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Updated: May 31, 2025
Well, I have a conviction that the time for great theoretical discourses, whether printed or spoken, is past. In the last nine years there have been developed within the International more ideas than would be necessary to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I defy anybody to invent a new one." This letter in reality marks the end of Bakounin's activity in the revolutionary movement.
The slightest knowledge of Bakounin's philosophy and methods is enough to make one realize that neither the International nor any considerable section of the labor or socialist movements had anything in common with those ideas. Certainly the thought and policies of Marx were directly opposed to everything from first to last that Bakounin stood for.
They ridiculed him as an "amorphous pan-destroyer," and made no attempt to refute his really intangible social and economic theories. However, they met Bakounin's attacks on the International at every point.
Nearly all the amazing collection of "documentary proof," afterward published in L'Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste, was submitted to the congress, and a resolution was passed that all the documents should be published, together with such others as might tend to enlighten the membership concerning the purposes of Bakounin's organization. Two other important actions were taken at the congress.
George Sand has shown these papers to some of her friends." Marx later printed Bakounin's answer to these charges which were, in fact, groundless and in his letters to the New York Tribune even commended Bakounin for his services in the Dresden uprising of 1849. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that to the end Marx believed Bakounin to be a tool of the enemy.
This is about all that had happened previous to Bakounin's arrival in Lyons, and, when he came, there was confusion everywhere. Even the members of the Alliance had no clear idea of what ought to be done. Bakounin, however, was an old hand at insurrections, and in a little lodging house where he and his friends were staying a new uprising was planned.
The very name Liebknecht had taken for his paper, the Volksstaat, was infamous in Bakounin's eyes, while all the leaders of the labor party had become merely appendages to "their friends of the bourgeois Volkspartei."
On the other hand, to his circle of worshipers he was a mental giant, a flaming titan, a Russian Siegfried, holding out to all the powers of heaven and earth a perpetual challenge to combat. And, in truth, Bakounin's ideas and imagination covered a field that is not exhausted by the range of mythology.
It is customary now to credit most of these writings to Nechayeff, although Bakounin himself, I believe, never denied that they were his, and no one can read them without noting the ear-marks of both Bakounin's thought and style.
This is often recognized by Syndicalists themselves. See, e.g., an article on ``The Old International'' in the Syndicalist of February, 1913, which, after giving an account of the struggle between Marx and Bakunin from the standpoint of a sympathizer with the latter, says: ``Bakounin's ideas are now more alive than ever.
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