“Mikhail Bakunin, a prominent Russian anarchist who, in Statehood and Anarchy (1873), had criticized Marx’s “people’s state.” “No state [or republic], however democratic,” Bakunin writes in Statehood and Anarchy, can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo–People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves …”
“To clarify their position on “the state” to Bebel and the Germans, Engels proposes a small but significant amendment to the platform’s language: “We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen [community] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French ‘Commune.’” This is a major moment for the interpretation of Marxist thought, and it was spurred by anarchists that Marx and Engels couldn’t stand.”