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Title: Letter to Karl Marx Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: December 22, 1868 Language: en Topics: Karl Marx, letter, Libertarian Labyrinth Source: Retrieved on 25th April 2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/bakunin-to-karl-marx-december-22-1868/
December 22, 1868. Geneva
123. Montbrillant.
My old friend – Serno has shared with me the part of your letter that
concerned me. You asked him if I continue to be your friend. – Yes, more
than ever, dear Marx, because I understand better than ever how right
you are in following, and in inviting us all to march on the wide road
of economic revolution, and in denigrating those among us who would lose
themselves on the paths of either national or exclusively political
enterprises. I now do what you yourself commenced to do more than twenty
years ago. – Since the solemn and public farewells that I addressed to
the bourgeois at the Berne Congress, I have known no other society, no
other milieu than the world of the workers. – My homeland now is the
International of which you are one of the principal founders. – So you
see, dear friend, that I am your disciple – and I am proud to be it. –
This is all that was needed to explain my relationships and my personal
feelings. – Let us pass on to other questions.
I read in your letter to Serno that we have posed the question falsely
at Berne, by speaking of the equalization of classes and individuals. –
That observation is perfectly fair with regard to the terms, with regard
to the formula that we have made use of. – But that formula has been, as
it were, imposed on us by the stupidity and final impenitence of our
bourgeois audience. – The have been stupid enough to yield to us,
without a fight, as it were, the terrain of equality – and our triumph
has consisted precisely in the fact that we have been able to observe
that they reject all the conditions of a real and serious equality. –
That if what has made them, and still makes them, furious. – What’s
more, I admit wholeheartedly that we could have better expressed
ourselves otherwise, if, for example, we had said: The radical
suppression of the economic causes of the existence of the different
classes, and the economic, social and political equalization of the
environment and the conditions of existence and development for all
individuals without difference of sex, nation and race. – I have send
you in a bundle all the speeches, except one, that I gave at Berne –
Herzen having asked me for permission to print them in the last Mohican,
that is in the last issue of his Journal, which has ceased to appear for
lack of public and readers, I had no reason to refuse him. – But I beg
you to believe that there is absolutely no solidarity between him and
me. – Since 1863 especially, all our political relations, and now even
our private relations, have broken off. – He asked permission to modify
in his own way the speech that I made at Berne regarding Russia, in
response to the speech of my friend Mroczkowski, which you will find in
Kolokol – I proposed, like all my friends of the Russian socialist
democracy, of which I have also sent the program, incidentally written
by me, as the condition of real, which is to say economic, social and
political emancipation of the Russian and non-Russian peoples shut up in
the Russian Empire – the radical destruction of that Empire – That is
too much for Herzen and we have fallen out. – I also send you the
Program of the Alliance that we have founded with Becker and many
Italian, Polish and French friends. – On this subject we will have much
to say to one another. – I will soon send you a copy of a long letter, –
almost a pamphlet – that I wrote on the subject to my friend César de
Paepe – Now a few words on what is happening here. At Basle there is a
considerable strike – which will probably have the result of adding 5000
members more to the International. – Geneva appears perfect. – We have
had a great popular assembly, which has appointed a permanent Commission
of Correspondence with Basle – I am on it. – Becker as well. – I have
truly found here, among the workers, some magnificent men. – Give my
regards to Engels, if he is not dead a second time. – You know that he
has been buried once – and I beg you to give him a copy of my speech,
and Eckarius and Jung as well.
Your devoted M. Bakunin
Please remember me to Madame Marx.