That is because no state, not even the most republican and democratic, not even the pseudo-popular state contemplated by Marx, in essence represents … - Mikhail Bakunin

The most terrible poverty, however, even when it strikes a proletariat numbering in the many millions, is not a sufficient guarantee of revolution. Nature has given man an astonishing and, indeed, sometimes despairing, patience, and the devil knows what he will not endure when, along with poverty that condemns him to unheard-of privations and slow starvation, he is also endowed with obtuseness, emotional numbness, lack of any consciousness of his rights, and the kind of imperturbability and obedience that particularly characterize the east Indians and the Germans, among all nations. Such a fellow will never take heart; he will die, but he will not rebel.

Improve working conditions, render to labor what is justly due to labor, and thereby give the people security, comfort, and leisure Then, believe me, they will educate themselves; they will create a larger, saner, higher civilization than this.

Cooperation in all its forms is undeniably a rational and just mode of future production. But for it to achieve its objective — liberation of all the workers and their full compensation and satisfaction — all forms of land and capital must become collective property. Until that occurs, cooperation in the majority of cases will be crushed by the almighty competition of big capital and big landholding. In the rare cases when some producers’ association, invariably more or less isolated, does succeed in withstanding and surviving this struggle, the result of its success will merely be the rise of a new privileged class of fortunate collectivists within the destitute mass of the proletariat. Thus, under the existing conditions of social economy, cooperation cannot liberate the worker masses. Nevertheless, it does offer the benefit, even now, of accustoming the workers to unite, organize, and independently manage their own affairs.