In their little circles
they "were laying plans for the overthrow of the world and intoxicating
themselves day by day, evening by evening, with the hasheesh-drink of:
'To-morrow it will start;'"[3] Before and after the revolutionary period
of '48 there were innumerable thousands of these fugitives, exiles, and
men of action obsessed with the dream that a great revolutionary
cataclysm was soon to occur which would lay in ruins the old society.
That a crisis was impending everyone believed, including even Marx and
Engels. In fact, for over twenty years, from 1847 to 1871, the
"extemporizers of revolutions" fretfully awaited the supreme hour.
Toward the end of the period appeared Bakounin and Nechayeff with their
robber worship, conspiratory secret societies, and international network
of revolutionists. Wherever capitalism made headway the workers grew
more and more rebellious, but neither they nor those who sought to lead
them, and often did, in fact, lead them, had much of any program beyond
destruction. Bakounin was not far wrong, at the time, in thinking that
he was "spreading among the masses ideas corresponding to the instincts
of the masses,"[4] when he advocated the destruction of the Government,
the Church, the mills, the factories, and the palaces, to the end that
"not a stone should be left upon a stone."

This was the mire of confusion that Engels speaks of. There was not one
with any program at all adequate to meet the problem. The aim of the
rebels went little beyond retaliation and destruction. What were the
weapons employed by the warriors of this period? Street riots and
barricades were those of the "bourgeois democrats"; strikes,
machine-breaking, and incendiarism were those of the workers; and later
the terrorists came with their robber worship and Propaganda of the
Deed. In the midst of this veritable passion for destruction Marx and
Engels found themselves. Here was a period when direct action was
supreme. There was nothing else, and no one dreamed of anything else.
The enemies of the existing order were employing exactly the same means
and methods used by the upholders of that order. Among the workers, for
instance, the only weapons used were general strikes, boycotts, and what
is now called sabotage. These were wholly imitative and retaliative. It
is clear that the strike is, after all, only an inverted lockout; and as
early as 1833 a general strike was parried by a general lockout. The
boycott is i