[lbo-talk] Not A Very Nice Man

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 4 08:06:42 PDT 2007


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

"But these opponents were not quite the innocents you seem think--Bauer and Bakunin anti Semites, Weitling a champion of the lumpen proletariat and the criminals, Proudhon a petty bourgeois socialist, Lassalle a Bismarckian. "

You can't dismiss the entire corpus of many of thse folks' works because of a rleatively small number of admittedly bad things they wrote. That would include Marx & Engels, too, byt the way. The entirety of Nietzsche, all of Mencken, and let's forget reading HP Lovecraft's fiction. All of 'em, gone.

I think Bakunin wrote maybe, what, a few paragraphs or something (out of hundreds of thousands of words, maybe more) that are anti-Semitic? That one is a common charge hurled by really desperate (and usually Trot) folks at anoks. Nevermind some racist stuff that came out of Engels' pen (esp. about Slavs) or the hysteric polemics some have worked up against Marx's lengthy _On the Jewish Question_. Bakunin was not so anti-Semitic he didn't inspire folks like Emma Goldman, Alex Berkman, and Noam Chomsky, all (culturally) Jewish and all folks who've quoted Bakunin approvingly, especially the latter, for ex. in Monthly Review Press's _Anarchism_, whose lengthy inro by Chomsky is full of approving Bakunin quotes.

There used to be a banner ad offering that _Anarchism_ book at Yoshie's MRZine site as a free gift if you subscribed. That always made me chuckle.

Folks also tend to forget that despite their later bitter rivalry, Bakunin was at many points a huge admirer and fan of Marx's writing and -- someone correct me if I'm wrong -- he provided the first translation into Russian of Das Kapital. (Bakunin, to pick one example, wrote: "Mr. Karl Marx, the illustrious leader of German Communism, justly observed in his magnificent work Das Kapital [2].... [...] Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, by Karl Marx; Erster Band. This work will need to be translated into French, because nothing, that I know of, contains an analysis so profound, so luminous, so scientific, so decisive, and if I can express it thus, so merciless an expose of the formation of bourgeois capital and the systematic and cruel exploitation that capital continues exercising over the work of the proletariat." http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/bakunin/writings/capitalist_system.html

Nietzsche was horribly misogynist but there is a lot of use in much of his material, for better or worse. Foucault and Bataille thought so, and they were both anti-fascist leftists. HP Lovecraft was horribly anti-Semitic and racist, but I still like his horror fiction and he even has an essay on atheism in ST Joshi's _Atheism_ anthology.

-B.



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