Iain McKay interviews Mark Leier
There’s an interesting interview with Mark Leier on Iain McKay’s blog. It was conducted for Black Flag (issue #229). I’ve pasted the first two questions below, but you should take a look at the whole thing…including Mark’s thoughts on possible casting for a Bakunin biopic!
Mark, of course, is the author of the wonderful biography Bakunin: The Creative Passion. And Iain is the author of An Anarchist FAQ, and the forthcoming Property is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology.
—charles
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Q. So, first, why write a biography of Bakunin?
I first started thinking about a biography of Bakunin in the aftermath of some of the anti-globalization and anti-WTO protests, such as the “Battle in Seattle” and the terrible police brutality in Genoa that resulted in the death of Carlo Giuliani. The anarchist presence at these protests had the media and “terrorism experts” scrambling to explain what was going on. Of course they were trying to explain away anarchism, not to understand, and they relied on parodies of anarchism. When they tried to do historical analysis, they always took it back to Bakunin, painting him as the father of propaganda by the deed, which they always interpreted as blind violence and terror. That worsened after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Towers. My first reaction was to blame the journalists and pundits, but when I went back to the English language works on Bakunin, such as Carr’s book and Mendel’s and Berlin’s articles, it was obvious that there was no comprehensive book, aimed at a more general audience, that treated Bakunin seriously as an activists and a thinker. So I decided to try to do that. I didn’t set out to write the biography of Bakunin or the most comprehensive biography; I tried to write a biography that used some primary research and that built on the splendid academic work on Bakunin that was not easily accessible to a non-academic audience.
Q. What would you say Bakunin has to offer today’s radicals?
First, he offers some hope, hope in the importance of struggle. This was an activist who fought on the losing side all of his life, yet did not lose his passionate hope, his understanding, that the struggle itself was meaningful, for without it, the world would certainly get worse. While some seem him as a quixotic figure, I see him as one who realistically assessed the opportunities for success and failure and decided to fight for an ideal even when he thought there was no immediate chance of victory.
Second, he offers a clear appraisal of what the radicals’ targets should be. After all, capitalism and the state have not changed much since his time; Bakunin would recognize much in the 21st century. He wrote powerful critiques of capital and the state that still serve as useful starting points for understanding the world, and he did so in accessible, evocative language.
Third, while there is a tendency to draw a dividing line between “classical anarchism” and contemporary anarchism and post-anarchism, a careful reading of Bakunin suggests that the “classical anarchists” wrestled with many of the same problems of goals, strategy, and tactics that anarchists face today. In fact, I believe that Bakunin offers a useful critique of today’s post-anarchism, for the ideas of postmodernism that inform post-anarchism are not as new as its advocates suggest. That is, Bakunin rejected the idealist thought of his day to become a materialist and a realist, and I believe materialism and realism offer a stronger foundation for criticism than idealism and some variants of post-modernism.