We would fight the Workers International if a Karl Marx had never existed, because we regard communism as barbarism, and all class division as nefarious. The whole movement that is maintained in the interest of a few demagogues we think capable only of working into the hands of the reaction by dividing the revolutionary forces, without aiding the "workers" in the least...

Nowhere a cheaper demogoguery is possible than among the workers, because they usually have too little education to look into the cards of their "educated" and "erudite" leaders...So even a Marx has succeeded in becoming a labor demagogue even though nobody is less qualified by his personality to impress himself on the people. He is no orator and his calculating and negative nature is incapable of a passionate exaltation or a surrender, even if in outward appearance only, to an idea.

Everything in him is mean, egotistical calculation. No noble aspiration of others means anything to him, no distinction of another lets him sleep... nobody probably despises more those who left themselves be used for his purposes.

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Between a Marx and a "worker" there exists as little intellectual sympathy as between a slaveholder and a slave; but because they are the easiest mark for harangues, and because in their ranks the least competition is to be expected, Mr. Marx hopes to attain as a labor leader what on a different level he is not able to gain.

Everything he represents he has picked up in France and in England in order to digest it scientifically and critically and ot put it into different phrases, but without ever getting to a positive result. In the whole Marx philosophy there is not one ounce of certainty. In spite of his "studies" and his sophistic nimble-mindedness he is really only one who gets whatever he works on second-hand. He is an anti-bourgeois, an anti-Bauer, an anti-Ruge, an anti-Proudhon etc., but what he is himself without the others, he would be at a loss to say... We judged him like that already in a pamphlet issued in 1847 in Switzerland. We have fought the German Communists one after another as they appeared... We objected to them primarily on two points:

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1. That in their fury against the "bourgeois" they not only withdrew completely from politics and the State, but also that they attacked in the most hostile and knavish fashion the "political radicalism" which worked for the democratic republic as the first presupposition of social reforms, while they, submissively enough, got along a la Fournier with the monarchy.

2. That while they completely refuse all that others are fighting for, they themselves will not say, in spite of all invitations, just what they want, or in what way they hope to realize Communism. Especially Marx and Engels have distinguished themselves in circumventing with sophistic agility any such direct explanations.