Anachism

Who did Marx rail against when the world saw them as natural allies? Yes Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist philosopher, whose life seemed a mirror of his own. He also gave up his privialaged comfortable existence at a young age, to live on thoughts alone, and the patronage of sympathisers.  He spent three years in prison until all his teeth fell out. Eventually he escaped to Japan, and America.  He visited London on his way to Switzerland where he eventually died and is buried in Bern.

I'm listening to George Orwell's account of the Spanish civil wall 'Homage to Catalonia' http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/11.html (chapter 12) which relates beautifully the madness of clashing ideology. The story starts with his inadequate training, largely because the only guns they had were in use at the front.  Your first lessons on how to fire a rifle was also how to save your own skin. The rifles used were dirty, rusty, outdated, still hot from having recently been fired by the man you had come to replace.  Orwell has a riveting description of the sensation of being hit by a direct bullet, straight into the neck.  He remarks that it is worth recording a description because this unique and singular experience can rarely be retold first hand.  Convalescing from the injury in Barcelona with his amazing wife, who so far, is a mystery to me, Orwell is disillusioned by the breakdown in unity between the different political factions making up the popular front.  He ends up guarding the offices of the POUM with a dodgy arm. The POUM is a trotskyist trade union, his particular affiliation, later denounced as a facist foil, by the other parties.

So what of Spanish Anarchism? Perhaps, the only time anarchists have historically been elected into power was in 1920/30's Spain.

As I read it, the struggle between Marx and Bakunin revolves around how the will of the people is enacted. Bakunin's famous quotes are:

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick". 

In Europe at the time the rich bourgeois were far out numbered by the poor.  The problem was that democracy could not work, because the ruling class had a monopoly of knowledge and control over the system.  The western system of democracy was for the people to elect a 'wise man' to represent them.  He would do what they wanted.  In countries where the vast majority of the people had been kept in poverty for generations, power at the ballot box was not seen as a solution. Bakunin's Anarchism I feel was an attempt to find a way for those people to gain the skills of government through their own experience, from the ground upwards.  He viewed natural law as the final arbitrator, being ferociously anti God.  God to him was the imagined justification, a projection of human belief just above the heads of kings, giving moral authority to their tyranny.

If Voltaire say that if God did not exist, it would he necessary to invent him, Bakunin says the opposite,  "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him."

But of course, you can find plenty of Anachism in the bible.
It starts with the relationship between God and Adam and Eve in the garden. God seems to be looking for a simple trusting partnership. Very few rules.
The the question everyone asks, "why is God not preventing evil? Not acting with great autocracy?  Why are we given so much freedom to choose, and why are the systems of power not more obvious.?