Politics & Power Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin is doing two things at once here: prosecuting a strategic argument against Marxism and laundering a vicious ethnic scapegoat into the logic of that argument. The line is built like a syllogism. Marx wants centralization; centralization breeds a class of intermediaries; therefore, “the parasitic Jewish nation” will thrive. It’s meant to sound like hard-eyed political realism, the kind radicals tell themselves they need when they’re warning comrades about the next betrayal.

The rhetorical trick is that Bakunin folds an old, conspiratorial stereotype into a contemporary intra-left feud. In the 19th century, “Jewish” often functioned in European polemics as shorthand for finance, brokerage, and urban modernity - a way to personify an abstract economic fear. By attaching that stereotype to “speculates upon the labor of people,” Bakunin smuggles moral disgust into what pretends to be structural critique. He’s not analyzing exploitation; he’s assigning it a face.

Context matters: Bakunin’s break with Marx was bitter and organizational, fought over the First International and over whether emancipation runs through a workers’ state or through the destruction of the state. This sentence weaponizes that disagreement. Centralization isn’t merely inefficient or authoritarian; it is portrayed as the habitat in which a designated “nation” survives by feeding off others.

The subtext is a warning about who will “really” govern after revolution: not workers, but bureaucrats and supposedly alien profiteers. It’s revolutionary paranoia posing as sociology - and it shows how even anti-authoritarian politics can relapse into the oldest authoritarian move of all: blaming a people for a system.