On Bakunin, Oaxaca, & Hoodie-Clad Slingshotists

. . . Bakunin figures into Oaxaca in the same way that he figures into the 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) pepper-spray rumpus at UBC, the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, and the pitched battle between rioters and Italian police at the July 2001 Group of Eight summit in Genoa that resulted in the death of 23-year-old Italian anarchist Carlo Giuliani.

That's my take, from my Chronicles column today. Mark Leier, a fine thinker and writer, goes a tremendous distance in making sense of it all for us in his great new book.

The way I put it, Bakunin figures into all this because the vanguardists involved in these violent showdowns—and there have been dozens of such donny­brooks in recent years, large and small—are in many ways the ideological heirs of Bakunin. But it is not as though all the activists who vainly court such excitements have been reading too much Bakunin, Leier told me the other day. If anything, they’ve been reading far too little of him.

One thing Leier argues is that it is in the violent “propaganda of the deed” that hoodie-wearing, slingshot-firing activists err by a tragic misreading of Bakunin, and the emergence of identity politics and other postmodernist currents would not have made Bakunin any happier. For one thing, Bakunin was no violence-fetishist. For another, Bakunin would never have abandoned the working class as the primary agent of social change, and he certainly wouldn’t have gone looking for more “revolutionary” substitutes for it.