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Updated: May 8, 2025
In his famous letter on the Gotha program addressed in 1875 to Bebel, Liebknecht, and others, at the time of the formation of the Socialist Party and perhaps the greatest practical crisis in Marx's lifetime, he said, it will be recalled, that "every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs," but he was even then against any sacrifice of essential principle.
In the old days, members of our party were men who had read, or tried to read, Marx's "Capital," who knew the "Communist Manifesto" by heart, and were occupied in continual criticism of the basis of capitalist society. Look at the new members of our party. Marx is quite unnecessary to them.
This theory is best stated in Marx's own words, as he gives it in his Critique of Political Economy, namely, that "the method of the production of material life determines the social, political, and spiritual life process in general." We find it stated in other words, though in substance the same, by Engels, Marx's friend and coworker.
I have urged that Marx found scientific reasons for what he wanted to do. It is important to add that the people who adopted his reasons for what they wanted to do were not any too respectful of Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means identical with the theories one hears among Marxian socialists.
However, all his labours and negotiations about the business, in the course of which he was driven from pillar to post, proved utterly futile, until at last he was told to have an interview with a certain general. This personage, like the King, had Marx's proposals explained to him in the minutest detail, and expressed his warmest sympathy with the undertaking.
Society may continue to progress, but it is surely inconceivable to any close observer, as it is inconceivable to the Socialists, that the privileged classes will ever consent, without the most violent struggle, to a program which, viewed as a whole, would lead, however gradually or indirectly, to a more equitable distribution of wealth and political power. Marx's letters to Sorge.
In this movement it is generally conceded by Socialists that the workingmen of industry play the central part. But they are neither its sole origin nor is their welfare its sole aim. The best known of the Socialist critics of Marxism, Edward Bernstein, shares with some of Marx's most loyal disciples in this excessive idealization of the industrial working class.
Biography and criticism are so strangely mixed up, jumbled together, anecdotes of different periods so absurdly brought into juxtaposition, chronology so oddly abused, that one can obtain a far better idea of the man Beethoven by reading Marx's authorities than his digest of them; and as to his works, those upon which we want information, which we have no opportunity to hear, which have not been subjects of criticism and discussion for a whole generation, on these he has little or nothing to say.
It is an irony of fate that the same revolution which purports to enact into life the Marxian social program should belie the truth of Marx's materialistic interpretation of history and demonstrate that history is shaped by both economic and non-economic forces.
By this time Bakunin's health was broken, and except for a few brief intervals, he lived in retirement until his death in 1876. Bakunin's life, unlike Marx's, was a very stormy one. Every kind of rebellion against authority always aroused his sympathy, and in his support he never paid the slightest attention to personal risk.
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