nsolent invasion by the social revolution no less ruthless and a
thousand times more menacing--it is certain, I maintain, that then
France is lost, her masses of working people will be slaves, and French
socialism will have lived its life."[32]

Approaching his subject in this dramatic manner, Bakounin turns to
examine the degenerate state of socialism in Italy, Switzerland, and
Germany to see "what will be the chances of working-class emancipation
in all the rest of Europe."[33] In the first country socialism is only
in its infancy. The Italians are wholly ignorant of the true causes of
their misery. They are crushed, maltreated, and dying of hunger. They
are "led blindly 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, "ha