Line drawing of a skeleton walking while carrying a plain flag over its shoulder

Mikhail Bakunin: The One Who Out-Argued Marx

May 21, 2026

In 1872 the International Workingmen's Association met at The Hague and expelled Mikhail Bakunin. Karl Marx ran the motion. On paper, Marx won cleanly: Bakunin was out, the organization was his, the future of the socialist movement carried Marx's name.

Then Marx, worried Bakunin's faction would seize the International anyway, moved its headquarters to New York, where it quietly died within four years. Bakunin won smaller fights for the rest of his life, in the margins, and those are the ones that lasted.

Who he was

Mikhail Bakunin was born in 1814 into the Russian gentry and spent his life dismantling everything that produced him. He trained as an artillery officer, abandoned it, drifted through the radical circles of Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, and turned up at nearly every European uprising that mattered for thirty years.

The 1849 Dresden insurrection got him arrested. Saxony sentenced him to death, then Austria sentenced him to death again, then Russia took him and buried him in the Peter and Paul Fortress and later in Siberian exile. In 1861 he escaped Siberia eastward, crossed the Pacific by way of Japan and the United States, and arrived back in Europe to resume the argument as if nothing had happened. He was hard to kill and harder to discourage.

The fight with Marx

Bakunin and Marx agreed on the diagnosis. Capitalism concentrated wealth, ground down workers, and had to go. They split, completely, on the cure.

Marx argued the working class should capture the state and use it to build socialism. A transitional period, a dictatorship of the proletariat, the state withering away later once its work was done.

Bakunin said the state would never wither. Hand a revolutionary government that much power and you do not get the absence of a ruling class. You get a new one, made of the cleverest revolutionaries, and it will be worse because it will believe it is righteous. "Take the most ardent revolutionary," he wrote, "vest him in absolute power, and within a year he will be worse than the Tsar himself."

He did not live to see the 20th century test the two theories. The test was not kind to Marx's version.

What he actually believed

Bakunin is easy to caricature as a man who simply wanted chaos. He wanted the opposite. His anarchism was collectivist and specific: no state, but also no private ownership of the means of production, with workers organizing through federated associations from the bottom up rather than the top down.

The line that holds it together is this one. "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." Liberty without economic equality just protects the people who already have everything. Equality enforced without liberty is a prison with good intentions. You need both at once or you have neither. The rest, as far as Bakunin was concerned, was housekeeping.

His major statement, "Statism and Anarchy," appeared in 1873. He died three years later in Bern, in 1876, broke and unfinished, having never run a country or built a lasting institution.

Why he ends up on a shirt

Bakunin lost the org chart and won the argument. The criticism he made of revolutionary states in the 1870s reads, a century and a half later, like a weather forecast. That is a rare thing to be right about, and an uncomfortable one.

The Bakunin tee renders him the way the work deserves: the beard, the stare, white on black, no manifesto printed underneath. It is for people who read the man before they wore him, and who, in his own phrase, refused to wait for permission. Bakunin never did. It cost him every comfort and most of his freedom, and he appears to have considered the trade obvious.