Mikhail Bakunin in the context of "Revolutionary socialist"

Karl Marx (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence.

Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, and received a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. From 1864, Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International, was a political international which aimed to unite a variety of left-wing political groups and trade union organizations based on the working class and class struggle. It was founded on 28 September 1864 at a workers' meeting in St Martin's Hall, London, and its first congress was held in 1866 in Geneva.

The IWA's history was characterized by internal conflicts between different socialist and anarchist factions. The initial ideological struggle was between the communists or Marxists, centred around Karl Marx on the General Council, and the mutualists or followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The communists successfully displaced the mutualists as the dominant ideological trend at the Brussels Congress in 1868. The rise of Mikhail Bakunin's collectivist anarchist faction in the late 1860s led to a more intense conflict over the role of the state and political action in achieving socialism. The organization reached its peak following the Paris Commune of 1871, which was celebrated and defended by the International in Marx's influential address, The Civil War in France. The bloody suppression of the Commune, however, led to a period of harsh government repression against the IWA.

Anarchism in Russia developed out of the populist and nihilist movements' dissatisfaction with the government reforms of the time.

The first Russian to identify himself as an anarchist was the revolutionary socialist Mikhail Bakunin, who became a founding figure of the modern anarchist movement within the International Workingmen's Association (IWA). In the context of the split within the IWA between the Marxists and the anarchists, the Russian Land and Liberty organization also split between a Marxist faction that supported political struggle and an anarchist faction that supported "propaganda of the deed", the latter of which went on to orchestrate the assassination of Alexander II.

Collectivist anarchism, also called anarchist collectivism and anarcho-collectivism, is an anarchist school of thought that envisions both the collective ownership of the means of production, and the entitlement of workers to the fruits of their own labour, which would be ensured by a societal pact between individuals and collectives. Collectivists considered trade unions to be the means through which to bring about collectivism through a social revolution, where they would form the nucleus for a post-capitalist society.

The tendency was initially conceived as a synthesis of social equality and liberty, by the Russian revolutionary socialist Mikhail Bakunin. It is commonly associated with the anti-authoritarian sections of the International Workingmen's Association and the early Spanish anarchist movement, with whom it continued to hold a strong influence until the end of the 19th century. Eventually, it was supplanted as the dominant tendency of anarchism by anarcho-communism, which advocated for the abolition of wages and the distribution of resources "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

Pavel Borisovich Axelrod (Russian: Па́вел Бори́сович Аксельро́д; 25 August 1850 – 16 April 1928) was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, and a leader of the Mensheviks. Originally a follower of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, he converted to Marxism in the early 1880s and became a co-founder, alongside Georgy Plekhanov, of the first Russian Marxist organization, the Emancipation of Labour group, in 1883.

Following the 1903 split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), Axelrod emerged as the foremost ideologist of the Menshevik faction. He formulated the main tenets of Menshevism, arguing for the creation of a broad-based, mass workers' party in contrast to Vladimir Lenin's concept of a narrow, centralized vanguard party. He emphasized the importance of the proletariat's political self-activity (samodeiatel'nost) and insisted that the party must follow, not dictate to, the working class.

The Hague Congress was the fifth congress of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), held from 2–7 September 1872 in The Hague, the Netherlands.

A total of 65 delegates from 15 “regional” organizations attended; a third of the delegates did not attend. At this congress, a split occurred between the Marxists and the Bakuninists, when the Marx-aligned delegates voted to expel Mikhail Bakunin and move the General Council from London to New York, precipitating the organization's decline.