After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin

Week 4: Response Paper
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February 6, 2017
In the first article – After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin – Marx and Bakunin were both shown to be men of almost similar ideologies. Both of them believed in the alienation and exploitation of the proletariats by those who are in the upper echelons of society – the capitalists. Also, both of them subscribes to the idea that in order abolish this cycle, a socialist society must be created to pave way for a more equal and freer society. However, it is also shown in the article that these two thinkers differ in what they believe a ‘socialist society’ must be. For Marx, he said that while removing capitalism from the society itself, it should be able to transition smoothly through the empowerment of the proletariat as the “dictators of that society”. On the other hand, Bakunin rejected this idea and believed that in order to develop a fully communist society, this transition should remove the ‘state’ itself, thus becoming a “stateless society”. On my part, I believe that this is the most interesting debate in this article, more specially because this is also what most scholars would believe as the greatest criticism of Marxism. They deemed it as one of its greatest criticism since it failed to predict and provide a prescription as to what should be done when a society becomes fully Socialist. As could be seen, even Bakunin’s idea of a fully matured socialist society does not provide a description of what should be and should not be done. Thus, making both of them easily vulnerable to a number of critiques by different scholars out there. However, despite of the fact that these debates piques my interest and that I subscribe to their idea that capitalism creates class conflict, I heavily disagree with both of their conceptions that a society must move towards a socialist one, while giving the proletariats the power to be the “dictators” of the state. This is because of my greater inclination towards Carnegie’s belief on wealth, and how it can be most beneficial when utilized by the upper classes for the public good, rather than distributed in small amounts to the masses.[C...