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The problem of how the workers’ movement should be organised has been set out as the ‘Marx-Bakunin’ debate. But there was no debate – at least not in the sense of two adversaries faithfully elaborating their positions against each other. The Marx-Bakunin ‘debate’ resulted with Bakunin, James Guillaume, the Jura Federation, and then almost the whole of the labour movement (as organised at that time), being excluded from the rump IWA.
Bureaucratic manoeuvres that were a model of their kind were used by Marx, Engels and friends. According to George Haupt, Karl Marx’s refusal to engage with Bakunin in a debate on policy was above all of a tactical order. Marx’s every effort tended to diminish and minimalize Bakunin, to deny his rival any theoretical consistency. He refuses to recognise Bakunin’s system of thought, not because he denies his consistency, as he peremptorily affirms, but rather because Marx seeks in this way to discredit him and to reduce him in dimension to the head of a sect and an old-fashioned conspirator.