As a matter of friendly debate, your analysis isn't quite correct.
Bakunin didn't “misapprehend” “Marx & Engels” theory of the State, totally or otherwise; I put to question the very assertion that they even had one. See, that's happening here is that you're committing an error that Lenin did: you're treating Marx and Engels as one single theorist, that what is said by one must be held by the other ——one particularly funny example is actually in State and Revolution: ch. 1.4. The “Withering Away” of the State and Violent Revolution where, after citing Engels and only Engels for this section, after the first quote dealing with said “withering away”, Lenin follows it up with “According to Marx” to then explain . . . Engels—— when this is very much not the case and MEGA project has in fact shown how much Engels did not know what Marx was working on, particularly towards the end of the latter's life, and how much editing he'd done to Marx' works which really says more about Engels' misunderstandings than Marx' theory.
Setting that aside for now, it gets even messier when getting back on topic of Bakunin “misapprehended” anything in a way that matters to this conversation: it is true, Bakunin very much did not understand Marx, particularly wrt to the State —but that wasn't my point here either.
As I've said before, Bakunin is a better critic of Marxists than of Marx proper. Bakunin was, afterall, really only attacking LaSalle's conception of the State as a vehicle to socialism, and attributing LaSalle's programme to LaSalle's greatest influence, Marx, thereby (wrongly) accusing Marx of holding the same view, and, hence, the quote above. LaSalle, you will recognize, as having been criticized by Marx himself prior to the former student's death, particularly in the Gothakritik.
Gothakritik, let us not forget, was first published in 1891, Anti-Dürhing in 1878, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1880, the last two are of which Lenin grabs from most.
It can hardly be said that he, even maliciously, misunderstood “Marx & Engels”.
But let's take a closer look at the one Marx actually wrote: Gothakritik.
I've written on the subject of this one extremely short but relevant ouvre, both in annotatiting and in explaining the relevant parts, but here let me explain:
“We reach a conundrum, if Marx is so deeply opposed to the State, why does he say that it forms a transitional period? Here is where the Marxists get stuck, and because they get stuck they think others can't surpass them. They think their own limitations universal and so we must show them the way through.
First, consider that at no point does Marx actually say that the State is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Second, that it makes no sense if he did!
Think, what makes more sense, with everything we have gone over and learned:
That somehow Marx (who, as we've pointed out, considers using the State as ‘narrow-minded’ and Socialism that does as ‘not even skin-deep’) makes an exception for the proletariat (despite just having stated that the answer does not lie in the ‘thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'State'.’)?
Or that Marx considers the State and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to be two distinct things, of [a] different quality, and by no means synonymous?
Thus stated there can be no doubt of which position is correct because only the one is consistent; the latter one!”
Here is, truly, where we butt heads, for you bringing up the quote, “As the State is only a transitional phase . . .” and the rest of it is only, for me, an imposition, a necessary extrapolation for those that wish to resuscitate the State in an other —ultimately counter-revolutionary— fashion.
Either you're right, and Engels understood Marx 100% despite MEGA showing how much he didn't and instead published “finished” or “correct” editions of Marx' till then unpublished works; or I'm right, and Marx and Engels are two distinct people, both working towards a better understand of their capitalist situation which Bakunin misunderstood as same and only, from which we can now lock out better and grow as as socialists.
This of course, puts it on me to then try to make sense as to what Marx meant in the Gothakritik.
What about Higher- and Lower- Phase “Communism”?
I've answered this before. I'll do so again, “Lower-Phase” refers to Anarcho-Collectivism; “Higher-Phase” to Anarcho-Communism.
This is, in my opinion, truly the rift that started the miscommunication between Bakunin and Marx; it's not a misunderstanding of what the State's role would be (though both did misunderstand it to a degree) but rather what the revolutionary goal would be. You can read in Marx' Conspectus on Statism and Anarchy him doing just that, and even chastising Bakunin for thinking he (Marx) thought the State as any different. Is it any surprise then that Dolgoff says:
Bakunin did not "‘deliberately fabricate’ the accusation that Marx believed in the ‘People's State’. Bakunin criticized Marx for this in 1870 and 1872. He could not be expected to forcee that Marx would condemn the ‘People's State’ THREE YEARS LATER in 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha Program. The Critique was published AFTER Bakunin's death about a year later. But this error does not invalidate Bakunin's prophetic indictment of the ‘Workers' State’ which Marx and Co. DID champion.
The assertion that the Marx and Engels ‘...position is spelled out most extensively in Marx's Civil War in France is in flagrant contradiction to everything Marx and Engels wrote before and after the Paris Commune. To establish this extremely important point, I quoted Franz Mehring, Marx's disciple and authorized biographer in my Bakunin on Anarchy. I strongly suspect that Diemer ignored this quote because it decisively refutes his argument. Here it is:
“..The opinions of the Communist Manifesto could not be reconciled with the praise lavished by The Civil War in France for the vigorous fashion in which began to exterminate the parasitic State ...Both Marx and Engels were well aware of the contradiction, and in a preface to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto issued in June 1872 they revised their opinions... after the death of Marx, Engels in fighting the anarchists once again took his stand on the original basis of the Manifesto... if an insurrection was able to abolish the whole oppressive machinery of the State by a few simple decrees, was that not a confirmation of Bakunin's steadfastly maintained standpoint? (Karl Marx, pp. 452-3)...”
—“Bakunin vs. Marx” (1979)
Of course, this has all been a history lesson to teach that Bakunin did, in fact, misunderstand Marx, but, implicitly, that he foresaw something Marx didn't: Marxists.
Afterall, in this context, i can hardly ignore the “je-suis pas un marxist” tradition.
Please don't hesitate to ask me anything else you can think of asking me, afterall, while you were concerned with delineating an assumed Marx(& Engels) conception, hereby criticized by Bakunin, I was instead dealing with a critique Bakunin could only work against Marxist positions but not Marx himself.
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