# Mikhail Bakunin Russian revolutionary and political theorist who became the leading rival to [[Karl Marx]] within the nineteenth-century socialist movement. Bakunin rejected Marx's vision of a workers' state, arguing that any centralized authority — even a proletarian one — would reproduce tyranny. His collectivist anarchism envisioned abolishing the state entirely and organizing society through voluntary federations. The Marx-Bakunin split fractured the First International in the 1870s and prefigured the authoritarian turn of the [[Russian Revolution]] that Bakunin had predicted. His critique of [[Marxism]] anticipated later anti-authoritarian left movements and remains a touchstone in debates about state power. Right-wing rhetoric sometimes conflates all left radicalism, but the anarchist-communist divide Bakunin embodied is one of the deepest fault lines in revolutionary thought. *Stub — expand with: role in 1848 revolutions, conflict with Marx over the International, influence on Spanish Civil War anarchism.*