Mikhail Bakunin Quotes on Freedom
Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) gave nineteenth-century anarchism its principal philosophical voice in God and the State (1882, posthumous), Statism and Anarchy (1873), and the polemical writings against the Marxist faction of the First International from which the anarchist tradition definitively split at the 1872 Hague Congress. The fundamental claim is that genuine human freedom is incompatible with any form of political authority — the capitalist state, the socialist state, the church — and that the proper object of revolutionary action is therefore the immediate dissolution of the state in favor of a federation of self-governing producer associations rather than the seizure of state power for the construction of a workers' state. The framework grounds Bakunin's enduring opposition to Marx and the philosophical tradition of revolutionary anarchism through Kropotkin, Reclus, and beyond.
Quotes
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“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”
Amoureux et jaloux de la liberté humaine, et la considérant comme la condition absolue de tout ce que nous adorons et respectons dans l'humanité, je retourne la phrase de Voltaire, et je dis : Si Dieu existait réellement, il faudrait le faire disparaître. -
“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
The Reaction in Germany" (1842) | Often paraphrased as, "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" [ 1 ] [ 2 ] -
Attributed to Mikhail Bakunin:
“I am free only when all human beings around me are equally free.”
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“Freedom without socialism is privilege; socialism without freedom is slavery.”
As we are convinced that the real attainment of liberty, of justice, and of peace in the world will be impossible so long as the immense majority of the populations are dispossessed of property, deprived of education and condemned to political and social nonbeing and a de facto if not a de jure slavery, through their state of misery as well as their need to labor without rest or leisure, in produc -
Attributed to Mikhail Bakunin:
“Liberty is not the daughter, but the mother, of order.”
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“What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their ignorance, want and clamoring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.”
Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom (1867) -
“Solidarity in Liberty: The Workers' Path to Freedom (1867)”
What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the consci -
“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.”
The Red Association" (1870)