Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary and one of the founding theorists of collectivist anarchism, later Karl Marx’s great rival in the First International. The line closes his first major political essay, “The Reaction in Germany” (1842), written while he was a young Left Hegelian in Dresden. Its fusion of destruction and creation became a rallying cry for later radicals — famously resurfacing as graffiti in the 1968 Paris uprising.