19th Century
Mikhail Bakunin
1814–1876 · Social anarchism
No freedom without equality, no equality without freedom.
In their words
“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
Bakunin's answer to Marx was that a people's state of any kind would put a new ruling class above the producers, and he predicted that state socialism would become a tyranny before anyone had an example to point at. He broke with the First International over it, and argued that liberty grows only from the grassroots, through federations of self-governing associations bound by voluntary contract.
Why it matters for freedom
He saw that a state built to liberate becomes a new master, and said so before any of it had happened.
Who they stood against
the Russian empire, and Marx's plan for a state that would supposedly wither