunin’s most famous book, or fragment of a book. It excoriates religion much like Nietzsche was doing a bit later. It points to the state’s use of religion to dominate the population. And to be complete in its instinctual hostility to all overlords, it also attacks the ‘savants’ of science as to any assumptions that they can also rule. Bakunin’s comments about science’s limitations are a veiled attack on Marx and some followers’ claims of ‘scientific’ socialism. Marx and Engels were his main opponents in the First International, as Bakunin stood for revolutionary socialism and anarchism against the claimed ‘doctrinaire abstractions’ of historical and economic study carried out by Marx and Engels. “Instinctual” is the word used by Paul Avrich in the 1970 introduction to refer to Bakunin’s politics.
Religion and the religious establishment during the 1800s
were an even more oppressive force than now in western Europe and north America
so this piece, like Stendahl’s 1830 book Red
and Black or Nietzsche’s 1882 statement “God is Dead,” was invigorating to those who were sick of the Christian
church’s prominence. Something like this might
be appropriate to theocracies dominated by Catholicism, Hinduism,
Buddhism or Islam even now. What is
missing in the book, which is somewhat extraordinary, is any mention of labor
or capital. The ‘trinity’ of Church, State and ? is absent one important
leg! So what does Bakunin, the “revolutionary
of the deed,” a leading subversive in the 1848 upheavals, a son of the Russian
landed gentry, have to say?
Bakunin denounced “...all
the tormentors, oppressors and exploiters of humanity – priests, monarchs,
statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts,
policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, economists,
politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats.”
While the introduction claims Bakunin had no truck with a
scientific analysis of history, the book says otherwise, seeing it as a useful
goal. Bakunin was a materialist and dialectician, and in this volume he turns
Rousseau’s aphorism on its head by saying this: “If God really existed, it would be necessary
to abolish him.” His identification of humanity as a higher animal is the
ability to think and to rebel. This
leaves out the ability to work, which seems significant for a materialist. He makes fun of the Bible’s Book of Genesis,
where Adam & Eve are punished for gaining ‘knowledge,’ a fruit given them
by Satan. It seems even then the Christians had to abolish thinking and
put faith in its place, while denouncing the knowledge-giver as evil. The curse continues.
Bakunin says Christianity began with absurd tales, the myth of original sin and a crude, jealous Jehovah and was refined into an abstract monotheism. He asserts understanding the world can be had by purely natural, materialist means, through experience, reason and later science. This is actually the real, daily, common-sense understanding of religious people as well, in fact all of humanity. He posits that all thought originates from the human brain, a physical thing, and not some ‘spirit.’ He opposes all the philosophers who dabbled in religion and idealism, starting with the ‘divine’ Plato and ending with Voltaire, Robespierre and Rousseau. The latter were emblematic of bourgeois compromises with religion in their pursuit of “a semblance of belief”, which appeared in later bourgeois Socialists. He calls religion a ‘collective insanity.’ He understands that society has physical, ‘animal origins.” He thinks religion is a historic but necessary error in the development of humanity, even in its morphed form of ‘spiritualism,’ but that time is over.
The states in Europe during those days were consecrated by
a Church, either Protestant or Catholic. He said the former better fit capitalism. This
state, like all states, was an agent of ‘slavery.’
Bakunin then switches gears and denounces a government of
scientists too, as they would institute another kind of slavery – that of
abstraction. This he also associates with ‘the German communists.’ Bakunin’s assertion that all science is ‘abstract,’
and does not deal with individuals seems to be an abstraction itself. For instance, a doctor setting a broken leg
knows the nature of infection, the skeleton, blood, muscle, ligaments and
tendons. He puts a rod in an individual’s
leg, not some abstract human, to allow them to walk again. Bakunin recognizes the general role of
science – “the absolute authority of
science” - even a science of history in the fight for emancipation, but believes
that ‘philosopher kings’ and scientists will be slavers in power. “The mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it.” So what would his position be on vaccines? An
impermissible attempt by science to govern life? That would be libertarianism, a product
of his false dichotomy regarding science. He prefers the method over the men, who he thinks will form another ‘class.’ This, the introduction notes, was prescient
in another way. Oddly, Bakunin thinks former ‘bourgeois
students’ will bring science to the masses, which will democratize the matter
out of the hands of an elite.
A good chunk of the book discusses the history of
philosophy in Greece, Rome and France.
This is a somewhat rambling, impressionist weave, attributing the monotheism
that refined Jehovah to the influence of the Roman conquest, ‘Oriental’
mysticism and Greek idealism. He
attributes materialism and naturalism to paganism, as against what followed with
Christianity. Bakunin shows how the
idealism of religion leads to the very material result of slavery and
exploitation. He says the ‘fall of man’ was caused – solely – by God’s
manifestation on earth. You will note that
Bakunin here falls into idealism himself, just as he identifies humanity only
with thinking or rebellion. As if there
was no material reason for slavery or exploitation except Church and State. Yet there is money to be made! This is a laughable mistake for a materialist
to make. Later materialists like
Feuerbach, Hegel and Comte reduced religious metaphysics to psychology, and
Bakunin agrees. Like Marx, Bakunin
attributes the attraction of religion at the time to not just tradition, upbringing, power or wealth, but to the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature.’
All in all, a somewhat disappointing sojourn into atheism
and anarchism. I have no faith in describing
socialism as thoroughly ‘scientific,’ as it gives an aura of invincibility that
only bolster’s bad claims to truth.
Social ‘sciences’ are just that. But actual scientific truth can also penetrate the
social sciences, as there is no wall between them.
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search
box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: ‘atheism,’ ‘religion,’ ‘anarchism,’ ‘philosophy.’
And I bought it at May Day Books, which has many anti-religious tracts and also several shelves of anarchist material.
Red Frog / January 26, 2025
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