adhere to views formed in his age of faith. In the Introduction to Hegel's Gymnasial Lectures, Bakunin formulated the essence of theocracy by saying, "where there is no religion there can be no state," and "religion is the substance, the quintessence, of the life of every state." Such was his opinion throughout life, the only change being that in maturer years he wished to replace religion by philosophy. The two men had at first similar ideas regarding the state, but the views and conduct of Marx underwent modification in proportion as he elaborated his historical materialism and his philosophy of history. From the first and subsequently (after 1863) Bakunin was more hostile to the state, which to him seemed more important than it did to Marx. Bakunin discovered the leading political and social evil in the principle of the state, in authority itself, not in political forms, which seemed to him matters of comparative indifference; this is why he was continually engaged in the organisation of conspiracies for the final destruction of the state. Marx was likewise opposed to the state, but desired to use it for his own ends; Marx, too, looked forward to a condition in which the state will no longer exist; but this is to be brought about with the help of the state, the state is to abolish itself.
From the very outset, Marx and Bakunin differed in their respective conceptions of political and social administration. Marx was a centralist, Bakunin a federalist.[1]
Bakunin remained a revolutionary. Marx and the Marxists did not abandon the revolutionary idea, but they tended increasingly to postpone revolutionary practice to a distant future; political effort, participation in parliamentarism, was to prepare the way for the realisation of the revolution. When Bismarck granted universal suffrage, Marx and Engels forged their weapons out of it in such a fashion that shortly before his death (1895) Engels declared revolution to be needless, and was eloquently silent concerning the definitive revolution. Bakunin would not hear a word of universal suffrage or of any other political institution; he looked upon Marxism as nothing more than state socialism. Even the worker, when he becomes a ruler or a popular representative, is taking part in the state, and the state is the secret or overt source of slavery. All political activity is essentially bourgeois. Bakunin
- ↑ In the beginning Bakunin fought only against state absolutism: as late as 1868, like the Marxists, he would hear of nothing but a republic.
