Marx on Bakunin, from a letter to Engels written in Manchester dated 1863:
Bakunin has become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking any more. To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom. He is presently in Sweden, where he is hatching “revolution” with the Finns.
They just don’t make insults like they used to.
a lively caricature of a monster, like old and chubby Courbet
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Reblogged this on msamba.
Reminds me of something Diderot or d’Holbach said of David Hume when he visited Paris. I don’t have a quote right now, but read about it in Philipp Blom’s book about radical enlightenment.
Marx told so many lies about Bakunin it’s hard to take anything he says seriously. How does he know Bakunin is sexually perverse? How does he know that B. is jealous of his wife? How does he know his wife married him for his martyrdom? As far as I know nobody has ever accused Bakunin of perversion (and how bourgeois of Marx to make such an observation). These slanders are no doubt in the same league as those issued by Marx in his squalid Confidential Communication on Bakunin in the International. At the end of their lives both Bakunin and Blanqui believed that Marx was a British agent. No doubt they were wrong, but it is precisely this sort of sophomoric nonsense that led them to such speculation.
Marx was a terrible conspirator and disinformer, whoever he was loyal too.