DIVIDE AND CONQUER OR DIVIDE AND SUBDIVIDE?

HOW NOT TO REFIGHT THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

MARK LEIER

Since the fights between Bakunin and Marx in the First International in 1864, anarchists and Marxists have emphasized the differences between the two. Even their physical stature was different. Bakunin was large, standing six feet four inches tall and weighing perhaps three hundred pounds, with a fair complexion and blond hair. Marx was short and dark, reflecting his family nickname of "The Moor." Other characteristics, however, emphasize how much they resembled each other. In the few, posed black-and-white photographs that have been preserved, which, appropriately enough, look rather like mug shots, it is difficult for the casual observer to distinguish one from the other. Both adopt the formal, stiff posture fashionable for photographs of the time, and each has a portly build, unkempt hair, and an unruly beard. Both are dressed in the formal, sloppy manner befitting slightly disreputable members of the Victorian intelligentsia, and they even patronized the same London tailor for a time.

For two men who fought so bitterly, their similarities go much deeper than physical appearance, grooming, and clothing. They were close in age — Bakunin born in 1814, Marx four years later — and so grew up in a shared intellectual, political, and cultural climate. More importantly, their family backgrounds gave them similar opportunities and experiences. Bakunin's family was part of the Russian nobility, but that description may hide more than it reveals. Russia was essentially a feudal society, and the wealth of the Bakunin family came from the peasantry, the serfs who were bound to lord and land. But the family was not of the grand aristocracy. The Bakunin estate was at Priamukhino, far from the political and cultural centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg and far from the swirl and opportunities of the tsar's court. The Bakunins were not wealthy but had obtained admission to the ranks of the aristocracy through service to the tsar, in much the way Lenin's family would years later. This is not to underestimate the relative privilege of the Bakunin family or the power it held over the serfs that worked the land. It did mean, however, that Bakunin and his sisters and brothers were not part of the idle rich. There was money for education, but education was instrumental, aimed at equipping the daughters to marry well and to train the sons for service in the officer corps or government office. While the children were afforded an excellent education and cultural accoutrements of their class such as music and language lessons, money was always a concern. Pennies had to be watched, debt avoided, and sacrifices made.

Marx's family too was somewhere in the middle ranks of German society. His father owned vineyards, but it was his work as an attorney that provided the family income, and like Bakunin's family, maintaining their social position meant watching expenses carefully and investing in education to give the children what is sometimes called "social capital." Again like the Bakunin family, the Marxes were not part of the inner circles of power of German society. Born in Catholic Trier shortly after the city was ceded from France to Prussia, Karl Marx was baptized a Lutheran, but his father had recently converted from Judaism. This separated the family from the conservative, traditional elites of Prussia as effectively as the isolation of Priamukhino separated the Bakunins from the elites of Russia.

Thus both men undeniably came from privileged backgrounds, but the privilege was narrowly bound, dependent not on great wealth but on relatively modest means and the access to education those means and status made possible. As the oldest male children, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx had great expectations put on them. In Bakunin's case, a career as a military officer would open up doors in government service and give him the managerial skills to run the estate. For Marx, the hope was that he would study law. Both received excellent early educations at home, learning several languages, mathematics, and literature. They learned other lessons at home as well. Neither of their fathers were radicals or revolutionaries, but both men were products of the Enlightenment and loosely connected to progressive causes. Alexander Bakunin had associated with people with ties to the Decembrist movement, a group of army officers who agitated for a constitutional monarchy and the abolition of serfdom in 1825. Heinrich Marx too was part of a circle of reformers pushing for modest constitutional reform. Their political ideals may be characterized as cautious liberalization of their respective political regimes, changes that would give people, especially those of their classes, more breathing room, freer exchanges of ideas, and more access to power without upsetting society or causing turmoil. And both men retreated rather hastily when the conservative state pushed back. Nonetheless, they gave their children much more than an uncritical, patriotic, conservative upbringing.

Both fathers came to regret it. In 1828, Michael Bakunin was sent off to school in St. Petersburg, first to a sort of prep school then to military academy to train to become an artillery officer. He was an unhappy and sometimes unruly cadet, whose studies were marked with a great deal of indolence and frantic cramming at exam time. Despite his undistinguished performance, he was commissioned as an officer in 1832. In 1830, Marx entered high school. He graduated in 1835 with average grades, notably and ironically weak in history, and went to the University of Bonn to study law. So far, both young men seemed dutiful sons of the middle class, competent but not exemplary students with the potential for solid careers in the state and civil bureaucracies.

That illusion was quickly dispelled. The first sign was their inability to manage money. Both men piled up debts, never for the books or tutoring or school supplies their families would have cheerfully scrimped to provide, but for lavish meals, alcohol, parties, concerts, and plays. Letters begging for more money were met with parental warnings to be responsible, accountable, and above all, studious. As is usually the case in such matters, the warnings were ignored.

It got worse. After three years of service, each of which he loathed, Bakunin left the military. He did not formally resign; he simply went AWOL, leaving his parents to use what little influence they had to secure his formal resignation by falsely claiming he was ill. Marx's rebellion was less fraught but no less alarming; he left Bonn for the University of Berlin, where he hoped to become a poet. He proved no more adept at verse than Bakunin had at military service.

By 1836, each had taken up an even more disreputable pursuit: philosophy. Bakunin moved to Moscow where he became part of a literary and philosophy circle named after Nikolai Stankevich, a young poet, critic, and liberal humanist. There Bakunin was joined by his sisters, Liubov, Varvara, Tatiana, and Alexandra, who were themselves influential members of the Stankevich circle. Other members of the loosely knit critical group included the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and the political writer Alexander Herzen. Literature, philosophy, and politics intertwined and were debated long through the night. For his part, Marx started in...