Mikhail Bakunin Quotes on Politics
Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) gave nineteenth-century anarchism its principal philosophical voice and the First International its decisive split from the Marxist faction at the 1872 Hague Congress. The central commitments — developed across God and the State (1882, posthumous), Statism and Anarchy (1873), and the polemical writings against Marx — are that genuine human freedom is incompatible with any form of political authority (the capitalist state, the proposed socialist state, the church), that the proper revolutionary action is the immediate dissolution of the state in favor of a federation of self-governing producer associations, and that any post-revolutionary state would inevitably re-establish in new forms the very domination revolution had aimed to abolish. The framework grounds Bakunin’s enduring opposition to Marx and the philosophical tradition of revolutionary anarchism through Kropotkin, Reclus, and the broader twentieth-century anarchist movements.
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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“The Reaction in Germany" (1842) , Bakunin's first political writings, under the pseudonym "Jules Elysard"; it was not until 1860 that he began to publicly assert a stance of firm atheism and vigorous rejection of traditional religious institutions.”
FREEDOM , the realization of freedom: who can deny that this is what today heads the agenda of history ? … Revolutionary propaganda is in its deepest sense the negation of the existing conditions of the State, for, with respect to its innermost nature , it has no other program than the destruction of whatever order prevails at the time.... We must not only act politically , but in our politics act -
“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.”
The Red Association" (1870)