PART II
The Fuel and the Spark

A few years before his death, so the story goes, Jack London sent a post card to H. G. Wells which he signed with the words "Yours for the social revolution." He received the facetious reply that "there ain't going to be no- revolution." It is possible that at that time the author of the Time Machine was still clinging to his ultra-pessimist view as to the inevitable dehumanization of the working masses which in the long run would result in the division of mankind into two different species. It is of course also possible that he merely wanted to say that the majority would always remain the helpless dupe of the ruling classes.

The nightmarish concept of the Time Machine was in a way a logical development of Karl Marx's idea of the progressive pauperization of the masses -- without the deus-ex-machina happy ending of the "inevitable" collapse of capitalism and the "emancipation" of the working class through the instrumentality of a revolutionary dictatorship. So far neither Marx's nor Wells' prediction has been borne out by the actual facts. The masses have become neither more dehumanized nor more pauperized. On the contrary, their standard of living has risen in most industrial countries, the Welfare State giving them a modicum of security in case of unemployment and old age, such as they had never enjoyed before. Yet essentially they have remained the same as they had always been: easily aroused by an appeal to their prejudices and to their bloodlust, humbly submitting to the immemorial economic and cultural inequalities, and totally indifferent to the idea of political and cultural freedom. Witness the equanimity with which they accepted the complete suppression of all liberty by the totalitarian regimes of Italy, Germany and Russia; witness particularly the workers of Argentina who, prior to Peron's rise to power through a military conspiracy, had been enrolled in the various radical camps, yet forsook all their past socialist, anarchist, syndicalist and communist allegiances in exchange for the very substantial wage rises and other benefits granted them by the dictator. Far be it from this writer to blame them for this attitude. Political and cultural liberty mean free competition for power and free enjoyment of the ever changing higher aspects of culture. Both naturally mean nothing to those whom lack of higher education deprives of the possibility of competing in either the field of politics or culture. Such being the case, any regime, whether democratic or totalitarian, will always be able to keep the masses in their place as long as it is willing and able to supply them with the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. In a burst of cynical frankness Hitler told his "idealistic" and "leftist" lieutenant Otto Strasser that "the working classes want nothing but bread and games; they will never understand the meaning of an ideal."¹ Well -- they stuck to him as long as he gave them "bread" (jobs and the plunder from the conquered countries) and "games" by persecuting religious, ethnical and political minorities. And after his fall they cheerfully accepted those who succeeded him.

In his magnum opus, Die Materialistische Geschichtsauf-fassung, the German anti-Communist Marxist Karl Kautsky points out that "technical progress furnishes him [man] with deadly weapons and converts him into a beast of prey."² A beast of prey, that is, who hunts not only creatures of another animal species, but those of his own as well. Kautsky tried to tone down the melancholy conclusions one might draw from this aspect of man's progress by declaring that "war is only the product of definite phases of civilization and that it may disappear after these phases have been overcome."³ He had of course in mind the "classless" warless millennium to be established after the liquidation of the capitalist system which, according to the Marxists, is the last "antagonistic [i.e., exploitative, M.N.] form of the social process of production."⁴ (The post-capitalist exploitation inaugurated by Lenin and his followers was in Kautsky's view apparently an anti-historical freak that could not last and might as well be ignored.)

True to his optimistic philosophy, the German scholar refrained from elaborating on other consequences of man's rise from the purely animal state to a more or less civilized existence. For the development of man's technical skill meant not only a permanent state of war; it meant also the subjugation of the majority of the human race and its reduction to economic and cultural inferiority for the benefit of the victors and their descendants, who became the ruling classes of the new nations formed by the amalgamation of the invaders and the invaded.⁵

That subjection implied for the defeated and their offspring not only poverty and ignorance but also an almost permanent infection with what Etienne de La Boetie (1530-1563) called the "venom of servitude."⁶ True, there have been moments in history when that "venom of servitude" did not work, as demonstrated by many successful uprisings, particularly after a lost war. But these victories, even when they went down in history as "great revolutions," failed to change the basic pattern of civilized society. They never succeeded in breaking down the barrier which, since the dawn of civilization, has separated the educated minority from the uneducated masses. No matter how radical or thorough the change of masters -- even when that change was for the better -- the yoke of ignorance has never been thrown off by the great majority; and the comparatively small number of self-educated upstarts rising from the masses would invariably either constitute, or ally themselves with, the new master class of "haves" and "knows" established as a result of the revolution.

The servility of the masses is a corollary of their helplessness in a complex world whose operation their untutored minds are unable to understand. Suffice it to mention the attitude of the Prussian peasants who, during the Napoleonic wars, after the abolition of serfdom in 1807, petitioned the king to please let them remain in serfdom for otherwise who would take care of them in misery, sickness and old age?⁷ Or the behavior of the starving weavers of Lyons, France, who, having risen and taken possession of the city in November, 1831, did not know what to do with their victory, but considered it their first duty to send detachments of rebels into the residential sections of the rich "in order to maintain order and to protect [the] property"⁸ of those who were the cause of their misery. Or the referendum of 1926 by which the German masses decided against the confiscation of the property of the royal and princely families that had lost their thrones upon the establishment of the Republic in 1918. Or the docility of the millions of American organized workers who, save in the case of altogether monumental scandals, permanently reelect their dictatorial rulers, even if -- not satisfied with their fabulous salaries -- they are disposing of the union treasuries and welfare funds as if they were their own property.

No wonder then that during those moments of history when it seemed that the power of the old rulers was getting shaky the masses were never equal to the situation. The Roman proletarians abandoned and refused to re-elect their champion Gajus Gracchus when, in 121 B.C., he came out for the enfranchisement of all inhabitants of Italy. They would not part with the privilege of the Romans being the sole citizens of the Republic. Fifty years after the death of the Gracchi it was the peasant soldiers, mostly paupers, who crushed the revolt of Spartacus, the greatest slave uprising in history. For, if there were no slaves, they themselves would be on the bottom rung of the social ladder, and they would not stand for that, even though they themselves owned no slaves. It was the landless peasants, turned mercenary soldiers, who sixteen centuries later did the same thing to the uprising of the German serfs during the Peasant War of 1525. Between 1789 and 1794 the aroused French masses disgraced the Revolution by a display of barbaric cruelty toward their defeated enemies, carrying their severed heads on pick-axes, murdering thousands of political prisoners during the September massacres of 1792 and finally prostrating themselves before a titan of conquest and bloodshed. Forty years later, in 1830, they permitted the financial oligarchy of France to steal the fruits of the anti-Bourbon revolution and to establish a regime of bankers and big businessmen. In Central Europe the revolutions of 1848 so frightened the old rulers that they put an end to all the feudal burdens still carried by the peasants. As a result the grateful peasants rallied to their old rulers, helping them to crush the Revolution. It was the peasant soldiers of the French countryside who crushed the Paris Commune of 1871, one year after the plebiscite in which the illiterate rural population had endorsed Napoleon III by seven and a half million votes as against the one and a half million republicans of the cities. Sixty-five years later, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the soldiers, mostly poor peasants, joined the rebellious monarchist and fascist generals in the belief that, by doing so, they were defending the Republic. And in the course of the Russian Revolution of 1917 which held out the promise of at last placing Russia among the democratic nations of the world, the masses helped in the establishment of a new oligarchy whose success encouraged political adventurers, using another vocabulary, but prompted by similar appetites, to reach out for power on most of the European continent.

There were those who during the last century expected compulsory public education to put an end to the political illiteracy of the masses and thus to give real content to the idea of democracy. There were others who saw in modern industrialism the force that would invest the immense majority with that self-consciousness and class-consciousness which would enable it to defend its own interests instead of always being the unwitting tool in the struggle between contending privileged groups.

The experience of a hundred years has shown that, whether or not they are able to read and to write, the bulk of the manual workers, peasants and lower grade white collar employees, are just as unable to distinguish between facts and propaganda as had been their illiterate forefathers. In 1862 there had been many fires in St. Petersburg, the then capital of the Russian Empire, started by some mad arsonist who has never been apprehended. Immediately the illiterate crowd began to attack Poles and university students to whom -- because of their opposition to the regime -- the reactionary rumor-mongers had pointed as the enemies of the Russian people.⁹ Seventy years later illiteracy was practically wiped out by the Bolshevik regime, but the masses, exposed to a permanent propaganda barrage, believed that "Fascism, Trotskyism, sabotage, counter-revolution and other capital crimes" were identical.¹⁰ When in 1918 an explosion in Wall Street caused enormous damage and a considerable loss of human lives, civilized New Yorkers knew or suspected that the "villain" in the case was a dynamite truck of one of the world's biggest chemical concerns, and that complacent government authorities deliberately refrained from investigating the case; but the man in the street was firmly convinced that it was either the Bolsheviks, or the Anarchists, or the "Wobblies" who deliberately caused the carnage. When thirty-six years later (1954) the Dixon-Yates scandal shed a glaring light upon the incredible corruption of American politics, "sixty-three percent of those interviewed [about the affair] said that they had never heard or read about that contract, while of the remaining thirty-seven percent who had heard about it, only about one third had any clear notion of the agreement."¹¹ In short, twelve percent of the population knew what was going on. (As it turned out, President Eisenhower himself was not aware of the most scandalous aspects of the affair; yet this did not prevent his landslide re-election to the highest office. At the International Socialist Congress held in Stuttgart in 1907, August Bebel, top leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, denied "that it would be difficult to say, when the case arises, what is an aggressive war and what a defensive war." (Quoted in William English Walling's The Socialists and the War, New York, 1915, p. 30). Seven years later (1914) not only the German masses at large, but even the bulk of the socialist voters and party members were convinced that Germany was the innocent victim of a vicious attack on the part of France, England and Russia. In his Disraeli biography, Andre Maurois says that his hero "had seen the crowd first acclaim and later boo Wellington, acclaim, boo and once more adore Gladstone." More than half a century later the British masses would vote the Labor Party into power, and then, after obtaining more concessions than they had ever been granted by any previous regime, permit the Tories to regain power once more.

The uneducated man's inability to grasp the mechanics of the hostile world around him is aggravated by the obstinacy with which he clings to opinions or prejudices which, more often than not, had already been discarded by the more intelligent sections of the privileged classes. To the educated, such concepts as atheism or socialism are no longer criminal creeds whose devotees should be ostracized. Yet a poll taken in 1955 by the Fund for the Republic established that 63 percent of those questioned would not permit an atheist "to make a public speech in their home town and that 67 percent would not permit a Socialist to teach in a high school."¹² These figures, one may say, fully bear out a statement to the effect that "seventy-five percent of the American people were members of the Klan whether they knew it or not."¹³ This being the case, H. L. Mencken could not be accused of undue exaggeration in writing -- at a time when the anarch in him prevailed over the snob -- that "on the evening of the same day that an American Legionary has his wages reduced forty percent and his hours of labor increased 25 percent, he goes out at his own risk and expense and helps tar and feather some visionary who tries to convince him he has been swindled."¹⁴

Nor are the masses in the world's oldest democratic republic more intelligent or broadminded. In 1837 the farmers of the Canton of Zurich refused to return to office the Progressive Party which had protected them against the oppressive rule of the financial interests. Why? Because the Progressives had given a professorship of theology to David Strauss whose Leben Jesu, published in 1835, had aroused the anger of the Fundamentalists.¹⁵ Forty years later the Swiss National Council (i.e., the federal parliament) adopted a factory law for the protection of the industrial workers with an enormous majority of ninety against fifteen votes; submitted to a referendum, the law passed by a narrow margin. A year later a referendum reintroduced the capital penalty in the various cantons after it had been abolished by the federal Constitution for the entire country.¹⁶ (The same backwardness characterizes the masses with regard to what is called "moral" concepts. Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had implicitly repudiated the double standard, unwed mothers would still be scorned, humiliated and often driven to suicide by the Victorian lowbrows constituting the bulk of the allegedly "victorious" proletariat.)

There is something sinister in the rudimentary mentality of the uneducated whose ferocious instincts have not been tamed or at least tempered by a certain modicum of culture. In one of his works¹⁷ the Italian sociologist Scipio Sighele pointed out that "everybody feels and knows by experience that the example of an evil man or of a madman may induce a crowd to commit crimes; few believe, and indeed it happens rarely, that the voice of an honest or of a courageous man could persuade the crowd to calm down." It is in line with this psychological potential that the "my-country-right-or-wrong" attitude implanted in early childhood manifests itself with such absurdity and violence even among those who have absolutely no stake in "their" country. "The police is international and so is the Church; only the disinherited hate each other patriotically," wrote the French radical Charles Malato several decades ago.¹⁸ Even when misery forces him to emigrate, the underdog keeps hating the so-called hereditary enemies of the "old country" in which he had no place at the banquet of life, though simple logic should make him realize that, to quote the Polish writer Stanislaw Brzozowski, "rags thrown on the rubbish heap have no reason to [literally "do not"] fight about the beauty of their colors." The wisdom contained in that epigram is apparently beyond the poor man's mental powers; witness the bloody fight which occurred on the Austrian steamer "Belvedere" a few weeks before the outbreak of World War I, when a news flash apprized the German-Austrian and Serbian (Yugoslav) steerage passengers of the assassination of the Austrian heir apparent by a Serbian nationalist.¹⁹

This helps to explain the suicidal folly of the once socialist population of the Saar basin which, in 1935, voted for union with Nazi Germany rather than for the neutral status quo; or the stupidity and meanness which led a French mob at about the same time to protest violently against the award of the "Miss France" title to a German Saar girl who, jointly with her family had adopted French citizenship rather than to submit to Nazi rule. As a result of this mob act she had to renounce the title.²⁰ It was the same obtuseness which, in all countries, made the man in the street unable to see in an anti-Nazi German anything else but a traitor to his country; or which, during World War I, prompted mobs in the United States to whip and occasionally to lynch inoffensive pacifists or readers of German-language papers.

The growth of the socialist vote and of the radical mass movements in general seemed to belie those pessimists who spoke of the incurable political illiteracy of the masses. The universal suffrage -- obtained in the more advanced countries after vigorous campaigns by the most enlightened and energetic sections of the lower middle class with the support of a section of the working class -- seemed to many to constitute the key to the Promised Land of social justice. It was in this spirit that Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), the eloquent inspirer of the first German socialist mass movement, once exclaimed: "When I say universal suffrage, I mean revolution." It is beside the point that Lassalle, when he spoke of "revolution" actually meant his own elevation to the post of German Chancellor under a system of "social monarchy" that would curb the capitalists for the benefit of the workers and maintain the Prussian nobility as the ruling bureaucratic and miltary caste.²¹ The fact is that the post-Lassallean Socialists, both in Germany and in the rest of Western Europe, believed that the no longer illiterate masses would eventually be able to distinguish between the friends of peace, i.e., the socialist internationalists, and the war mongering bourgeois nationalist demagogues.

However, as time went on, even those sections of the population which by their vote had shown that they favored the socialist candidates, would immediately succumb to the predatory urge and to the most brazen propaganda of chauvinism, imperialism and colonialism in their crassest form. As a result, the German Socialist Party, in order not to lose the support of the masses, gave up its internationalist attitude, and in 1914 its leaders became open supporters of the Kaiser's aggressive policies. (In 1956 it was not only the clinging to their cabinet posts but also the chauvinism of the electorate which induced the French socialist politicians to support their country's colonial policy against the rebellious Moslems of Algeria and against the basic tenets of socialist internationalism.)

When in the wake of the post-war depression of the 1920s and 1930s the fascists of the various brands began to ride the super-nationalist wave, their bestial "ideas" and practices won the acclaim not only of the common herd but also of many of the "class-conscious" workers.

For, in truth, that proletarian "class-consciousness" has always been just as skin deep and just as much adulterated with "bourgeois" ingredients as is the Christian faith of most believers with very non-Christian passions and sentiments. As far back as 1903, Franz Mehring, official historian of the German Socialist Party and biographer of Karl Marx, in a burst of anger blurted out that "three million votes are very nice, but this mass will become an army that is ready to fight [for socialism, M. N.] only when at least 300,000 of them know exactly whither they are really bound."²² The implication was of course that not even one tenth of the socialist voters knew anything about socialism beyond the fact that it was against the government.

It may not be amiss to mention here the grotesque spectacle offered in 1940 by the electorate of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the municipal elections held that year the Socialists who could boast of an unimpeachable twenty-four year record of a graftless administration, were defeated by a young and charming demagogue whose only plank was "Clean out City Hall and oust the Socialists."²³ After the death of the new Mayor who was killed during the War, the fickle, unidoctrinated majority once more elected a Socialist not only because he was a good orator but apparently also because he happened to be the brother of the fallen anti-Socialist Mayor.

In his Ruling Class, Gaetano Mosca says that the radically indoctrinated masses "instead of blindly believing the priests believe the revolutionary agitators with the same blindness."²⁴ The same idea was expressed also by Konrad Heiden,

Hitler's unfriendly biographer and historian of the Nazi movement, when he remarked somewhere that the masses are more loyal to leaders than to ideas. This is best illustrated by the behavior of both the members of the revolutionary syndicalist labor unions in France, and of the Communist rank and file all over the world. The growth of the French labor unions, accompanied by the growing economic security of their functionaries, had cooled the revolutionary ardor of the syndicalist leaders to such an extent that by the middle of the 1910s most of them forsook all the ultraradical tenets of their original creed, such as general strike, sabotage, and direct action, to become respectable and law-abiding Socialists. When the Bolshevik Revolution opened to some of them vistas of a possible downfall of capitalism throughout the world, and of their own ascent to power, many of these leaders -- later joined by the overwhelming majority of their colleagues -- became Communists. In all these zig-zag changes the masses sheepishly followed their leaders so that since World War I practically no trace was left of the old revolutionary syndicalist movement. Even more strikingly has this sheepishness of the revolutionary following been demonstrated by the way the Communist rank and file unquestioningly obeys all orders coming from the leaders. In 1925 the American Communist Party decided to stage a demonstration in front of the Polish Embassy in Washington. On May 21, hundreds of New York stalwarts took the train to the capital. When it was all over, Dr. M. Olgin, editor of the Yiddish Communist daily Freiheit and one of the top men of the party, boasted that the paraders did not even know where they were going. During the May 25, 1936, demonstration at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris -- a ceremony participated in traditionally by all Leftists in commemoration of the martyrs of the Paris Commune of 1871 -- the Communist Party used that solemn occasion to instigate its followers to beat up a group of dissenting Communists of the Trotskyist school. A few years later, on September 7, 1939 -- at a meeting held in New York City shortly after the conclusion of the Hitler- Stalin Pact which precipitated World War II -- the comrades booed the name of Leon Trotsky but not that of Adolf Hitler. And they continued to read the Daily Worker, even though in its issue of December 12, 1939, the party's chairman William Z. Foster, following the Moscow party line, opposed the boycott of Nazi Germany. The publication of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech of February, 1956, may have had a sobering effect upon a certain number of educated sympathizers and fellow travelers; but neither that speech nor the massacre of the Hungarian workers had any appreciable effect upon the faith and the vote of the majority of the Communist mass following in France and Italy.

The anything but idealistic, revolutionary, radical or progressive mentality of the masses was not unknown to the more intelligent among the nineteenth century revolutionists who first raised the banner of what they called the "emancipation of the working class."

Filippo Buonarroti, the survivor and historian of Babeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals (1796) and the patron saint of an entire generation of pre-1848 communist and equalita-rian conspirators, was outspoken in his contempt for the opinion of the masses, as expressed by universal suffrage. He was convinced that if permitted to vote after a revolution, they would invariably bring back the reactionaries.²⁵ This was also the opinion of Proudhon (1809-1865), not a revolutionary conspirator, to be sure, but a thinker who inspired many revolutionists of the various anarchist schools. "The universal suffrage," he said, "is the counterrevolution."²⁶ After the Revolution of 1848 Auguste Blanqui, the famous conspirator and permanent revolutionist, was likewise opposed to elections to the National Assembly²⁷ for the same reason as Proudhon, even though in all other respects there was an abyss between the latter's libertarian philosophy and the authoritarian outlook of Blanqui, Marx²⁸ and Engels came to the same conclusion when they beheld the result of the plebiscite that handed all the power to Louis Bonaparte. Needless to say that Marx's rival, the Anarchist Michael Bakunin, shared the views of the aforementioned revolutionary thinkers, as when he wrote: "Universal suffrage, so long as it is exercised in a society where the people, the mass of the workers, are economically subject to a minority, can produce only fake elections, anti-democratic in essence, and absolutely opposed to the needs, instincts and real will of the people."²⁹ And when after the downfall of the tsarist regime in 1917 the masses elected a non-Communist Constituent Assembly, Lenin, the inheritor of the revolutionary tradition of Buonarroti, Blanqui, Marx and Bakunin, spurned the result of that popular vote as a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."³⁰

All revolutionists, from Buonarroti to Lenin, saw the way out of this impasse in the dictatorship of the revolutionary leaders that would express the real interests of the masses. During the 1820s the egalitarian Buonarroti called one of his secret organizations Sublimes Maltres Parfaits (Sublime Perfect Masters)³¹ which throws a light on the naivete with which the first nineteenth century "proletarian" revolutionists identified their own power with the liberation of the masses. Marx who, like all the nineteenth century revolutionists, had either consciously or unconsciously drunk from the fountain of Buonarroti's dictatorial ideas, expressed the same idea in the famous phrase of the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat"; Auguste Blanqui (1806-1881), whom Marx admired so much, launched the slogan of the "Parisian dictatorship,"³² meaning the rule of the victorious conspirators of the capital over the rest of the country until universal public education and general literacy had inoculated the masses against the influence of the clergy and the reactionaries in general. In his Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (Chapter I of Part II) Wilhelm Weitling, the leader of the early German Communists of the 1840s, likewise insisted upon the "necessity of dictatorship during the transition period." And Bakunin who, to outbid Marx in radicalism, in his writings and his speeches meant for the general public demanded the abolition of all government authority on the morrow after the revolution, spoke in his secret circulars and private letters of the "invisible dictatorship"³³ of the "International Brothers," i.e., of his own secret organization. Around the turn of the century those frankly dictatorial ideas of the founder of revolutionary anarchism were replaced by the less offensive or less revealing terms of either "revolutionary minorities" which, in the opinion of the post-Bakunin Anarchists, were to initiate and to stimulate the revolutionary self-activity of the masses; or by the "proletarian elite" of the revolutionary Syndicalists who applied that term to the more active members (i.e., functionaries and potential functionaries) of the labor unions controlled by them.

In the end, the followers of Lenin succeeded where their revolutionary predecessors had failed. But after forty years of "working class" power, the "cooks" (in Russian usage the term kookharka conveys the idea of a lowly woman servant), who according to Lenin's famous promise were soon to be able to rule the State, are still cooking for their new masters and are every bit as ignorant of politics as is the typical reader of the tabloids in the capitalist countries. For the monopoly of higher education has remained the possession of the new managerial-bureaucratic elite. (It goes without saying that any other revolutionary group -- regardless of the philosophy it might profess -- would in case of victory be just as eager to maintain its educational monopoly as did the ruling income-and-power elite of Russia. For the Communists have no monopoly of group selfishness.)

The British elections of 1945 which, for the first time in history, gave to a socialist party a clear majority, supplied a powerful boost to those who hoped that the immemorial rift between the "haves-and-knows" on the one hand, and the "have-nots-and-know-nots" on the other, would be bridged at last by the civilized method of parliamentary majorities.

The vote of the masses at the subsequent elections, which restored the Conservatives to power, were a rude shock to those optimists. To be sure, nearly half of the electorate still gave their vote to the Labor Party, but to other millions of wage earners the advantages afforded them by the reforms which the Labor Government had introduced merely meant that they had now risen to the "middle class" and that as members of that class they should now give their vote to the party of the respectable people.

If large sections of the working people are capable of such an attitude, can it be expected that the leadership of the labor or socialist parties, which after all does belong to the middle class, would, once entrenched in power, sacrifice its own privileges as members of the educated minority and raise the incomes of all of the uneducated to such a level as to enable them to give their children a higher education and thus wipe out the very concept of the underdog as an economic and cultural category?³⁴

1Otto Strasser, Hitler and I, Boston, 1940, p. 106.

2 Karl Kautsky, Die Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, Berlin, 1929 Vol. I, p. 286.

3 Kautsky, loc. cit.

4 Karl Marx, Preface to the Kritik der Politiechen Oekonomie.

5 Most amalgamations took, of course, place in prehistorical times. Examples of complete amalgamations of this kind which occurred in historical times and as a result of which the invaders became the ruling class: the Romans and later the Franks in Gaul; the Normans in England, the Germans as against various Slavic and Baltic tribes in what is now Central and Eastern Germany, the Varangians (Scandinavians) in Russia.

6 Etienne de La Boetie, Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire, first published in 1574. There are those who believe that that little volume was in reality written by Montaigne who, for reasons of safety, attributed its authorship to his dead friend Etienne de La Boetie,

7 Friedrieh Engels, Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, Leipzig, 1878, Part I. Chapter X. This book is usually referred to as Anti-Dühring.

8 Karl Kautsky, Krieg und Demokratie, Berlin, 1932; p. 310 (quoting Louis Blanc's Histoire de Dix Ans 1830-1840),

9 [Alexander Kornilov] Obshchestvenrwye Dvizhenie pri Aleksandre II (The Social Movement under Alexander II), Paris, 1905, pp. 117-118.

10 New York Times, August 27, 1939.

11 New York Post, December 7, 1954.

12 New York Post, April 15, 1955.

13 Roger Baldwin in The Progressive, Madison, Wis., December, 1949, p. 19.

14 Quoted in Ernest Boyd's Mencken, New York, 1925, p. 54.

15 Georges Weill, L'Eveil des Nationalites, Paris, 1930, p. 466.

16 Karl Kautsky in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart 1890-1891, No. 49, p. 730, in an article entitled "Entwurf des Neuen Parteiprogramms."

17 Scipio Sighele, La Foule Criminelle, Paris, 1901, p. 59.

18 Charles Malato, La Grande Greve, Paris, 1905, p. 136.

19 New York Call, July 10, 1914.

20 New York Times, May 19, 1935.

21 See p. 50ff. of this volume.

22 Franz Mehring, Meine Bechtfertigung, Leipzig, 1903, p. 37.

23 The Nation, New York, April 20, 1940, p. 523.

24 Page 251 of the Italian original published under the title of Elementi di Scienza Politica, Turin, 1923 (second edition).

25 Ph. Buonarroti, La Conspiration pour l'Egalite dite de Babeuf, Brussels, 1828, Vol. I, pp. 33-34.

26 P.-J. Proudhon, Idees Revolutionnaires, Paris, 1849, p. 23.

27 August Blanqui, Critique Sociale, Paris, 1885, Vol. I, p. 207.

28 F. Mehring, Geschichte der Deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Stuttgart, 1897, Vol. I, p. 554, Vol. II, p. 27.

29 M. Bakounine, Oeuvres, Paris, 1907, Vol. II, p. 311.

30 V. I. Lenin, Report to the First Congress of the Communist International July 31, 1919. Quoted in M. A. Landau-Aldanov's Lenin New York, 1922, p. 104.

31 International Review of Social History, Assen, Netherlands, 1956, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 120-122. Article by Etr. Lehning, entitled "Buonarroti and his International Secret Societies." In his La Conspiration pour l'Egalite (see Note 25) Vol. I, pp. 291-292, Buonarroti insists upon the necessity of absolute thought control through an airtight censorship.

32 Auguste Blanqui, Critique Sociale, Paris, 1885, Vol. I, pp. 206-207.

33 Letter to Albert Richard, Geneva, April 1, 1870, quoted in Max Nettlau's Der Anarchismus von Proudhon zu Kropotkin, Berlin, 1927, pp. 148-150. Max Nettlau, a follower of Bakunin, is the author of a monumental Bakunin biography and of several volumes dealing with the history of anarchism. See also op. cit. p. 31.

34 See the chapter The Elusive Ideal in this volume.