"Relations between Marx and Bakunin had never been warm, although it was only in the late 1860s that they erupted into open warfare. When the two met in Paris in 1844, Bakunin had admired Marxâs erudition but not his personality. Then, in July of 1848, Marx, in his Cologne newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published a report that the novelist George Sand had proof that Bakunin was a Russian government agent â a rumor that had been dogging Bakunin for some time. The paper subsequently printed Sandâs denial of the story as well as Bakuninâs protest, but the incident could not help but poison their future relations. (They met once again, in London in 1864, an encounter that was cordial but distant.) Furthermore, Marx was as scornful and distrustful of Russians as Bakunin was anti-German and anti-Semitic. Even Poland, whose independence both of them supported, drew them apart rather than together: to Marx, freedom for Poland signified a blow against Russia, the bastion of European reaction, whereas to Bakunin it represented the starting-point of Russiaâs liberation. Finally, it is hardly surprising that even an international organization was not capacious enough to contain two such domineering as well as divergent personalities. Nevertheless, the personal antagonism between them should not be unduly emphasized â for Bakunin as well as Marx their conflict involved fundamental differences of principle.
The storm which had been gathering for several years finally broke at the congress of the International held at The Hague in September 1872. Marx succeeded in having Bakunin (who was unable to attend the congress) expelled from the International on the grounds, for which no convincing proof was offered, that he had continued to maintain within the International a secret Alliance inimical to the Internationalâs objectives. For good measure, he was also accused of having engaged in fraud and intimidation in regard to his projected translation of Marxâs Capital. In order to keep the General Council out of the hands of the Bakuninists (who by now probably constituted a majority of the International), Marx had The Hague Congress agree to transfer it from London to New York. In terms of the labor movement at the time, this was the equivalent of Siberian exile, and, as Marx well knew, it spelled the death of the old International." - Marshall Shatz, "Introduction," Statism and Anarchy
