Anarchism and Socialism¶
Core Argument¶
Eleanor Marx's preface to Plekhanov's work presents it as an essential weapon against the dangerous misconception, particularly prevalent in England's disorganised socialist movement, that anarchism represents an advanced revolutionary position. She insists on the distinction between anarchism and nihilism, citing Plekhanov's claim at the Zurich Congress that Russia had been spared anarchists. The book aims to demonstrate that anarchism is merely another word for reaction.
Plekhanov begins by tracing the methodological roots of anarchism to the utopian socialists and eighteenth-century French Materialists, who shared a fatal flaw: they sought perfect social organisation by appealing to an abstract, absolute "human nature" independent of time and place. Even Saint-Simon, despite grasping historical evolution, ultimately fell back on this abstraction, creating a circular argument where human nature explained nothing. German Idealists like Hegel rejected this standpoint, conceiving history as a law-governed process, but located its motive-power in the absolute idea. Marx broke through this dead end by grounding legal relations and forms of state in material conditions of life—specifically the relations of production corresponding to a given stage of productive forces. This materialist conception made sociology a science: historical movement fashions human nature, not the reverse.
The anarchist tradition is subjected to devastating critique across its major figures. Stirner's "League of Egoists" is exposed as the utopia of a revolting petty-bourgeois, blind to economic reality, whose property relations never escape bourgeois economic ideas. Proudhon, who repudiates political struggle and preaches class reconciliation, embodies petty-bourgeois socialism oscillating between radicalism and conservatism, wishing to perpetuate private property while destroying the state. Bakunin, despite acquaintance with Marx's historical theory, remains an incorrigible utopian who adds together abstract principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity without reconciling them, understanding neither the origin of private property nor the meaning of individually hereditary property.
The anarchist "free agreement" is merely the bourgeois entrepreneur's freedom of contract. Kropotkin's ideal has a double origin in Manchester-school radicalism and communism, but anarchists prioritise unlimited individual liberty, with communism secondary. Their rejection of political action, opposition to reforms like the eight-hour day, and glorification of terrorist "propaganda of deed" serve reaction, providing pretexts for government repression. Anarchist morality, free from obligation, judges the most atrocious deeds "not guilty." The "companions" carry bourgeois reasoning to its logical conclusion; decadent writers and artists who convert to anarchism restore its true character of bourgeois individualism. Stirner's "Nothing for me goes beyond myself" becomes the dismissal of victims. Social-Democrats alone offer a scientific, revolutionary path.