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 work he was sitting in the British Museum and trying to find a positivist and materialist basis for economics and the philosophy of history, while Bakunin was helping to organise revolts and only incidentally trying to work out his thoughts in theory. That is why Marx is so far superior to Bakunin as a sociologist and interpreter of history.

At an early stage Marx broke away from Bakunin in his habit of ignoring the Church and its political importance. Bakunin remained closer to Feuerbach or, if you will, closer to his own views before he lost his belief. He formulated the essence of theocracy in the phrases: “Where there is no religion, there can be no State,” and “Religion is the substance, the essence of the life of every State.” To this view he always adhered, the only difference being that later on he sought to replace religion by philosophy.

From the very first they differed in their views on social and State administration. Marx is a centralist, Bakunin a federalist. Bakunin remains revolutionary; Marx and his followers do not give up the idea of revolution, but postpone its realisation to a more and more distant future, while seeking to prepare for its advent by a share in parliamentarism. When Bismarck introduced universal suffrage, Marx and Engels employed it so effectively as a weapon that the latter, shortly before his death, declared the revolution to be unnecessary. Bakunin would have nothing to do with universal suffrage or any political institution, and hence looked upon Marxism as mere State socialism. Bismarck he hated beyond words, Bismarckism was to him merely “militarism, police régime, and financial monopoly combined into a system.” And with Bismarck he also condemned the Germans as a State-race, and expected of the Slavs and Latins, not that they would create a great Slav State against Pangermanism, but that they would through social revolution found “a new world, lawless, and therefore free.” Bakunin will not recognise reforms, he desires " overthrow from the foundations”: his aim is total disorganisation, political amorphism and chaos, in the hope that future society will form itself spontaneously from below. Marx and Engels are calmer in their judgment of the State, because, as historical materialists, they recognise the primacy of economic organisation in social politics.