Kindle Notes & Highlights
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June 11 - June 28, 2017
The minoritarian founders of even the most primitive State bequeath to their offspring superior social status and all its concomitant advantages, including the "right" to exploit.
Foreseeing our modern notion of privilege.
From the moment that a villainy is committed in the service of the State, it becomes a meritorious act. That is the morality of the State. It is the very negation of human morality and of humanity.
No doubt he would have recognized the Trump Administration.
That is why we are the enemies of God Almighty, why we call this fiction, this Divine Phantom, one of the basic sources of the evils which torment mankind.
The Divine Phantom. Love it.
isolated, labor will be the slave of capital and workers the subjects of Bourgeois Gentlemen, who out of ridicule give you every political right and every semblance of freedom, so as to preserve its reality exclusively for themselves.
What the GOP is doing now and has been doing for decades.
slave; and if he exercises any political rights, you can be sure, one way or another, that he will always exercise them against himself, for his exploiters' and masters' benefit.
Omg, yes. This explains why people vote against their interests!
The theory of the free contract is just as false from the standpoint of nature. Man does not voluntarily create society, he is involuntarily born into it.
To fill conscientiously the offices of the State, and above all the highest offices, it is first necessary to possess an equally large amount of education.
Those who hold power actively seek to limit this in the poor.
What is involved is not only the natural inequality of individuals; it is an inequality to which we are compelled to resign ourselves.
In a democratic State, it will be said, the people will choose only the good men. But how will they recognize them?
Do you know the true definition of hereditary property? It is the hereditary ability to exploit the collective labor of the people and to enslave the masses.
This was again a lie! I ask you whether fraternity is possible between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and the oppressed?
equality joins forces with the power and authority of the State, and the result is incompatible with freedom.
True communism cannot be brought to fruition by the state.
There, the bourgeois principle has had full freedom to be expressed in literature, politics, and social economy since 1830. That principle can be summarized in a single word: individualism.
The State demands only one thing: that all these crimes be committed legally. I may ruin you, walk over you, and destroy you, but I must observe the laws in doing so.
The first obligation, which we find at the head of the Preamble, is to strive with every effort for the triumph of EQUALITY; not just of political equality, which would be pure radicalism, but of simultaneously political, economic, and social equality, through the abolition of all possible privileges, economic as well as political, so that for all persons on earth, without regard to color, nationality, or sex, there may henceforth be only a single social way of life: "the same obligations, the same rights."
them, have manifested their talent in infancy, in adolescence, or even in early adulthood. Their genius was demonstrated only when they had reached a mature age,
Bakunin is incorrect here
conclusion-that any political revolution that does not have economic equality as its immediate and direct goal is, from the standpoint of the interests and the rights of the people, nothing but hypocritical and camouflaged reaction.
Why I still believe BernieSanders is correct.
Human beings, who are preeminently carnivorous, began their history with cannibalism.
What?
It is exactly the solidaristic interest of this privileged class that is called patriotism.
Didn't human beings begin with cannibalism?
Not necessarily. Some groups did, some did not.
All those with whom an individual finds it impossible to reproduce, form a different species, an absolutely foreign and hostile world, condemned to be destroyed;
Again, not necessarily. My cats live side by side with my chickens. Bakunin generalizes entirely too much.
No one will dispute that the instinctive or natural patriotism of the wretched tribes inhabiting the arctic zones, which have hardly been touched by civilization and whose material life is stricken by poverty, is infinitely stronger and more exclusive than the patriotism of, for example, a Frenchman, an Englishman, or a German.
And yet, how much poorer and less human his existence is!
Hello, privilege!
For them, the more absurd and impossible a thing is, the truer it is. All religions are only deifications of the absurd.
But, they will say, the world was perfect, only less perfect than God. To this I shall reply that one cannot speak of more or less where perfection is involved. Either perfection is complete, whole, and absolute, or it does not exist; therefore, if the world was less perfect than God, the world was imperfect.
And this is what dealing in absolutes gets you.
