Thoughts, analysis, and interpretation of the „Revolutionary Catechism“ by Michail Bakunin

What if the biggest problem of humanity isn’t stupidity, greed, or violence, but simply the fact that people constantly want to rule over other people? Kings, chancellors, CEOs, party functionaries, gurus, billionaires, general secretaries, influencers with coaching podcasts – the forms change, the principle remains astonishingly stable: Someone declares themselves the competent authority for the lives of others. And history shows with impressive regularity how quickly „leadership“ turns into control, and control turns into domination. It is precisely at this point that Michail Bakunin’s Revolutionary Catechism steps in, a political text from 1866, written at a time when Europe smelled simultaneously of revolution and gunpowder. Nation-states were emerging, industrial capitalism was exploding, workers were sinking into poverty, monarchies were faltering – and right in the middle of this historical engine room, Bakunin formulated a thought that remains uncomfortable to this day: Maybe power itself is the problem.

The title initially sounds like incense and confessional, but it’s actually a revolutionary program for the so-called International Brotherhood, a secret alliance of radical revolutionaries. Bakunin is not outlining some small reform idea, no friendly suggestion for improving parliamentarism. He attacks the whole edifice at once. State, church, property order, authority – all of it has to go. Not to create a void, but to open up space for freely associated, self-governed communities. And not because Bakunin was some pubescent chaos romantic, but because he was convinced that every form of institutionalized power eventually turns into oppression. For him, the state is not a neutral administrative unit, but an apparatus for disciplining human beings. Whoever rules eventually begins to consider their own rule necessary. The rest is usually bureaucracy with a baton or a flag.

The worldview Bakunin outlines is radically libertarian and at the same time remarkably collective in its thinking. Contrary to the cliché of the egoistic „everyone does what they want“ anarchist, Bakunin decidedly does not believe in the isolated individual. For him, freedom only emerges in a social context. No one is free as long as others are dominated. In doing so, he formulates a concept of freedom that feels more modern than much of what is sold as freedom today – such as the sacred freedom of multinational corporations to avoid taxes, or the freedom of digital platforms to squeeze monetizable data out of every breath. Bakunin is not interested in the freedom of the stronger, but in the possibility of a life without subordination.

And this is precisely where the text becomes uncomfortable. Because Bakunin distrusts not only kings or priests. He also distrusts revolutionaries. That made him the arch-enemy of Karl Marx. While Marx believed the working class first had to seize political power, Bakunin warned that this would merely create a new elite. Once you give a revolutionary party control over the state, police, and administration, it will hardly ever give that power back with a smile. History rarely tends toward voluntary self-disempowerment. As early as the 19th century, Bakunin suspected that revolutionaries, too, could very quickly begin to imprison their opponents „temporarily“ – a word that, politically speaking, tends to be astonishingly long-lived.

At this point, a direct line leads to Rosa Luxemburg, even though theoretically she came from a different tradition. Luxemburg, too, believed in the power of the revolutionary masses and warned against a party that puts itself in the place of the people it claims to liberate. Her famous statement, that freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently, sounds like a response to any political movement convinced it is finally in sole possession of the truth. Luxemburg understood something crucial: A revolution that no longer tolerates any contradictions will sooner or later turn into administration with a claim to salvation. The path from liberator to functionary is historically frighteningly short.

Bakunin, for his part, relies almost defiantly on people’s ability to self-organize. For him, it is not a divine order that determines human life, but a web of domination, property, and social dependency. Church and state appear as great educational institutions for the production of obedience. People are kept small so that power remains stable. The twist is that Bakunin does not believe people are naturally submissive. They are made that way. And whoever once begins to exercise power astonishingly quickly develops the conviction that it is, unfortunately, without alternative. That goes for tsars just as much as for party secretaries or Silicon Valley billionaires in turtlenecks who want to „improve the world“ while incidentally establishing global monopolies.

Despite his radical concept of freedom, however, there is a remarkable contradiction in the Revolutionary Catechism. Bakunin rejects all domination, but relies on an invisible avant-garde to coordinate the revolution behind the scenes – a contradiction that brings him closer to Lenin than he would have liked. The thought is almost tragicomic: An invisible elite is supposed to prevent elites from emerging. One could say that here Bakunin stumbles over exactly the problem he actually criticizes. But perhaps this also reveals an uncomfortable truth about political movements: Even the most passionate ideas of freedom are constantly tempted to secure themselves organizationally. People apparently want not only freedom. They also want control over the freedom of others.

And yet, it is precisely in this contradiction that the literary and political power of the text lies. Bakunin does not write like a dry theorist. His language has force, anger, something almost volcanic. The Revolutionary Catechism is less a blueprint than a battle cry. Here, literature becomes political explosive. The text does not live by offering perfect solutions, but by attacking habits of thought. It forces us to suddenly view seemingly natural power relations as historical constructs. Why should it be normal that a few decide over many? Why are hierarchies considered reasonable, even though their balance sheet consists of wars, exploitation, and ideologically decorated violence? Perhaps, Bakunin suggests, because people get used to domination like they get used to bad weather.

That is precisely why the text feels astonishingly current again today. The faces of power have changed, but their mechanisms hardly have. Instead of monarchs, today we have markets ruling. Algorithms. Lobbying apparatuses. Political PR machines. Modern humans consider themselves autonomous while voluntarily selling their attention to platforms that know them better than their closest friends. Self-optimization does not replace obedience – it merely makes it more efficient. No one officially forces anyone today to market themselves constantly. The system takes care of the rest through economic pressure and social competition. Bakunin’s distrust of power therefore seems by no means antiquated, but almost eerily prescient.

And this is where the circle closes to Rio Reiser and Ton Steine Scherben. „No power for nobody“ sounds like the pop-cultural shorthand for what Bakunin wrote hundreds of pages about. Reiser formulated the same longing, though less theoretically, more humanly, more vulnerably, more directly. Where Bakunin writes like a revolutionary storm, Rio Reiser sounds like someone who, amidst the societal shambles, still believes in warmth and dignity. While Bakunin demands the destruction of the old, Rio sings: „Hold on to your love“ – meaning a politics of mutual care, not of command. There is a fine difference between „Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht“ (Break what breaks you – another Ton Steine Scherben song) and „No power for nobody“ – the former is actively destructive, the latter simply refuses the recognition of domination. Perhaps that is the real core of all these texts and thoughts: the hope that people could live together without having to dominate one another.

Of course, the big question remains whether a complex society can actually function without central power. There is probably no simple answer to that. But perhaps that is precisely the value of such texts. They prevent domination from ever seeming completely natural. And that is already more than many political systems would willingly allow.

Bakunin’s Revolutionary Catechism is therefore not a cozy book. It scratches, provokes, sometimes contradicts itself, and probably occasionally overestimates the revolutionary purity of human beings. But perhaps that is still more sympathetic than those political designs that claim to have finally understood humanity. Those, as we know, often end where someone in uniform declares that freedom must unfortunately be temporarily suspended – for their own protection, of course.

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