Daily Inspiration Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin’s line isn’t a warning about “big government” in the modern, tax-policy sense. It’s a revolutionary X-ray: the State, by its nature, concentrates coercive power, and that concentration inevitably sorts people into rulers and ruled. The phrasing is almost mathematical - “If... then...” - as if domination is not a political accident but a built-in property, like pressure in a sealed container. Once you accept the State as the container, Bakunin argues, you’ve accepted the pressure.

The provocation is the jump from “domination” to “slavery.” He’s not claiming every citizen is literally chained; he’s insisting that dependency enforced by law is still dependency. “Slavery” functions here as moral shock therapy, collapsing polite distinctions between “legitimate authority” and outright bondage. The subtext: the liberal promise that the State can be tamed by constitutions, elections, or good intentions is a comforting story told by people close enough to power to mistake its restraints for its essence.

Context sharpens the blade. Bakunin writes from the 19th-century ferment of empire, industrial capitalism, and the rise of socialist parties that increasingly imagined capturing the State to liberate workers. He’s preemptively attacking that strategy: a workers’ State would still be a State, producing a new managerial class - bureaucrats, police, party elites - who govern in the name of emancipation. The sentence is designed to foreclose compromise. If the State equals domination, reform is lipstick; the only coherent politics is dismantling the apparatus itself and rebuilding social order from the bottom up, before liberation gets rebranded as administration.