Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) was a Russian revolutionary whose confrontation with Marx in the First International established the defining line between anarchism and authoritarian socialism: the question of whether the state can be used as a tool of liberation or whether it inevitably reproduces domination regardless of who controls it.
Core ideas
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The state as inherently dominating: Bakunin argued that the state is not a neutral instrument that can be seized and redirected toward liberation. Its structure — centralized authority, bureaucracy, monopoly on force — reproduces hierarchy regardless of the ideology of those who hold power. A “workers’ state” would produce a new ruling class: the bureaucrats, party officials, and managers who administer it. This prediction, made decades before the Russian Revolution, proved precise.
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Collectivist anarchism: Bakunin advocated collective ownership of the means of production with remuneration proportional to labor performed — a position later superseded by Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism (distribution by need). He emphasized workers’ self-organization through federation as the organizational form of both the revolutionary movement and the post-revolutionary society.
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The critique of Marx: Bakunin’s disagreement with Marx was not about the analysis of capitalism — he largely accepted Marx’s economic critique — but about the proposed solution. Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” would, Bakunin predicted, become the dictatorship of a party, then of a committee, then of a single man. Authority does not dissolve itself; it accumulates.
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Revolution from below: Revolution must be organized from the bottom up, not directed from above. The revolutionary organization must prefigure the society it aims to create — prefigurative politics avant la lettre. If the means are hierarchical, the ends will be hierarchical.
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The abolition of inheritance and religion: Bakunin saw inherited wealth and organized religion as pillars of domination. Inherited wealth perpetuates class across generations; religion teaches obedience as a cosmic principle. Both must be abolished, not reformed.
Significance for this research
Bakunin’s primary analytical contribution is the structural argument against the state: not that particular states are corrupt or particular rulers unjust, but that the form itself — centralized authority backed by force — produces domination as its necessary output. This argument does not depend on the moral character of the people in power. It is a claim about what institutions do regardless of intentions.
His prediction about Marxist states — that they would produce a new ruling class — provides one of anarchism’s strongest empirical validations. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, and every other state-socialist project confirmed what Bakunin argued in the 1870s: you cannot use hierarchy to abolish hierarchy.
Key texts
- Statism and Anarchy (1873)
- God and the State (1882, posthumous)
- The Program of the International Brotherhood (1869)
Related
- the state — the institution he analyzed
- federation — his proposed organizational form
- prefigurative politics — the principle his argument implies
- Pyotr Kropotkin — built on Bakunin’s anti-statism with the mutual aid framework