> "It means that so long as the other classes, especially the capitalist
> class, still exists, so long as the proletariat struggles with it (for
> when it attains government power its enemies and the old organization
> of society have not yet vanished), it must employ forcible means,
> hence governmental means. It is itself still a class and the economic
> conditions from which the class struggle and the existence of classes
> derive have still not disappeared and must forcibly be either removed
> out of the way or transformed, this transformation process being
> forcibly hastened."
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm
As I indicated, this point is also made in the Civil War in France. It remains necessary at the beginning of the "socialist" phase of the transition to the "realm of freedom" to have a "state," i.e. a capacity to use coercive force to implement and defend the democratic political and economic arrangements the vast majority of the population have self-consciously agreed to create, given that their will still be others who will forcibly oppose the creation of these arrangements.
In the annotations following the one you quote, Marx spells out how a democratic "state power" organized in accordance with the principles set out in the Civil War in France should treat peasants. Are you claiming that "state power" in the form given it by Lenin and Stalin and the peasant policies it implemented correspond to what Marx meant, as indicated both in these annotations and in the Civil War in France, by "dictatorship of the proletariat" and so would have been endorsed by him?
[the passages from Bakunin are in double quotes]
>> e.g. the krestyanskaya chern, the common peasant folk, the peasant
>> mob, which as is well known does not enjoy the goodwill of the
>> Marxists, and which, being as it is at the lowest level of culture,
>> will apparently be governed by the urban factory proletariat.
>
> i.e. where the peasant exists in the mass as private proprietor, where
> he even forms a more or less considerable majority, as in all states
> of the west European continent, where he has not disappeared and been
> replaced by the agricultural wage-labourer, as in England, the
> following cases apply: either he hinders each workers' revolution,
> makes a wreck of it, as he has formerly done in France, or the
> proletariat (for the peasant proprietor does not belong to the
> proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes
> himself not to) must as government take measures through which the
> peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as to win him for
> the revolution; measures which will at least provide the possibility
> of easing the transition from private ownership of land to collective
> ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this of his own accord, from
> economic reasons. It must not hit the peasant over the head, as it
> would e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or
> the abolition of his property. The latter is only possible where the
> capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the
> true cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as is
> the town worker, and so has immediately, not just indirectly, the very
> same interests as him. Still less should small-holding property be
> strengthened, by the enlargement of the peasant allotment simply
> through peasant annexation of the larger estates, as in Bakunin's
> revolutionary campaign.
>
>> Or, if one considers this question from the national angle, we would
>> for the same reason assume that, as far as the Germans are concerned,
>> the Slavs will stand in the same slavish dependence towards the
>> victorious German proletariat as the latter does at present towards
>> its own bourgeoisie.
>
> Schoolboy stupidity! A radical social revolution depends on certain
> definite historical conditions of economic development as its
> precondition. It is also only possible where with capitalist
> production the industrial proletariat occupies at least an important
> position among the mass of the people. And if it is to have any chance
> of victory, it must be able to do immediately as much for the peasants
> as the French bourgeoisie, mutatis mutandis, did in its revolution for
> the French peasants of that time. A fine idea, that the rule of labour
> involves the subjugation of land labour! But here Mr Bakunin's
> innermost thoughts emerge. He understands absolutely nothing about the
> social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions
> do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms,
> developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker
> (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that
> a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more!
> He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic
> basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the
> Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass
> this level [...] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the
> foundation of his social revolution.
>
>> If there is a state [gosudarstvo], then there is unavoidably
>> domination [gospodstvo], and consequently slavery. Domination without
>> slavery, open or veiled, is unthinkable -- this is why we are enemies
>> of the state.
>> What does it mean, the proletariat organized as ruling class?
>
> It means that the proletariat, instead of struggling sectionally
> against the economically privileged class, has attained a sufficient
> strength and organization to employ general means of coercion in this
> struggle. It can however only use such economic means as abolish its
> own character as salariat, hence as class. With its complete victory
> its own rule thus also ends, as its class character has disappeared.
>
>> Will the entire proletariat perhaps stand at the head of the
>> government?
>
> In a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its executive
> committee? Will all division of labour in the factory, and the various
> functions that correspond to this, cease? And in Bakunin's
> constitution, will all 'from bottom to top' be 'at the top'? Then
> there will certainly be no one 'at the bottom'. Will all members of
> the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then
> there will be no distinction between commune and territory.
>>
>> The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty
>> million be member of the government?
>
> Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of
> the commune.
>
>> The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.
>
> If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is
> after all himself and no other.
>
>> Then there will be no government and no state, but if there is a
>> state, there will be both governors and slaves.
>
> i.e. only if class rule has disappeared, and there is no state in the
> present political sense.
>
>> This dilemma is simply solved in the Marxists' theory. By people's
>> government they understand (i.e. Bakunin) the government of the
>> people by means of a small number of leaders, chosen (elected) by the
>> people.
>>
>> Asine! This is democratic twaddle, political drivel. Election is a
>> political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The
>> character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the
>> economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as
>> soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists
>> 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general
>> functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination,
>> 3) election has nothing of its present political character.
>>
>> The universal suffrage of the whole people...
>
> Such a thing as the whole people in today's sense is a chimera --
>
>> ... in the election of people's representatives and rulers of the
>> state -- that is the last word of the Marxists, as also of the
>> democratic school -- [is] a lie, behind which is concealed the
>> despotism of the governing minority, and only the more dangerously in
>> so far as it appears as expression of the so-called people's will.
>
> With collective ownership the so-called people's will vanishes, to
> make way for the real will of the cooperative.
>
>> So the result is: guidance of the great majority of the people by a
>> privileged minority. But this minority, say the Marxists...
>
> Where?
>
>> ... will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of
>> former workers, who however, as soon as they have become
>> representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers...
>
> As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he
> becomes a municipal councillor...
>
>> and look down on the whole common workers' world from the height of
>> the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves
>> and their pretensions to people's government. Anyone who can doubt
>> this knows nothing of the nature of men.
>
> If Mr Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a
> workers' cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to
> the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative
> function can take on the basis of this workers' state, if he wants to
> call it that.
>
>> But those elected will be fervently convinced and therefore educated
>> socialists. The phrase 'educated socialism'...
>
> ...never was used.
>
>> ... 'scientific socialism'...
>
> ...was only used in opposition to utopian socialism, which wants to
> attach the people to new delusions, instead of limiting its science to
> the knowledge of the social movement made by the people itself; see my
> text against Proudhon.
>
>> ...which is unceasingly found in the works and speeches of the
>> Lasalleans and Marxists, itself indicates that the so-called people's
>> state will be nothing else than the very despotic guidance of the
>> mass of the people by a new and numerically very small aristocracy of
>> the genuine or supposedly educated. The people are not scientific,
>> which means that they will be entirely freed from the cares of
>> government, they will be entirely shut up in the stable of the
>> governed. A fine liberation!
>> The Marxists sense this (!) contradiction and, knowing that the
>> government of the educated (quelle reverie) will be the most
>> oppressive, most detestable, most despised in the world, a real
>> dictatorship despite all democratic forms, console themselves with
>> the thought that this dictatorship will only be transitional and
>> short.
>
> Non, mon cher! -- That the class rule of the workers over the strata
> of the old world whom they have been fighting can only exist as long
> as the economic basis of class existence is not destroyed.
>
>> They say that their only concern and aim is to educate and uplift the
>> people (saloon-bar politicians!) both economically and politically,
>> to such a level that all government will be quite useless and the
>> state will lose all political character, i.e. character of
>> domination, and will change by itself into a free organization of
>> economic interests and communes. An obvious contradiction. If their
>> state will really be popular, why not destroy it, and if its
>> destruction is necessary for the real liberation of the people, why
>> do they venture to call it popular?
>
> Aside from the harping of Liebknecht's Volksstaat, which is nonsense,
> counter to the Communist Manifesto etc., it only means that, as the
> proletariat still acts, during the period of struggle for the
> overthrow of the old society, on the basis of that old society, and
> hence also still moves within political forms which more or less
> belong to it, it has not yet, during this period of struggle, attained
> its final constitution, and employs means for its liberation which
> after this liberation fall aside. Mr Bakunin concludes from this that
> it is better to do nothing at all... just wait for the day of general
> liquidation -- the last judgement.
Ted