Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
Statism and Anarchy
Against Marx and the German Social Democrats: a workers’ state would be ruled by a privileged minority of former workers and scholars.
Introduction
Bakunin wrote the book in Russian in 1873, the year after his expulsion from the First International at the Hague Congress, and had it printed in Switzerland to be smuggled into Russia. It surveys the European situation after the Franco-Prussian War: the new German Empire as a centralised military state, Pan-Germanism and the role of the German Social Democrats. Bakunin argues that Marx’s plan for a workers’ state would produce a new ruling minority of educated leaders, and that a revolution must abolish the state at once. An appendix urges Russian youth to go “to the people”, and the book influenced the Narodnik movement of the 1870s. Marx made extensive critical notes on it.
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