Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy

‎"No state, however democratic...not even the reddest republic -- can ever give the people what they really want, i.e. the free organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State...is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves...but the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled 'the people's stick'" --Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy [1873]