"… Marx and Bakunin were engaged in a conflict in which it is hard to distinguish political from personal animosities. Marx did his best to persuade everybody that Bakunin was only using the International for his private ends, and in March 1870 he circulated a confidential letter to this effect. He also saw the hand of Bakunin (whom he never met after 1864) on every occasion when his own policies were opposed in the International. Bakunin, for his part, not only combated Marx’s political programme but, as he often wrote, regarded Marx as a disloyal, revengeful man, obsessed with power and determined to impose his own despotic authority on the whole revolutionary movement. Marx, he said, had all the merits and defects of the Jewish character; he was highly intelligent and deeply read, but an inveterate doctrinaire and fantastically vain, an intriguer and morbidly envious of all who, like Lassalle, had cut a more important figure than himself in public life. (pp. 247-8)"
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Leszek Kołakowski
Leszek Kołakowski (23 October 1927 – 17 July 2009) was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism (1976). In his later work, Kolakowski increasingly focused on religious questions.
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