Politics & Power Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin is doing two things at once here: sketching a nightmare of technocratic rule and, in the same breath, smuggling in a prejudiced scapegoat to make that nightmare feel concrete. The first clause reads like a proto-critique of “rule by experts” avant la lettre. “Skilled and learned” isn’t praise; it’s a warning about a self-justifying caste that confuses competence with legitimacy, turning knowledge into a license to dominate. For a revolutionary anarchist, that’s the betrayal baked into every promised “temporary” transition: the administrators become a new class.

Then comes the uglier pivot. The phrase “profitable crooked deals carried on by the Jews” doesn’t merely reflect ambient 19th-century European antisemitism; it performs a rhetorical function inside his argument. It offers a ready-made villain for the abstract machinery of finance (“international speculations,” “national banks”) and gives readers a human target instead of a system. The subtext is conspiratorial: modern capital as an international web, national institutions as a facade, and a minority figured as the natural intermediary of corruption. It’s a cheap shortcut that converts structural critique into ethnic suspicion.

Context matters: Bakunin is writing in an era when banking, credit, and state-building were rapidly modernizing, and radicals across the spectrum were struggling to narrate invisible economic power. He’s prescient about how “expert” governance can reproduce hierarchy, but he contaminates that insight with a bigotry that narrows analysis into stereotype. The line shows a revolutionary imagination capable of diagnosing new forms of domination, and a political culture still eager to explain complexity by pointing at Jews.