Editing Mikhail Bakunin (section)

=== Authority ===

Bakunin saw the institutions of church and state as standing against the aims of emancipatory community, namely that they impose wisdom and justice from above under the pretense that the masses could not fully self-govern. He wrote that "to exploit and to govern mean the same thing".{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=318}} Bakunin held the State as a regulated system of domination and exploitation by a privileged, ruling class.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=318}} This applied to States both historical and contemporaneous, including modern monarchies and republics that each used military and bureaucratic centralization. He regarded representative democracies as a paradoxical abstraction from social reality. Although a popular legislature is meant to represent the will of the people, he saw it rarely function as such in practice. Elected politicians instead represented abstractions. Bakunin believed that powerful institutions to be inherently stronger than individual will and incapable of internal reform due to the overwhelming ambitions and temptations that corrupt those with power. To Bakunin, anarchists were rightly "enemies of all power, knowing that power corrupts those invested with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it".{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=319}}

Bakunin clashed with Marx over worker governance and revolutionary change. Bakunin argued that even the best revolutionary placed on the Russian throne would become worse than Czar Alexander. Bakunin wrote that socialist workers in power would become ex-workers who govern by their own pretensions, not representing the people.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=321}} Bakunin did not believe in transitional dictatorship serving any purpose other than to perpetuate itself, saying that "liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality".{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=322}} Bakunin disagreed with Marx that [[Withering away of the state|the state would wither away]] under worker ownership and that worker conquest and changes in production conditions would inherently kill the state.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=322}} Bakunin promoted spontaneous worker actions over Marx's suggested organization of a working-class party.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=321}}

While Bakunin believed that science and specialists could be useful in enlightening communities, he did not believe in government by experts or letting any privileged minority rule over a majority or any presumed intelligence rule over a presumed stupidity. Bakunin wrote of referring to the "[[Authority of the bootmaker|authority to the bootmaker]]" on boots and to savants for their specialties, and listening to them freely in respect for their expertise, but not allowing the bootmaker or the savant to impose this authority and not letting them be beyond criticism or censure. Bakunin believed that authority should be in continual voluntary exchange rather than a constant subordination. He believed intelligence to have intrinsic benefits so as to not require additional privileges.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=320}}