Questions: Anarchism and Stateless Political Theory

Question 1

Bakunin and Marx both sought to end capitalism and achieve a classless society. Their fundamental disagreement was about:

• A. Whether capitalism was unjust — Bakunin believed market economies were acceptable if reformed
• B. Whether the working class should seize and use state power — Bakunin argued that any organization holding state power would reproduce hierarchy and domination
• C. Whether revolution was necessary — Bakunin preferred gradual parliamentary reform over insurrection
• D. The correct theory of surplus value — Bakunin rejected Marx's labor theory of value

Answer: (B)

This is the precise fault line at the First International. Marx believed workers should seize state power and use it as a transitional tool to build socialism. Bakunin's counter-argument was structural: state power is inherently dominating regardless of who holds it. A workers' state is still a state — it concentrates coercive authority, creates a governing class, and will reproduce hierarchy even with the best intentions. Bakunin's prediction that revolutionary states would become oppressive was, he felt, vindicated by 20th-century socialist regimes.

Question 2

Kropotkin's argument in Mutual Aid differs from Bakunin's anarchism primarily in that it:

• A. Accepts that state power is legitimate when exercised by workers rather than capitalists
• B. Grounds the case against the state in evolutionary biology and evidence of cooperative behavior in nature and human societies
• C. Focuses on the general strike and trade unions as the primary vehicle for achieving anarchism
• D. Argues that Enlightenment liberalism was correct and the state should be minimized but not abolished

Answer: (B)

Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902) made a naturalistic argument: he drew on biology and evolutionary theory to show that cooperation — not competition — was the dominant mechanism in both animal societies and human history. The state was not a natural or necessary institution but a historical imposition that suppressed humanity's innate sociability. This contrasts with Bakunin's more confrontational, insurrectionary argument rooted in political critique. The general strike and syndicalism (option C) describe anarcho-syndicalism, particularly the Spanish tradition.

Question 3

Anarchists advocated for the abolition of most social organization, not just the state, believing that any institution reproduces domination.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is the most persistent popular misconception about anarchism. Anarchists did not oppose all organization — they opposed hierarchical, coercive organization. They proposed replacing the state with voluntary federations of communes, workers' associations, and mutual aid societies, with horizontal decision-making, direct democracy, and delegates bound by mandates. The anarchist vision was a highly organized society — just one without centralized state authority.

Question 4

The suppression of anarchist collectives in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War by Stalinist communist forces was seen by anarchists as a vindication of Bakunin's warnings.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Bakunin had argued that any organization seizing state power — even with revolutionary intentions — would reproduce domination. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), anarchist unions had collectivized factories and farms in Catalonia and Aragon. Stalinist communists, who controlled key state and military resources, systematically suppressed these anarchist collectives. From the anarchist perspective, this was precisely what Bakunin had predicted: a revolutionary state (here, the Soviet-aligned communist party) crushing horizontal, stateless organization in favor of centralized control.

Question 5

What is Bakunin's core argument for why a 'workers' state' would still be oppressive, and how does this differ from the Marxist view of the transitional state?

Model answer: Bakunin's argument is structural: state power is inherently dominating because it concentrates coercive authority in a distinct governing class. Even if workers seize the state with good intentions, the act of wielding state power creates a new ruling class — the party, the bureaucracy, the managers of state institutions — whose interests diverge from the workers they claim to represent. The state does not wither; it self-perpetuates. Marx's transitional state view held that a proletarian state would use state power to expropriate the capitalist class, abolish private ownership of the means of production, and then, as class distinctions disappeared, 'wither away.' Bakunin rejected this: the withering-away, he argued, would never happen, because those who hold power do not relinquish it.

The disagreement is ultimately about whether an institution can be wielded toward its own abolition — Marxists said yes (temporarily), Bakunin said no (structurally).