IN THE PERSONS OF THESE TWO REVOLUTIONARIES, TWO DISTINCT PROJECTS CLASHED WITHIN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL ~ Carlos Taibo ~ There are more elements of commonality between Bakunin and Marx than might appear. It was hardly a coincidence that both sought the shelter of the International and that, despite their disagreements, they shared space within that organisation. Aside from this, it is evident that both Bakunin and Marx wished to protect the International from external attacks. The boundless, perhaps excessive, admiration that Bakunin felt at all times for Marx’s theoretical work can never be overstated. The desire to leave behind an order, that of capital, was present in the reflections and actions of these two revolutionaries. Despite what I have just suggested, two distinct projects clashed within the International. While Bakunin and Marx’s positions were honourable, the same cannot be said of their methods, and particularly Marx’s. Regarding the latter, Grawitz has pointed out that, “a prisoner of his abstract schemes and objectives, he will only appreciate in Bakunin’s theses the manifestation of a rival, an enemy of his doctrine, without grasping the richness and nuances of a thought opposed to his own.” It was, in any case, extremely difficult to reconcile two very disparate perspectives when it comes to discussions such as those concerning the functioning of the International, the consequences of centralisation, the horizon of self-management, the nature of the State institution, participation in parliaments, or the role of intellectuals and scholars. And to make matters even more difficult, there is no shortage of Bakunin’s texts that, while moderately contradictory, defend the need for leading vanguards. While the superiority of Marx’s theoretical work compared to Bakunin’s is undeniable, the weakness and inadequacy of many of his predictions about the future must be emphasised. After all, Marx was a 19th-century thinker, he paid the price of Enlightenment thought, and, at the very least, he exhibited two silences—I’m setting aside for now the consequences of his centralising policies, the Jacobin spasms he led, and his uncritical stance on technology—that seem vital to us today. The first of these silences concerned the ecological question. Marx seemed to operate on the assumption that material resources were inexhaustible, and only in the last years of his life did he pay any attention to the environmental damage being perpetrated, for example, in the Rhine basin. The second silence was on the women’s question. In Marx’s work, these women exist only in their dimension as exploited workers, without any hint of the miseries of patriarchal society. Although it would be absurd to conclude that Bakunin fully accomplished his duties in these two areas, he did benefit from some interesting precautions. This was certainly more true regarding women and their marginalisation than regarding ecology, the latter being an area in which, even so, he gained some advantage from his advocacy for decentralisation and his disdain, albeit relative, for large industrial complexes. I take it for granted, in any case, that today Marx would write Capital in very different terms. Molnár has drawn attention to the proposal to treat the organisational problems of the International as if they were those of the state, and in this regard has emphasised that, in Bakunin’s view, “the existence of the International is only possible on the condition that its General Council, like the national, regional, and local committees, exercises no power and does not constitute a government.” Molnár concludes that Bakunin wanted the International to be the model of a society without any kind of authority. Furthermore, in Bakunin’s view, the International was to be the foundation of the society of the future. For the Russian revolutionary, the federation of workers’ associations and resistance societies prepared and anticipated the social administration of tomorrow, and the International, purged of its authoritarian content, prefigured that movement. In this respect, Bakunin’s self-management and federalist approach was manifestly different from that defended by Marx, who was clearly an advocate of centralising and authoritarian structures. I feel a certain sympathy for a concept, that of border socialism, which has gained traction in recent years. It aims to portray the condition of people who seek dialogue and exchange between different traditions. Inspired by this concept, I have often wondered what would have happened in the International if, instead of a confrontation between a haughty intellectual averse to self-criticism—Marx—and an impulsive revolutionary who often failed to consider the consequences of his actions—Bakunin—two different figures had clashed. I think, on the one hand, of the Marx of his later years, that libertarian Marx who took an interest in the rural commune in Russia, who dispensed with many of the dogmatic elements of his theory of the development of societies, and who opened himself to the study of the most disparate horizons. And I think, on the other hand, of Kropotkin who, drawn to the spontaneous manifestations of self-management and solidarity in the most diverse places and times, decided to write Mutual Aid. Perhaps then the scenario would have been different, and this mutual revitalisation would have given us a valuable gift: a shrewd combination of the critique of Marxist political economy, so admired by Bakunin, and the proposal of generalised self-management. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 2nd edition of Carlos Taibo’s Bakunin versus Marx was published in Spanish in the autumn of 2025. His book Retinking Anarchy is available in English from AK Press The post Bakunin versus Marx appeared first on Freedom News.