future, social development seems stagnant and society intellectually corrupted or fossilized—dormant. To him the revolution is a mental reality, and could become a material one, if, yes, if, the workers would only see the light and become class-conscious, i.e., would only become Socialists. The individual who reasons in this fashion, and who by the way is by no means a rarity in the movement of to-day, is everything but a Socialist in the Historical Materialistic, that is scientific conception of the term. He is a soaring idealist, who has lost the firm foundation of historical reality and material possibility from under his feet, and who is, consequently, utopistic in his deductions, actions and tactics. The first International, as is also the Socialist movement of to-day, was abundantly blessed, with a large number of these undoubtedly sincere but intellectually ill-balanced comrades. Karl Marx and his followers, perceiving capitalist society through the spectacles of dialectical evolution and Historical Materialism, and seeing in all its manifestations but the logical sign of social development, were bound to collide with the gasconading idealist, who contemplated revolutionizing society via the road of backroom conspiracies and armed uprisings, especially at a time when sporadic prosperity had momentarily blinded the average wage slave to his actual conditions.
This struggle between Historical Materialism and utopian Idealism has been largely recorded by Socialist historians as a personal struggle between Marx and Bakunin for leadership in the International. Such writers are also everything else but Socialist historians, because if their conception were true, then the ghosts of Marx and Bakunin are at this advanced day still seeking to settle their personal quarrel in the Socialist and radical movement, of every modern country on the face of the globe. The struggle between Historical Materialism, ergo scientific Socialism, and utopian Idealism—whether disguised as Opportunism, Impossibilism, Anarchist-Communism, etc, matters not—first took on shape and form in the first International and was led
