Michael Bakunin
Marxism, Freedom and the State
Freedom Press, 1950

"By the flower of the proletariat I mean precisely 
that eternal 'meat' for governments, that great 
rabble of the people ordinarily designated by 
Messrs. Marx and Engels by the phrase at once 
picturesque and contemptuous of 'lumpen 
proletariat', the 'riff raff', that rabble which, 
being very nearly unpolluted by all bourgeois 
civilization carries in its heart, in its 
aspirations, in all necessities and the miseries 
of its collective position, all the germs of the 
Socialism of the future, and which alone is 
powerful enough to-day to inaugurate the Social 
Revolution and bring it to triumph.
. . . .


"But thanks to this great beloved 'riff raff' of 
the common people, who will oppose themselves, 
urged on, by an instinct invincible as well as 
just, to all the governmentalist fancies of this 
little working-class minority already properly 
disciplined and marshaled to become the myrmidons 
of a new despotism, the scientific Socialism of 
Marx will always remain as a Marxian dream. . . .


"I have a firm confidence that in a few years the 
German workers themselves, recognising the fatal 
consequences of a theory which can only favour the 
ambition of their bourgeois chiefs or indeed that 
of some exceptional workers who seek to climb on 
the shoulders of their comrades in order to become 
dominating and exploiting bourgeois in their turn-
-I have confidence that the German workers will 
reject this theory with contempt and wrath, and 
that they will embrace the true programme of 
working-class emancipation, that of the 
destruction of States, with as much passion as do 
to-day the workers of the great Mediterranean 
countries, France, Spain, Italy, as well as the 
Dutch and Belgian workers."

[Why this quote is wrong: Bakunin predicted in his 
writings 1867 to 1872 the domination of the 
lumpenproletariat and in more than 100 years since 
that time it did not happen in one society.

After Bakunin wrote this, German Marxists "in a few years" built
a party of millions and anarchists never approached
that influence. Although Bakunin spoke of the labor
aristocracy, he did not gain from that in his
predictions.]