Det är skönt att nån tar på sig det tveksamma nöjet att tvätta Bakunins sketna underkläder. Jag är säkerligen inte ensam om att i gångna tider viftat det anarkistiska tygskynket, utan att ägna bajsfläckarna och det tunnslitna materialet nån större uppmärksamhet.
“George Woodcock observes in his book Anarchism (p. 136), Bakunin’s: ‘admirers, admitting the thinness of his literary and theoretical claims, have usually countered with the contention that Bakunin was really significant as a man of action. Yet even his actions, dramatic as they were, often seem singularly ineffectual. He was involved in more pointless plots and more forlorn hopes than most other revolutionaries in an age peculiarly given to such ventures. He arrived too late for the active phase of the only successful uprising of his life, the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris; the five other insurrections, spread over the map of Europe, in which he took a leading part, were all either heroic disasters or comic fiascos. The secret societies he loved to invent were stillborn or expired early from internal dissensions. And at the end of it all he died a lonely man, out of the struggle to which he had devoted his life and deserted by his own anarchist followers.’”
I stort handlar The Sucking Pit om anständig gyttjekastning på London-gruppen Green Anarchist från Stewart Homes håll. Detta, och en grisig Bakunin-abduktion, hjälper till i kartläggandet av träskfeberns smittovägar.
The activist disease, or swamp fever as it’s commonly known, can be traced back at least as far as Mikhail Bakunin, the founding ‘father’ of ‘revolutionary’ anarchism. (…) This is the real doctrine of the founding father of anarchist activism, beneath all his fine rhetoric about ‘freedom’ and ‘individuality,’ he is utterly contemptuous of both. By demanding a choice between ‘thought’ and ‘action,’ the various groups and individuals infected with swamp fever are promoting a false dichotomy. Clearly, the material unfolding of the class struggle leads the proletariat to self-consciousness, and therefore to a unity of theory and practice, something swamp inhabitants rail against precisely because they don’t operate from a proletarian perspective.