FORERUNNERS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Marxism and Social Democracy, but it is a mistake for certain Marxists to claim him as a Russian Marx or semi-Marx. It is also wrong to describe him as the founder or even father of the Narodničestvo [revolutionary agrarian socialism]. He had a more realistic conception of the Mužik and the Mir than had Bakunin and Herzen, and thus strengthened the more political and practical tendency in the Narodničestvo. But he looked upon the Mir as an association in the sense of European socialism, and did not ascribe to it such exclusive importance as did the later National Radicals (Narodniki). Unlike the Slavophils, he did not look upon Europe as rotten; in his opinion the European masses had still not come into action.
⁂ The first two articles in the above series [(I) Bakunin, (II) Bakunin and Marx] appeared in Nos. 63 and 64 respectively.—Editor.
The Germans of Austria
To students of Austrian affairs we recommend a specially enlightening article in the Socialist monthly, Der Kampf, for December, on “German Policy in Austria,” by Herr Austerlitz, the well-known German-Jewish Socialist journalist, who for many years past has been one of the principal editors of the Arbeiter Zeitung. Space prevents us from giving more than a few extracts.
“All the nations of Austria have their distinct and positive national programme; the Germans (we are only speaking of the bourgeoisie) lack a programme to such a degree as to be unaware that it is missing. The Czechs want their independent state’ with every attribute of sovereignty’; the Poles want to get away from this state and to take Galicia with them, and regard the Personal Union merely as an inevitable transitional stage: the Ukrainians demand either independence within the Monarchy, or a return to the bosom of the Ukraine; the Southern Slavs, the union of all parts of their race, now cut up among four states, in a single state. But what do the Germans want and demand? Really nothing for its own sake; their demand is limited to the non-fulfilment of the ideals of the other nations. They oppose the foundation of the Czech state, the union of the Southern Slavs, and even where they appear to agree to the national claims of another people, in the ‘Austro-Polish’ solution of the Polish question, they only wish to set up a miniature copy of the Austria of to-day, and are not concerned for a national ideal of their own. ‘For all this is negative with them; the Germans really want everything in Austria to remain as it was, and resist every demand of the other nations, because they themselves have none. . . .
“The result of their insistence upon worn-out ideas is that the German bourgeoisie cannot attain to a uniform point of view. In
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