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Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and that socialism
without liberty is slavery and brutality.
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Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of
decisively interfering in the life of someone else.
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"The abolition of the Church and the State must be the first and
indispensable condition of the true liberation of society; only after this
can society be organised in another manner, but not from the top downwards
and according to some ideal plan, dreamed up by a few sages and scholars,
and certainly not by decrees issued by some dictatorial power or even by
a national assembly elected by universal suffrage. As I have already
shown, such a system would lead inevitably to the creation of a new state,
and consequently to the formation of a governemental aristocracy, that is
to say a whole class of individuals having nothing in common with the mass
of the people, which would immediately begin to exploit and subdue that
people in the name of the commonwealth or in order to save the State."
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"God being master, man is the slave." M. Bakunin :God and the State
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"In common with all socialists, the anarchists hold that the
private ownership of land, capital, and machinery has had its time;
that it is condemned to disappear: and that all requisites for
production must, and will, become the common property of society,
and be managed in common by the producers of wealth. And...they
maintain that the ideal of the political organization of society is a
condition of things where the functions of government are reduced to
minimum....(and) that the ultimate aim of society is the reduction of
the functions of government to nil--that is, to a society without
government, to an-archy."
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"[E]verything that lives, does so under the categorical condition
of decisively interfering in the life of someone else....
The worse it is for those who are so ignorant of the natural and
social law of human solidarity that they deem possible or even
desirable the absolute independence of individuals in regard to one
another. To will it is to will the disappearance of society.... All men,
even the most intelligent and strongest are at every instant of their
lives the producers and the product. Freedom itself, the freedom of
every man, is the ever-renewed effect of the great mass of physical.
intellectual, and moral influonces to which this man is subjected by
the people surrounding him and the environment in which he was
born and in which he passed his whole life.
To wish to escape this influence in the name of some . . . self-
sufficient and absolutely egoistical freedom. is to aim toward non-
being.
To do away with this reciprocal influence is tantamount to
death. And in demanding the freedom of the masses we do not intend
to do away with natural influences to which man is subjected by
individuals and groups. All we want is to do away with is factitious.
legitimized influences. to do away with the privileges in exerting
influence."
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"Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the
serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person ant his
liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf
because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his
head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions
imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist,
the employer.... The worker always has the right to leave his
employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to
sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same
hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.
"Thus the "worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom.
lacking any means for its possible realization. ant consequently it is
only a fictitious liberty. an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole
life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of
terms of serfdom--"voluntary from the juridical point of view but
compulsory from an economic sense--broken up by momentarily brief
interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is
real slavery"
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"Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow-
man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power."
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The State is the organized authority, domination, and power of
the possessing classes over the masses\ldots{\em the most
flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of
humanity}. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the
earth, and brings some of them into association only for the
purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the
rest.\ldots This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes
the very essence of the State is, from the standpoint of the
State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue\ldots Thus, to
offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or
enslave one's fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In
public life, on the other hand, from the standpoint of
patriotism, when these things are done for the greater glory of
the State, for the preservation or the extension of its power, it
is all transformed into duty and virtue\ldots This explains why
the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a
series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and
present, of all times and all countries---statesmen, diplomats,
bureaucrats, and warriors---if judged from the standpoint of
simply morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand
times over earned their sentence to hard labor or to the gallows.
There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no
imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold
plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily
being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no
other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so
terrible: ``{\em for reasons of state}.''
---Michael Bakunin, {Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism},
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"Even if god really did exist, it would be necessary to abolish him"
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"If you pull a sapling out of the ground, cut off all the leaves, and
branches and make it into a club, you cannot expect to plant it back in
the ground and have it grow into a beautifull tree..."
Bakunin to Marx
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"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier
if it is called `the People's Stick'."