Forum Post: Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities

Already in Marx and Engels's day — decades before the establishment of the Soviet state — there were some with a shrewd idea of just who it was that would assume the title role when the time came to perform the heroic melodrama, Man Creates His Own Destiny. The most celebrated of Marx's early critics was the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, for whom Marx was "the Bismarck of socialism" and who warned that Marxism was a doctrine ideally fitted to function as the ideology — in the Marxist sense: the systematic rationalization and obfuscation — of the power urges of revolutionary intellectuals. It would lead, Bakunin warned, to the creation of "a new class," which would establish "the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes"[7] and entrench its control over the producing classes of society. Bakunin's analysis was extended and elaborated by the Pole Waclaw Machajski.

http://www.mises.org/daily/5855/Marxist-Dreams-and-Soviet-Realities