For his part, Bakunin considered Marx naïve to believe that a state so forged would ever wither away. States could be expressions of any sectional interests and not just classes. Even well-intentioned revolutionary elites were capable of authoritarianism and deploying state power to maintain and develop their own position. “I am not a communist,” he explained, “because communism concentrates and absorbs all the powers of society in the state; it necessarily ends with the concentration of property in the hands of the state.”
