Statism and Anarchy

by Mikhail Bakunin, Marshall S. Shatz (Editor), Raymond Geuss (Editor)

Statism and Anarchy is a complete English translation of the last work by the great Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin. It was written in 1873, in the aftermath of the rise of the German Empire and the clash between Bakunin and Karl Marx in the first International. Bakunin assesses the strength of a European state system dominated by Bismarck. Then, in the most remarkable part of the book, he assails the Marxist alternative, predicting that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" will in fact be a dictatorship over the proletariat, and will produce a new class of socialist rulers. Instead, he outlines his vision of an anarchist society and identifies the social forces he believes will achieve an ananarchist revolution. Statism and Anarchy had an immediate influence on the "to the people" movement of Russian populism, and Bakunin's ideas inspired other anarchist movements. This is the only complete and reliable rendition of Statism and Anarchy in English, and in a lucid introduction Marshall Shatz locates Bakunin in his immediate historical and intellectual context, and assesses the impact of his ideas on the wider development of European radical thought. A guide to further reading and a chronology of events are appended as aids to students encountering Bakunin's thought for the first time.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Anarchism, Theory, Russia

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1873

About the author

Russian anarchist and political theorist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, imprisoned and later exiled to Siberia for his considered revolutionary activities, escaped to London in 1861, opposed Communism of Karl Marx.

People often called Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Russian: Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Баку́нин), a philosopher, the father of collectivism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail...

Reviews

[Laurent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to start by being brutally honest: this book is almost no fun at all, but then it isn't supposed to be. It's one of the founding texts of an almost lost political movement, namely anarchism. Anarchism has a bad name now and is usually equated to chaos and social breakdown, but this was never the intention. Until the end of the Spanish Civil War, it was a serious alternative to Marxist thought, one of the key differences being that Bakunin recognised that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was still dictatorship. And dictatorship being what it is, it couldn't be good. With hindsight, one can regret that the authoritarian "statist" faction prevailed.

The one piece of unintentional light relief in this work is that Bakunin keeps losing his objectivity whenever he mentions the Germans, but again, he doesn't seem to have been particularly wrong in thinking them prone to support authoritarian regimes (at the time)...

[paper0r0ss0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ottocentesco in tutto e per tutto. Nell'analisi storiografica, sostanzialmente una lunga e acuta ricostruzione critica dei rapporti di forza internazionali al cospetto della rinata potenza pan-germanica, nella disputa politico-ideologica, nella diatriba partitica; eppure qua e la', tra le lunghe ricostruzioni, a volte fin troppo verbose, ecco lo sprazzo di luce, la visione. La visione di un futuro che ha dato ragione al Bakunin: il fallimento della via marxiana all'emancipazione sociale, lo strapotere nefasto della Germania, la sostanziale ipocrisia della prassi social borghese. Se (con titubanza) una critica va fatta, e' senza dubbio l'eccessiva vaghezza del progetto politico proposto. L'abbattimento senza indugi dello Stato, l'organizzazione sociale dal basso, il cooperativismo, sono tutti concetti affascinanti, coinvolgenti, giusti, ma alla fine, dovendo passare dalla speculazione ai fatti, verrebbe da chiedere, novello Lenin (per intendere i travagli del passare dal pensiero ai fatti), che fare?

[Dario Varese · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Stato e Anarchia”, di Michail Bakunin, titolo originale:”Государственность и анархия” (wikipedia), traduzione di Nicole Vincileoni e Giovanni Corradini, edizioni Feltrinelli, ISBN 978-88-07-88229-6.

Si tratta di un classico della letteratura politica, scritto nella seconda metà del 1800 (venne pubblicato per la prima volta in forma anonima nel 1873); in esso l’Autore propone la sua visione rivoluzionaria che auspica e promuove una società totalmente destrutturata, supportata dalla spinta aggregativa dal basso e sorretta da una forte volontà federativa. Queste “società”, per Bakunin devono essere al di fuori del controllo degli stati che, possibilmente, devono essere aboliti, come deve essere eliminata ogni forma di gerarchia di sangue o di classe. Si tratta quindi di applicare l’“anarchica” (anarchia = priva di leader/governante), in esplicita contrapposizione con le organizzazioni statali e sociali costruite su strutture gerarchiche e verticistiche e in antitesi ideologica rispetto al clima dell’epoca che vedeva prevalere l’ideale nazionale e nazionalista rispetto a posizioni maggiormente universaliste.

Un’opera che giudico molto interessante, anche se, ammetto, mi aspettavo qualcosa di molto diverso. In effetti l’Autore, in fondo, non si sofferma molto a spiegare nei dettagli la sua idea. Ciò probabilmente è dovuto al fatto che l’ideale anarchico, per quanto accattivante, risulta per definizione un po' vago e caratterizzato da molteplici interpretazioni e applicazioni che, tra l’altro, risultano difficili da mettere in pratica.

La parte preponderante del saggio è invece dedicata ad una pignola analisi della situazione europea del tardo periodo ottocentesco. Insieme ad essa viene fornita, non solo una chiave di lettura per spiegare le ragioni di successo o di insuccesso dei molti moti insurrezionali che caratterizzarono il diciannovesimo secolo, ma anche una serie di previsioni riguardo al futuro che, bisogna ammettere, si riveleranno ex-post abbastanza azzeccate.

Nel saggio viene infatti prefigurata la lotta per l’egemonia fra Stati che vedrà contrapporre la nascente nazione tedesca alle altre potenze europee, Russia e Francia in testa.
Per l’Autore il protagonista assoluto di tale ascesa è il cancelliere Otto Von Bismark, per carattere e obiettivi, quasi l’opposto di Bakunin ma tuttavia da questi molto ammirato, non fosse per altro che in virtù della coerenza mostrata in relazione al conseguimento dei propri obiettivi politici. Bismark finirà per realizzare, come da suo programma, uno stato germanico forte e centralizzato sotto la guida della Prussia ... e ciò, in estrema sintesi, sarà uno dei fattori scatenanti di ben due conflitti mondiali!

Altro elemento interessante che emerge dal saggio è la consapevolezza della contrapposizione ideologica che esiste fra l’ideale anarchico e il marxismo allora nascente e che finirà per tradursi negli assetti politici e ideologici del “comunismo”. Bakunin individua subito quello che per lui è il peccato originale di tale ideologia, cioè l’obiettivo di creare la “dittatura del proletariato” sulle basi di una forte gerarchia statale retta da una élite che si attribuisce il ruolo di decidere e governare per il bene del popolo.

Bakunin non crede a questa pretesa e la storia gli darà ragione.

Egli infatti, in estrema sintesi sostiene due cose:
- Solo il popolo sa qual è il proprio “bene” e solo la sua libera iniziativa dal basso può tradursi in realizzazioni pratiche finalizzate a conseguirlo.
- Nessun tipo di élite, per quanto ben intenzionata può sostituirsi al popolo al fine di governarlo senza che questo finisca per trasformarne i membri in una classe privilegiata e tirannica.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poignant critique of the state, and of the marxists movement that sought to bring about the economic emancipation of the working people by first acquiring state power. Bakunin argued that said emancipation cannot happen without also abolishing state power. He fervently insisted that any measure, in lieu of contesting all structures of power, would lead to a crippling state bureaucracy, and inevitable dictatorship over the working class, not by the working class.

This prediction has certainly been proven to be as such.

[Pardis TD · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea of State as a necessity is lost in Bakunin, straight from the beginning. In Marxism, the State is only lost in the end, once real socialism is achieved. The problem with that vision is that some nations have very poor laws, such as common law systems, this allows for incredible levels of corruption to take place. Maybe the president of X nation is just gullible and has some neurological disorder, but maybe he's really just evil. In the end, taking sides makes you evil in the eyes of someone, and we should take sides, but which side is the correct side? What if a neurologically impaired man chose the wrong side, then he is evil, by definition, he is also impaired, true, but he was put in the position to cause problems, and that also is evil. How do you effectively prevent evil in an idea of State that doesn't really exist? Maybe yes, as Bakunin states, power makes evil, but I interpret it as the position of power allowing it (the role the individual has), it won't mean it's always the case, if your legal system works, and that is why, I'm now more sure than ever, that real socialism is a system that works, it works in civil law systems specifically, it fails in other systems. In other systems anarchy should be the alternative, that however, is far less effective than communism, but it's a safe system that works for those specific cases in which the legal systems are dismantled, and high levels of corruption exist.

[Can Küçükyılmaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bakunin devleti analiz ederken, Alman devletini ve Alman halkını temel almış. Bana kalırsa, Hitler öncesi dönemde de Almanların aşırı otoriterlik ve güçlü devlet yanlılığı düşünülürse, Hitler bir istisna değil aksine kaçınılmaz bir sonuç.

Bakunin'in devletçi sosyalizm ve Marksizm ile de arası pek hoş değil. Temel savı, devlet sonunda yıkılması gereken kötü bir şeyse, neden bunu büyütmeyi amaçlıyorsunuz. İşçilerin iktidarı söyleminin de boş olduğunu, çünkü iktidara geldikten sonra bu insanlar işçiler arasından seçilmiş olsa bile, artık işçi değil siyasetçi olacağını söylüyor ki bu da önemli bir nokta.

Bilimsellik iddasındaki sosyal teorilerinde boş olduğunu, teorinin hayatı değil, hayatın teoriyi üretmesi gerektiği noktasını da gayet güzel açıklamış.

[Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

This often intriguing volume is really marred by Bakunin's conspiratorial anti-Semitism, Sinophobia, Slavophilia, and anti-German posturing. Bakunin shows himself to be obsessed with racial conflict here. Would like to see if that was a new development toward the end of his life, and how it measures with his previous thinking. Appendix A, an address to the Russian youth who subsequently launched the Populist upsurge, is pretty solid.

[Macho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is so focused on nineteenth century European geopolitics, and especially the road to the unification of Germany, that I wouldn't have been able to get through this or understand what Bakunin was talking about if I didn't happen to have been reading a lot about both topics a lot over the past year. Bakunin's political philosophy (which is obviously what I was reading this for) is told a bit indirectly through that story: I was expecting it to be more in the forefront. He does critique Marx, and I quickly read Marx's reply to Bakunin in his "Conspectus" immediately afterward. It's hard for me to reconcile giving a good review to a book that occasionally exihibits base anti-Semitism, which it goes without saying is ugly and inexcusable.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

The attack on scientific socialism seems prophetic. The assumptions about instincts and progress seem naive.

[Lee]

This is Bakunin's final work, and of course, it was supposed to be part of a much larger writing which isn't unusual considering his longwinded style, inconsistencies, and the hetic era of time he was agitating in. He goes into detail about why the Pan-german campaign was such a bad thing providing much historical information that led up to it. Also, he outlines a project for a pan-slavic campaign as well. Much of the book focuses on the conflict with socialist democracy and anarchism within the first international. On a side note, and very irrelevant, Bakunin's anti-semitism comes out in this book. Other than that, Bakunin is not my favorite of theorists, but the book is still a must read.

[Aron Kerpel-Fronius · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find Bakunin's thoughts very thought provoking as he stands just as opposed to Marxism as to bourgeois capitalism. According to his philosophy, any form of state interference will inevitably result in an authoritarian regime, oppression and inequality. Based on some empirical evidence just looking around, we can find some truth in his words I guess.

On another hand, however, he could have just summarized his thesis on around 30 pages, as the rest 270 of this book was a very detailed XIX. century history lesson - I understand that you need some perspective and real life examples, but Bakunin was clearly overdoing it here.

[Syd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an abridged version and was left wanting more. This was the first time i read anything by Bakunin which is slightly embarrassing considering his place in history. Bakunin was Marx's greatest adversary within the International Workingman's Association. Eventually Marx had Bakunin kicked out of the International by popular vote. History they don't teach you in school!

[Alienne Laval · Rating 5 out of 5]

I once drank all night with a socialist major and teacher. "Of my entire book shelf you do not know a single book!", he shouted at me. Then I went to the shelf and pulled this one. He grabbed it away and threw it against the wall, looking at me like a lunatic.

[Sagida Serikbayeva]

Собиралась читать Бибихина и перепутала его с Бакуниным, но в целом было интересно почитать про роль государства в подавлении воли масс, узнала для себя исторические детали революционных движений и задумалась о том насколько взаимосвязаны государственное правление и историческое развитие социума.

[Marks54 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the huge attention to politics in the media, there is surprisingly little attention to political theory, or how a series of political ideas fit together. As a result, popular discussions of general politics too often boil down to series of disconnected words that are used more as slogans and weapons than as ideas. For example, who doesn’t invoke “freedom” while failing to even suggest what it means? If everyone claims to support freedom then how can the word help resolve disputes? …or what about Marxism or Communism or socialism? These are almost always used as attack words with little attention to what they mean or how they differ from each other. In the extreme, a “Marxist” becomes someone I disagree with (again with no explanation why a position is Marxist or not). …and if people take the time to explain what they mean - define their terms - they are irrelevant where political discussion reduces to sound bites.

This brings me to Bakunin. I was generally aware of Bakunin and that he was associated with the ideas of anarchy and anarchism. I was curious because anarchy is associated (on the WWW for example) with “a state of disorder due to the absence or no recognition of authority or other controlling systems”. How does one come to be associated with that? Who would be in favor of it? As a political movement, anarchism involves a bit more than this - and this is where Bakunin comes in. The problem is with large and articulated top-down structures of state power. These tend to be run by and supported by political and economic elites who tend to oppress the masses of the people. Remember this is being written in the 1870s, when revolutions such as the Paris Commune were in the air. So criticizing authority and hierarchy was criticizing the established power structures in Russia and Europe as highly oppressive. Even the Marxist and Communists do not escape criticism, since they were arguing that the revolutionary vanguard needed to take control of the state and make the changes needed for revolution to succeed. Bakunin viewed this as a fundamental contradiction and as a fatal flaw with Marxism (of which Marx was well aware).

What did Bakunin recommend in place of state power structures? He advocated for a bottom up revolution of local communes and associations that would reflect the needs and wants of their members rather than some top down revolutionary diktat. It goes without saying that the prospects of such a bottom up revolutionary change across the world were slim when Bakunin was writing and have declined ever since. Perhaps this is why he is so little read today.

BTW - Statism and Anarchy is not well crafted. It reads like a series of pamphlets that are strung together to produce a book. He does have a way with words is some places, however, but he did not produce many complete works. He also seems to be a sharp analyst of contemporary geopolitics. Writing after the Franco-Prussian war and the establishment of the German Empire under Bismarck, he has a number of sections where is speculates about future policies of Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and even the US. Looking at his speculations 150 years later is highly informative.

This is dense read and one tied to local political conditions and histories of 1870 Europe. It is certainly not for everyone.

[Molly Kluck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mikhail Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy is an interesting but frustrating text to read. It served as Bakunin's major contribution to anarchist thought, but it's also weighed down by his biases. Three things stood out to me most:

1. His racism is inescapable. He was virulently anti-Semitic, but it didn't stop there. He had something derogatory to say about everyone. To him, the French were hopelessly disorganized and couldn't maintain the results of a revolution to save their lives, and the Germans were destined to submit to the "cudgel of the state." These are just two examples, but he makes sweeping generalizations about the Chinese, the Slavs, the Russians, and so on and so forth. He attributes specific qualities to whole peoples, which, to me, undercuts the universality and egalitarianism that anarchism is supposed to stand for.

2. This prejudice is clear in his own reading of, to him, recent revolutionary history. This creates a biased snapshot of his time. I think that as long as you can remember this, his long diatribes against his political enemies (this guy really hated Marx), and large groups of people, does get a bit amusing in a "wtf, this is ridiculous" sort of way but does make the work very hard to take seriously as a political theory book.

3. Despite the two above criticisms, I think there are some genuine insights. His central thesis, as it appears to me (and tbh, it was so deeply buried in rambling and vitriol, I can't be 100% certain this was his point), is that revolutions aiming to capture and reform the state inevitably reproduce domination, while true liberation requires dismantling the state altogether. I believe this thesis statement remains a sharp critique of authoritarian socialism. The text itself is dotted with striking anarchist lines that are worth pulling out and remembering. At some point, I'll skim it for those, highlight them and save them somewhere likely to never see the light of day again.

Ultimately, I think Statism and Anarchy could have been a much, much, much shorter and more powerful essay. Instead, it is a meandering book weighed down by polemics against Marx and Bakunin's offensive, essentialist, and often absolutely bonkers views about different peoples. For those interested in anarchism, it's a text to approach selectively. Skim it for some neat quotes, but read it critically and understand its biases in its examination of that period of, what is now, history.

[Kev Nickells · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Simone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Panoramica storica sul' 800 europeo, specialmente tedesco, vista dagli occhi di un socialista anarchico sempre irriducibile al compromesso borghese.

"queste sono le convinzioni del socialisti rivoluzionari e per questo ci chiamano anarchici. Noi non protestiamo contro questa definizione perché siamo realmente nemici di ogni autorità, perché sappiamo che il potere corrompe sia coloro che me sono investito che coloro i quali devono soggiacervi"

"Il signor Marx è di origine ebraica. Si può dire che riunisca in se tutte le qualità e tutti i difetti di questa razza capace. Nervoso secondo alcuni sono alla depressione, eccessivamente ambiziosoe vanitoso, litigioso intollerante e assoluto come Jehova ... e come lui vendicativo fino alla follia.

"Il proletariato tedesco...subisce ed ugualmente odia l'identico giogo economico , sopportato dal proletariato degli altri paesi, perché me lui ne gli altri possono liberarsi dalla schiavitù economica senza previamente distruggere quella prigione chiamata stato"

"Ogni popolo ha i suoi gusti e nel popolo tedesco prevale il gusto di un buon manganello statale"

"Garibaldi....che odia i preti a tal segno che basta dichiararsi loro nemico per essere proclamato da lui l'uomo più liberale e più avanzato"

"Prendete l'individuo meno istruito e ingenuo...non appena scoprirete in può sentimenti istintivi ed onesti e delle aspirazioni conformi all'idea social-rivoluzionaria, per quanto rozze, se vi occuperete di lui seriamente e con amore vedrete con quanta larghezza e con quanta passione egli abbraccerà la vostra idea, o meglio la propria, in quanto esse altro non è che una formulazione chiara , piana e logica del suo primo istinto, per cui in verità non gli avrete dato niente ."

[WunderBoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

L’analisi storica dell’Europa di fine 1800 è impeccabile come anche la critica feroce del Marxismo. In tutti i due i casi Bakunin ha avuto ragione: la Germania che diventerà un impero guerrafondaio e la Russia che passerà dagli Zar al Comunismo. Se ad uno Stato se ne sostituisce un altro nulla cambierà per il popolo, cambierà lo sfruttatore ma rimarrà una società iniqua. L’Anarchia non è “nessuna regola” ma “senza governo” nel senso che ogni comunità deve autogestirsi attraverso la democrazia diretta, la proprietà collettiva, il lavoro fatto da tutti con la produttività in base alle proprie capacità fisiche e intellettuali. Tutti gli esperimenti anarchici sono falliti per la violenza militare dello Stato e non per il fallimento dell’idea. Bakunin ha messo le basi per la comprensione e il perseguimento della società libera, ovvero anarchica. Lettura assolutamente consigliata sopratutto in questo momento storico in cui le “democrazie per delega” europee sono in piena crisi e le disuguaglianze sociali sono sempre maggiori e terribili.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

More of a political history of the 19th century than a 19th century work of political philosophy, Bakunin addresses the major currents of Russian, French, Austrian and German empire during the period from the Napoleonic wars to Bismark's consolidation of the German federation under Prussian control. The unique interpretive perspective of the historical record is that of a critique of statism in its many forms, all of which Bakunin argues inevitably leads to despotism. He contrasts the statisms of monarchy, bourgeois parliamentary democracy, communist revolutionary ideology and the militarisms of Napolean and Bismark to the anarchic, spontaneous resistance of the proletarian and peasant classes. Through this, Bakunin offers up an exceptional history of the forces at play among the great powers and great movements of his day. Accessible, with a brilliant if all too brief, critique of Marx and Marxism's embrace of state solutions embedded in the communist ideology which embraces a dictatorship of the proletariat rather than free collective associations.

[Recep Güler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kitap 19. y.y. siyasi tarihini çok ayrıntılı anlatıyor ve bunları sadece almanların ve slavların nasıl bir millet olduğuyla ilgili bir sonuca varmak için yapıyor.

Engels ve marks hakkında kişiliklerinin çok iğrenç, kinci olduğunu söylediği bölümler var orada tam bir magazin sayfaları karıştırıyormuşum gibi hissettim.

Bu ikisi dışında son iki bölüm anarşizmin neden savunulması gerektiğini ve komünizmin cevap veremediğini düşündüğü sorunları ortaya koyuyor. okunmaya değer bölümler son iki bölüm bana göre. son olarak Almanlara ve Yahudilere karşı nefreti olduğu açıkça görülüyor ve arada bir "almanlar şöyledir" "yahudiler böyledir" diyerek çok saçma çıkarımlarda bulunuyor. son iki bölümü dışında kitap pek bir şey söylemiyor denilebilir (daha çok tarihi veri barındırıyor).

[Munta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bakunin'in zamanın Avrupa gündemini bir anlatım aracı olarak kullandığı eseri. Devlet, Anarşist devrim, marksizm ve toplumların sosyolojisini anlatıyor. Büyük ölçüde Avrupa devletlerini analiz ediyor ve genel olarak çok derinliği düşük çıkarımlar yapıyor. Bazı tahminleri doğru çıksa da, anarşizm anlatısı ve savunması çok vasat. Yine de zamanda yaşanmış olaylara verdiği tepkileri okumak açısından ilginç (Biraz Kropotkin'nin Bir İsyancının Sözleri kitabına benzettim.) Enternasyol'de yaşananları anlatması, Marx eleştirisi, Rusya'daki komünler konusunda görüşleri ve 1848 olayları konusundaki kısımları ilgimi çekti. Bakunin okuyacaksanız direkt Tanrı ve Devlet'i okuyun ve bunu geçin derim. Sadece kendisiyle ilgisi olan benim gibi insanların okuması gereken bir eser.

[Valerio]

Libro magnifico. Non tanto dal punto di vista della filosofia politica, su cui si sofferma poco, ma proprio sull'analisi che Bakunin fa sull'ecosistema europeo nel 1873.
Si tratta di un'analisi in cui fotografa i rapporti di forza coevi, ne spolpa il passato spiegandone i motivi e prevede in modo perfetto come si sarebbe poi evoluta la situazione.

Personalmente la considero una lettura fondamentale insieme alla trilogia sul Lungo Ottocento di Hobsbawm per studiare l'800 e affacciarsi al 900.


Nota totalmente personale: mette una voglia matta di fare la guerra

[Jurnalis Palsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dalam buku ini, sang penggagas kolektivisme memberikan keterangan dan fakta sejarah serta analisis kuat mengenai Statisme, alias eksistensi negara. Ia juga mengkritik habis-habisan gagasan Marxisme dalam buku ini, disamping menjabarkan bahaya starisme dan kritik terhadap marxisme, Bakunin menjabarkan pikirannya mengenai Anarkisme. Doktrin-doktrin anti Negara, yang merupakan cita-cita kaum Anarkis bisa kita baca dalam karya ini.

[Davi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate doing it, but I dropped it at page 100.
This was my first approach to anarchism, and I expected something different. I was hoping for a deeper analysis of the state and how to adopt or create an anarchist society. However, in the end Bakunin mostly yaps about the state of affairs in Europe, which wasn't what I was looking for.
Despite all that, the few points of anarchism I did reach were interesting.

[Amy Lloyd]

Statism and Anarchy is a complete English translation of the last work by the great Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin. It was written in 1873, in the aftermath of the rise of the German Empire and the clash between Bakunin and Karl Marx in the first International. Bakunin assesses the strength of a European state system dominated by Bismarck.

[Said Agung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terjemahannya sedikit sulit dipahami - penasaran sama yang edisi inggris. Tapi ide pemikiran Bakunin di sini sangat layak dan mencerahkan meskipun terengah-engah membacanya.

[Robert Cochran · Rating 4 out of 5]

As others have noted, Bakunin's antisemitism, and stereotyping of many other ethnic groups, is quite repugnant and draws away from what otherwise might have been a truly great piece of theory.

[Ziikii · Rating 3 out of 5]

il club del libro dei sogni sarebbe leggere questo con Stalin e Marx

[Trystan W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relatively vanilla conclusions for a Socialist Anarchist, and quite a rationalistic method, but definitely not the worst.