Written: 1869 - 71
Source: Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 25-6 (by James Guillaume)
Publisher: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, UK, © 1971
Online Version: marxists.org 1999
Transcribed: Brian Basgen
HTML Markup: Brian Basgen
This is a short collection of memories Bakunin recalls in various letters
on his impressions of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. These quotes were
collected from "Bakunin on Anarchy", save for the note on Das Kapital,
which came from the second footnote of Bakunins' The Capitalist System.
As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still
is incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political
economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical aberrations, and my
socialism was only instinctive. Although younger than I, he was already
an atheist, a conscious materialist, and an informed socialist. It was
precisely at this time that he was elaborating the foundations of his system
as it stands today. We saw each other often. I greatly respected him for
his learning and for his passionate devotion- thought it was always mingled
with vanity- to the cause of the proletariat. I eagerly sought his conversation,
which was always instructive and witty when it was not inspired by petty
hate, which alas! was only too often the case. There was never any frank
intimacy between us- our temperaments did not permit it. He called me a
sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him vain, perfidious,
and cunning, and I also was right.
In 1845 Marx was the leader of the German communists.
While his devoted friend Engels was just as intelligent as he, he was not
as erudite. Nevertheless, Engels was more practical, and no less adept
at political calumny, lying, and intrigue. Together they founded a secret
society of Germany communists or authoritarian socialists.
As I told him a few months before his death, Proudhon,
in spite of all his efforts to shake off the tradition of classical idealism,
remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, immersed in the Bible,
in Roman law and metaphysics. His great misfortune was that he had never
studied the natural sciences or appropriated their method. He had the instincts
of a genius and he glimpsed the right road, but hindered by his idealistic
thinking patterns, he fell always into the old errors. Proudhon was a perpetual
contradiction: a vigorous genius, a revolutionary thinker arguing against
idealistic phantoms, and yet never able to surmount them himself.... Marx
as a thinker is on the right path. He has established the principle that
juridical evolution in history is not the cause but the effect of economic
development, and this is a great and fruitful concept. Thought he did not
originate it- it was to a greater or lesser extent formulated before him
by many others- to Marx belongs the credit for solidly establishing it
as the basis for an economic system. On the other hand, Proudhon understood
and felt liberty much better than he. Proudhon, when not obsessed with
metaphysical doctrine, was a revolutionary by instinct; he adored Satan
and proclaimed Anarchy. Quite possibly Marx could construct a still more
rational system of liberty, but he lacks the instinct of liberty- he remains
from head to foot an authoritarian.
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, by
Karl Marx; Erster Band. This work will need to be translated into French,
because nothing, that I know of, contains an analysis so profound, so luminous,
so scientific, so decisive, and if I can express it thus, so merciless
an expose of the formation of bourgeois capital and the systematic and
cruel exploitation that capital continues exercising over the work of the
proletariat. The only defect of this work... positivist in direction, based
on a profound study of economic works, without admitting any logic other
than the logic of the facts - the only defect, say, is that it has been
written, in part, but only in part, in a style excessively metaphysical
and abstract... which makes it difficult to explain and nearly unapproachable
for the majority of workers, and it is principally the workers who must
read it nevertheless. The bourgeois will never read it or, if they read
it, they will never want to comprehend it, and if they comprehend it they
will never say anything about it; this work being nothing other than a
sentence of death, scientifically motivated and irrevocably pronounced,
not against them as individuals, but against their class.
The German workers, Bornstadt, Marx, Engels- especially Marx, poison the atmosphere. Vanity, malevolence, gossip, pretentiousness and boasting in theory and cowardice in practice. Dissertations about life, action and feeling- and complete absence of life, action, and feeling- and complete absence of life. Disgusting flattery of the more advanced workers- and empty talk. According to them, Feuerbach is a "bourgeois", and the epithet BOURGEOIS! is shouted ad nauseam by people who are from head to foot more bourgeois than anyone in a provincial city- in short, foolishness and lies, lies and foolishness. In such an atmosphere no one can even breathe freely. I stay away from them and I have openly declared that I will not go to their Kommunistischer Handwerkerverein [Communist Trade Union Society] and will have nothing to do with this organisation.