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BATTLE BETWEEN MARX AND BAKOUNIN
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by the liberal and radical bourgeois." (34) Altogether,
there is no immediate hope of socialism there. In
Switzerland the people are asleep. "If the human world
were on the point of dying, the Swiss would not resuscitate
it." (35) Only in Germany is socialism making
headway, and Bakounin undertakes to examine this socialism
and to put it forward as a horrible example. To
be sure, the German workers are awakening, but they
are under the leadership of certain cunning politicians,
who have abandoned all revolutionary ideas, and are now
undertaking to reform the State, hoping that that could
be done as a result of "a great peaceful and legal agitation
of the working class." (36) The very name Liebknecht
had taken for his paper, the Volksstaat, was infamous
in Bakounin's eyes, while all the leaders of the
labor party had become merely appendages to "their
friends of the bourgeois Volkspartei." (37) He then
passes in review the program of the German socialists,
and points to their aim of establishing a democratic
State by the "direct and secret suffrage for all men" and
its
guidance by direct legislation, as the utter abandonment
of every revolutionary idea. He dwells upon the
folly of the suffrage and of every effort to remodel, recast,
and change the State, as "purely political and bourgeois."(38)
Democracies and republics are no less tyrannical than
monarchies. The suffrage cannot alter them. In England,
Switzerland, and America, he declares, the masses
now have political power, yet they remain in the deepest
depths of misery. Universal suffrage is only a new superstition,
while the referendum, already existing in
Switzerland, has failed utterly to improve the condition
of the people. The working-class slaves, even in the most
democratic countries, "have neither the instruction, nor