Mikhail Bakunin Quotes (1814-1876)

“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.”

“Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way and only this way are new worlds born”

“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.”

“A slave owner is not a man but a master. By denying the humanity of his slaves he also abrogates his own humanity.”

“Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.”

“Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.”

“Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.”

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”

“Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning. And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!”

“Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning. And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!”

“All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.”

“All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers.”

“As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations… He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right.”

“As a romantic rebel and an active force in history, Bakunin exerted a personal attraction that Marx could never rival. … His broad magnanimity and childlike enthusiasm, his burning passion for liberty and equality, his volcanic onslaughts against privilege and injustice — all gave him enormous appeal in the libertarian circles of his day. But Bakunin, as his critics never tired of pointing out, was not a systematic thinker. Nor did he ever claim to be. … He refused to recognize the existence of any preconceived or preordained laws of history. … He believed, on the contrary, that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives cannot be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract social formulas. … And yet, however erratic and unmethodical, his writings abound in flashes of insight that illuminate some of the most important social questions of his time — and of ours.”

“I looked up to these Russians who could discuss by the hour the theories of Marx and Bakunin, who had participated in demonstrations and other revolutionary activity.”

“To classify the views with those of Bakunin as forms of semi-anarchistic 'populism', or with those of Proudhon or Rodbertus or Chernyshevsky as yet another variant of early socialism with an agrarian bias, is to leave out his most arresting contribution to political theory. This injustice deserves to be remedied.”

“Bakunin is a many-sided phenomenon and could be studied in many aspects and from many points of view. He is-rightly, on the whole-regarded as the father of anarchism; for William Godwin, to whom the title is sometimes awarded, never left the plane of abstract theory, and the anarchism of Proudhon took on the special concrete mould of syndicalism and exercised a lasting influence on French politics and French thought mainly in that guise. Bakunin was the apostle of liberty in its absolute form-a liberty which, as M. Hepner remarks, had nothing in common with Hegel's conception of liberty realizing itself in the State. Yet Bakunin, on the strength of his emphasis on propaganda by deed and of his willingness to appeal to the "evil passions", has often been convicted of an affinity with the movements which ultimately issued in Fascism. He was always ready to subordinate theory to the spontaneous character of the revolutionary impulse; in this respect he was a revolutionary empiricist and stood at the opposite pole to Marx. When Lenin in 1917 announced that, in spite of the rudimentary progress made by the Russian bourgeois revolution, the socialist revolution was at hand, the Mensheviks-and some of his own followers-branded him as a disciple of Bakunin and not of Marx.”

“Bakunin's social theory began, and almost ended, with liberty. Against the claims of liberty nothing else in his view was worth consideration at all. He attacked, remorselessly and without qualification, every institution that seemed to him to be inconsistent with liberty.”

“The world carnage put an end to the golden era when a Bakunin and a Herzen, a Marx and a Kropotkin, a Malatesta and a Lenin, Vera Sazulich, Louise Michel, and all the others could come and go without hindrance. In those days who cared about passports or visas? Who worried about one particular spot on earth? The whole world was one's country.”

“Although Bakunin had included in the programme of his International Alliance of Social Democracy the explicit aim of abolishing sexual inequality along with class inequality, the anarchist record on women's rights was an uneven one.”