Wit & Attitude Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin doesn’t politely argue here; he indicts. The line is built like a courtroom charge sheet: “pretense, a fraud, a lie.” Each noun tightens the noose, stripping liberal “political freedom” of its self-congratulatory glow and recasting it as theater staged for people who don’t own the stage. The insistence that workers “want no lying” isn’t a sentimental appeal to honesty; it’s a warning that patience has run out. If freedom is real, it must be materially lived, not merely legally declared.

The specific intent is agitational clarity. Bakunin is drawing a hard boundary between rights on paper and power in practice, insisting that votes, constitutions, and parliaments can’t compensate for wage dependence and property monopolies. “Without economic equality” is the hinge: he’s not saying politics doesn’t matter, he’s saying politics is easily purchased when wealth is radically unequal. Formal liberties become permission slips to compete in a rigged contest.

Subtext: the bourgeois state sells a moral alibi. It offers “freedom” as a brand while keeping the economic structure that forces workers to accept terms set by owners. Calling it “lying” reframes compromise as complicity; it also justifies extra-parliamentary action. If the system is fraudulent, then refusing its rules becomes not extremism but honesty.

Context matters. Bakunin is writing in the pressure cooker of 19th-century industrialization, when suffrage expands unevenly while factories concentrate wealth and discipline bodies. He’s also sparring with Marx and other socialists over what emancipation looks like: for Bakunin, a state promising equality is still a state, and states don’t liberate workers - they manage them.