Mikhail Bakunin vs Karl Marx and the Jewish Question

Mikhail Bakunin is remembered as the founding theorist of modern anarchism, a man who dedicated his life to the abolition of all systems of domination and who warned with prophetic accuracy that Marxist states would create new ruling classes rather than liberate the masses.

Mikhail Bakunin

His admirers in the anarchist space celebrate him as a champion of human freedom who spent years in solitary confinement for his beliefs, escaped from Siberian exile, and inspired revolutionary movements across Europe. Tucked away in the dark corners of Bakunin’s voluminous literary output is a persistent, antisemitic thread that has been obscured by the passage of time.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was born on May 30, 1814 into Russian landed nobility at the family estate of Premukhino in the Tver Governorate, northwest of Moscow. His father had served as a diplomat in Italy before returning to manage an estate that included over 500 serfs. The young Bakunin abandoned a military career, immersed himself in Hegelian philosophy, and eventually found his way to the revolutionary circles of Paris, where he consorted with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx.

The revolutionary wave of 1848 transformed Bakunin from a philosophical radical into a man of action. He fought during the February Revolution in Paris, attended the Slav Congress in Prague, and participated in the Dresden insurrection of May 1849. His arrest led to a death sentence that was commuted, followed by extradition first to Austria — where he was sentenced to death a second time, again commuted — and then to Russia. In May 1851, he was placed in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, where he spent three years before being transferred to Schlisselburg Fortress for three more years, then exiled to Siberia in 1857.

His escape from Siberian exile in 1861 became legend. Bakunin made his way through Japan and then by ship from San Francisco through Panama to New York before crossing to London, where he would spend the remainder of his life constructing the anarchist creed he preached until his death in 1876. He built networks of interlocking secret revolutionary societies, participated in an insurrection in Lyon in 1870 and helped plan an anarchist uprising in Bologna in 1874, and became the central figure of the anarchist faction within the International Workingmen’s Association.

Bakunin’s anarchism rested on a profound conviction that all systems of domination, whether the state, the church, or capitalism, must be abolished simultaneously. He argued that “to exploit and to govern mean the same thing” and viewed the state as an instrument of domination and exploitation serving a privileged ruling class — one that applied equally to monarchies and representative democracies alike.

He envisioned a post-revolutionary world of freely federated communes organized from below, with voluntary associations of producers starting locally but organizing internationally. He championed the right of every people to self-determination and opposed colonialism and imperialism. In his 1867 essay Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism, Bakunin declared: “liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”

His most enduring contribution to political thought was his warning that a revolutionary state run by socialists would not wither away but would instead create a new ruling class of party officials and intellectuals governing in the name of the proletariat. In Statism and Anarchy (1873), he directly challenged Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, arguing that any post-revolutionary state would perpetuate itself indefinitely rather than dissolve.

Bakunin and Marx first met in Paris in 1844 and maintained an initially cordial if wary relationship. Marx even sent Bakunin a copy of the first volume of Capital. But their disagreements ran too deep for friendship to survive.

Marx believed the working class should seize state power through a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a transitional instrument to build socialism. By contrast, Bakunin believed any state, even a workers’ state, would inevitably reproduce class domination. Marx favored centralized political organization while Bakunin advocated federalism and spontaneous worker action. Marx placed the urban industrial proletariat at the center of revolution while Bakunin also embraced the peasantry and the poorest workers, especially in Russia, Spain, and Italy.

The conflict was also bitterly personal. Marx wrote that Bakunin was “a man devoid of theoretical knowledge” and “in his element as an intriguer.” Bakunin believed Marx “lacks the instinct of liberty” and “remains from head to foot, an authoritarian.”

The crisis came to a head at the 1872 Hague Congress (The Hague Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association (aka the First International)). Bakunin could not travel to the Netherlands without risking arrest, and in his absence, Marx engineered his expulsion from the International on charges of maintaining a secret society within the organization and fraud related to an unfinished translation of Capital. The anarchist wing regrouped at the Saint-Imier Congress eight days later and founded the Anti-Authoritarian International, permanently splitting the socialist movement into wings that remain divided to this day.

Bakunin perceived that Marx had conspired against him and assumed that Marx sought to centralize control of the International. Bakunin framed the entire conspiracy in antisemitic terms, as a specifically “Jewish” plot.

The Russian anarchist intellectual’s antisemitism appeared in rudimentary form as early as 1851. While imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Bakunin wrote his Confession to the Tsar, in which he criticized Polish independence leaders for their favorable attitude toward Jews. Bakunin’s aversion to Jewry grew stronger after his conflict with Moses Hess, a German Jewish socialist and proto-Zionist who represented the Marxist wing of the International and published a two-part critique in the Paris newspaper Le Réveil on October 2, 1869.

Bakunin responded with a long unpublished letter titled To the Citizen Editors of Le Réveil, in which he declared something that his friend Alexander Herzen immediately found disturbing. Herzen read this letter and complained to Nicholas Ogarev with a single question that captured the bewilderment of those who knew Bakunin best: “Why all this talk of race and of Jews?”

Between October 1871 and February 1872, Bakunin wrote a note titled Supporting Documents: Personal Relations with Marx that was originally intended for Italian allies but never sent. First published in 1924 in volume 3 of his German collected works, it contains some of his most disturbing writing:

Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, intriguing, mobile, speculating Jews, such as Jews are everywhere: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, correspondents for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank, the other in the socialist movement, and with their behinds sitting on the German daily press — they have taken possession of all the newspapers — and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of bloodsuckers, a single gluttonous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion — this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild.

Throughout the passage, he sought to synthesize his broader critique of the state with specific observations regarding the role of Jewish financiers in the global economy:

What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralisation in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail…

In his February–March 1872 letter To the Comrades of the International Sections of the Jura Federation, perhaps his most extensively antisemitic text, Bakunin expanded his theories into sweeping generalizations about Jewish people as a collective.

Every Jew, however enlightened, retains the traditional cult of authority: it is the heritage of his race, the manifest sign of his Eastern origin. … The Jew is therefore authoritarian by position, by tradition and by nature. This is a general law and one which admits of very few exceptions, and these very exceptions, when examined closely confirm the rule.

He attributed Marx’s authoritarianism to his “threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German.” In Statism and Anarchy, his 1873 book written in Russian, Bakunin described the creation of the German nation state as “nothing other than the ultimate realisation of the anti-popular idea of the modern state. … It signifies the triumphant reign of the Yids, of a bankocracy under the powerful protection of a fiscal, bureaucratic, and police regime which relies mainly on military force.”

Ultimately, Bakunin’s willingness to look past the superficial constraints of his day and directly identify the intersection of finance, state power, and Jewish influence and proneness to authoritarianism remains his most vital, yet ignored, lessons. While his contemporary successors in the anarchist movement have devolved into willing foot soldiers for the Jewish-dominated post-World War II order, a resurgence of Bakunin’s brand of judeoskepticism is long overdue. It is time for a new generation of dissidents to pick up Bakunin’s mantle, shedding the baggage of modern ideological constraints to confront the reality of Jewish power head-on.