Science & Tech Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin smuggles a communal ethic into what sounds, at first blush, like an almost managerial observation. “Division and association of labor” is the language of factories and laboratories, the era’s twin engines of prestige. He borrows their prestige to make a heretical point: cooperation isn’t a moral add-on to modern life; it’s the operating system. Even science, the supposed kingdom of solitary genius, depends on split tasks, shared tools, inherited methods. Industry makes the same dependence louder, harder to ignore.

The subtext is a direct jab at the liberal fantasy of the self-made individual and the authoritarian fantasy of the all-directing state. “I receive and I give” turns human life into an exchange that can’t be cleanly privatized. You don’t just trade goods; you trade formation. Skills, ideas, and even freedom are social products. Bakunin’s insistence that “each directs and is directed in his turn” is doing political work: it reframes authority as situational and rotating rather than permanent and concentrated. Leadership becomes a temporary function of competence, not a title backed by police.

Context matters: writing in the 19th century’s churn of revolutions and industrialization, Bakunin is watching hierarchies harden inside the very systems that claim progress. He doesn’t deny specialization; he denies its conversion into domination. The intent is to rescue modern complexity from becoming an argument for bosses, bureaucrats, or “experts” as a ruling class. Mutual dependence, for Bakunin, isn’t a reason to submit. It’s the strongest case for solidarity and shared power.