Perhaps Bakunin's most resonant critisism of all was that Marx's pronouncements on the proletarian state were 'lies behind which lurks the despotism of a governing minority', which were even more dangerous in that this minority pretended to appear as an expression of the people's will. No more prescient prediction about the negative side of Marxist governments of the twentieh century was ever made by a socialist.

Marx's stark prediction about the inevitability of capitalist collapse has not come true, but the fact that "Capital" was never finished can be interpreted as indicating that its author realised that such a prophecy had not been conclusively proved, if only on a subconscious level. Marx so desperately wanted capitalism to collapse that his emotional desires sometimes overruled what his (brilliant) intellect had actually demonstrated.