1st July 1876 the Death of Mikhail Bakunin

...While Bakunin is undoubtedly one of the key anarchist thinkers and activists of the 19th century, on this anniversary of his death, we remember him primarily as a prophet. A prophet whose visions extended clearly and far-sightedly enough to recognise that Marxism would only create in its leaders monstrous substitutes for those ‘divine figures’ who had for centuries ruled us before. Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong. Pol Pot. Decades before they came to power, Bakunin predicted the inevitable rise of this new breed of tyrants when he wrote:

They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship — their dictatorship, of course — can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

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