ate from all the exploiter parties,
opposed to the whole "reactionary mass."

Proudhon, who we know had not any overwhelming sympathy for "politics,"
nevertheless advised the French workers to vote for the candidates who
pledged themselves to "constitute value." Bakounine would not have
politics at any price. The worker cannot make use of political liberty:
"in order to do so he needs two little things--leisure and material
means." So it is all only a bourgeois lie. Those who speak of
working-class candidates are but mocking the proletariat. "Working-class
candidates, transferred to bourgeois conditions of life, and into an
atmosphere of completely bourgeois political ideas, ceasing to be
actually workers in order to become statesmen, will become bourgeois,
and possibly will become even more bourgeois than the bourgeois
themselves. For it is not the men who make positions, but, on the
contrary, positions which make the men."[45]

This last argument is about all Bakounine was able to assimilate of the
materialist conception of history. It is unquestionably true that man is
the product of his social environment. But to apply this incontestable
truth with advantage it is necessary to get rid of the old, metaphysical
method of thought which considers things _one after the other, and
independently one of the other_. Now Bakounine, like his master,
Proudhon, in spite of his flirtation with the Hegelian philosophy, all
his life remained a metaphysician. He does not understand that the
environment which makes man may change, thus changing man its own
product. The environment he has in his mind's eye when speaking of the
political action of the proletariat, is the bourgeois parliamentary
environment, that environment which must necessarily fatally corrupt
labour representatives. But the environment of the _electors_, the
environment of a working-class party, conscious of its aim and well
organised, would this have no influence upon the elected of the
proletariat? No! Economically enslaved, the working class must always
remain in political servitude; in this domain it will always be the
weakest; to free itself it must begin by an economic revolution.
Bakounine does not see that by this process of reasoning he inevitably
arrives at the conclusion that a victory of the proletariat is
absolutely impossible, unless the owners of the means of production
voluntarily relinquish their possessions to them. In effect the
subjection of th