Why did Bakunin oppose the dictatorship of the proletariat?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Mikhail Bakunin opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat because he fundamentally rejected the state as an institution, arguing that it is in the nature of any state to extend its control over its subjects, thereby limiting and eventually eliminating their liberty.1

In his work Statism and Anarchy (1873), Bakunin challenged the Marxist view that a transitional state would simply "wither away" after preventing a bourgeois counterrevolution. He argued that no state has ever withered away, and none ever will. Instead, he believed that such an interim government would inevitably become a dictatorship "over" the proletariat, leading to a new form of bureaucratic tyranny rather than a classless society.21

Bakunin’s anarchist philosophy emphasized the immediate abolition of the state and the use of spontaneous insurgence by the working class, rather than the centralized political control and authority inherent in the Marxist model of a revolutionary state.23