When Marx talks about “political action”, he is referring to universal suffrage and parliamentary strategy.
When Marx speaks of “revolution” in the Manifesto, he speaks of a political revolution to conquer universal suffrage. The whole political strategy of Marx and Engels is based on the illusion that the proletariat constitutes the majority of the population and that it will inevitably end up electing a majority of socialists to parliament, whereas Proudhon had shown that parliamentary democracy only brought the bourgeoisie to power.
The “independent working-class political action” (i.e. the creation of a political party running for parliamentary elections) had been decided in September 1871 at the London Conference of the IWA, which was a confidential, fractional meeting that brought together Marx’s supporters. This decision was then voted the following year during the rigged congress of The Hague which inserted in the IWA statutes an Article 7a which made electoral action compulsory.
Bakunin was naturally not opposed to working class political action in general; however, he was:
a) Opposed to the adoption by the IWA of a mandatory political program because it would inevitably produce splits and, as he said, there would be as many Internationals as there were different programs” (Bakunin, “Writings against Marx”, Nov.-Dec. 1872. Bakunin, Selected texts 1868-1875, Anarres Editions. )
and
b) Opposed to the electoral strategy because, far from leading to the emancipation of the working class, it led instead to its subjugation to bourgeois politics.
Bakunin had formed his opinion on the one hand by observing the parliamentary politics of the Swiss socialists, which served the interests of the bourgeois radicals, but also by Proudhon’s experience, who had been elected to Parliament in 1848 and had discovered that elections simply drove the bourgeoisie to power.
Is it necessary to say that Proudhon’s view has been widely confirmed by history? Is it necessary to say that when Socialists come to power through elections, they quickly turn into servants of the bourgeoisie?
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Ah, Hal Draper -- that anti-anarchist hack. Not someone to be taken that seriously. For example, he quotes Engels:
"If anything is established, it is that our party and the working class can come to power only under the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French revolution [the Paris Commune] has already shown."
And adds "the Paris Commune" after "the great French revolution" in spite of no one ever calling the Paris Commune (limited as it was to Paris) the "great French revolution" and everyone calling the Revolution of 1789-1793 "the great French Revolution".
Moreover, contextually, no evidence exists to support Draper's claim and what does disputes it - Engels discusses French history and makes no mention of the Commune but does mention the republic of 1792 to 1799. In fact, Engels goes on to argue that "[f]rom 1792 to 1799 each French department, each commune, enjoyed complete self-government on the American model, and this is what we too must have. How self-government is to be organised and how we can manage without a bureaucracy has been shown to us by America and the first French Republic." (Collected Works, vol. 27, p. 227-9)
Draper adds in a footnote:
'Because of the expression “great French revolution,” the assumption has often been made that Engels meant the French Revolution of 1789; but the idea that he, or anyone else, could view 1789 (or 1793) as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is too absurd to entertain. The specific reasons why this interpretation is untenable are presented in Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution 3.'
Yet both Marx and Engels viewed the French Republic under the Jacobins as a situation where the proletariat held political power (although, like Marx with the Paris Commune, they do not use the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to describe it). Engels wrote of "the rule of the Mountain party" as being "the short time when the proletariat was at the helm of the state in the French Revolution" and "from May 31, 1793 to July 26, 1794 . . . not a single bourgeois dared show his face in the whole of France." Marx, similarly, wrote of this period as one in which "the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie" but due to the "material conditions" its acts were "in service" of the bourgeois revolution. The "bloody action of the people" only "prepared the way for" the bourgeoisie by destroying feudalism, something which the bourgeoisie was not capable of. (Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 373, p. 5 and p. 319]
Apparently Engels did not consider it "too absurd to entertain" that the French Republic of 1793 was "a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'" and, ironically, Draper's "anyone else" turned out to be Marx!
In short, Draper was never one to let the facts get in the way of his assertions. Ignoring this, he makes no attempt to explain why the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would not become the "dictatorship over the proletariat" in spite of the awkward fact it always has.