Anarchism and Socialism

Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov

Anarchism and Socialism

EAN 8596547243854

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

ANARCHISM AND SOCIALISM

CHAPTER I

THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS

CHAPTER II

THE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM

CHAPTER III

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANARCHIST DOCTRINE

The Point of View of Anarchism.

Max Stirner

CHAPTER IV

PROUDHON

CHAPTER V

BAKOUNINE

CHAPTER VI

BAKOUNINE—(CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER VII

THE SMALLER FRY

CHAPTER VIII

THE SO-CALLED ANARCHIST TACTICS. THEIR MORALITY

CHAPTER IX—CONCLUSION

THE BOURGEOISIE, ANARCHISM, AND SOCIALISM

PREFACE.

Table of Contents

The work of my friend George Plechanoff, Anarchism and Socialism, was written originally in French. It was then translated into German by Mrs. Bernstein, and issued in pamphlet form by the German Social-Democratic Publishing Office Vorwärts. It was next translated by myself into English, and so much of the translation as exigencies of space would permit, published in the Weekly Times and Echo. The original French version is now appearing in the Jeunesse Socialiste, and will be issued in book form shortly. The complete English translation is now given to English readers through the Twentieth Century Press. I have to thank the Editor of the Weekly Times and Echo, Mr. Kibblewhite, for his kindness in allowing me to use those portions of the work that appeared in his paper.

As to the book itself. There are those who think that the precious time of so remarkable a writer, and profound a thinker as George Plechanoff is simply wasted in pricking Anarchist wind-bags. But, unfortunately, there are many of the younger, or of the more ignorant sort, who are inclined to take words for deeds, high-sounding phrases for acts, mere sound and fury for revolutionary activity, and who are too young or too ignorant to know that such sound and fury signify nothing. It is for the sake of these younger, or for the sake of the more ignorant, folk, that men like Plechanoff deal seriously with this matter of Anarchism, and do not feel their time lost if they can, as this work must, help readers to see the true meaning of what is called Anarchism.

And a work like this one of Plechanoff's is doubly necessary in England, where the Socialist movement is still largely disorganised, where there is still such ignorance and confusion on all economic and political subjects; where, with the exception, among the larger Socialist organisations, of the Social-Democratic Federation (and even among the younger S.D.F. members there is a vague sort of idea that Anarchism is something fine and revolutionary), there has been no little coquetting with Anarchism under an impression that it was very advanced, and where the Old Unionist cry of No politics! has unconsciously played the reactionary Anarchist game. We cannot afford to overlook the fact that the Socialist League became in time—when some of us had left it—an Anarchist organisation, and that since then its leaders have been, or still are, more or less avowed Anarchists. While quite recently the leader of a new party—and that a would-be political one!—did not hesitate to declare his Anarchist sympathies or to state that The methods of the Anarchists might differ from those of the Socialists, but that might only prove that the former were more zealous than the latter.

It is also necessary to point out once again that Anarchism and Nihilism have no more in common than Anarchism and Socialism. As Plechanoff said at the Zürich International Congress: "We (i.e., the Russians) have had to endure every form of persecution, every thinkable misery; but we have been spared one disgrace, one humiliation; we, at least, have no Anarchists." A statement endorsed and emphasised by other Russian revolutionists, and notably by the American delegate, Abraham Cahan—himself a Russian refugee. The men and women who are waging their heroic war in Russia and in Poland against Czarism have no more in common with Anarchism than had the founders of the modern Socialist movement—Carl Marx and Frederick Engels.

This little book of Plechanoff will assuredly convince the youngest even that under any circumstances Anarchism is but another word for reaction; and the more honest the men and women who play this reactionist game, the more tragic and dangerous it becomes for the whole working class movement.

Finally, there is a last reason why the issuing of this work at the present moment is timely. In 1896 the next International Socialist and Trade Union Congress meets in London. It is well that those who may attend this great Congress as delegates, and that the thousands of workers who will watch its work, should understand why the resolutions arrived at by the Paris, Brussels, and Zürich International Congresses with regard to the Anarchists should be enforced. The Anarchists who cynically declare Workers' Congresses absurd, motiveless, and senseless must be taught once and for all, that they cannot be allowed to make the Congresses of the Revolutionary Socialists of the whole world a playground for reaction and international spydom.

Eleanor Marx Aveling

.

Green Street Green, Orpington, Kent.

August, 1895.

ANARCHISM AND SOCIALISM

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

Table of Contents

THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS

Table of Contents

The French Materialists of the 18th century while waging relentless war against all the "infâmes whose yoke weighed upon the French of this period, by no means scorned the search after what they called perfect legislation," i.e., the best of all possible legislations, such legislation as should secure to human beings the greatest sum of happiness, and could be alike applicable to all existing societies, for the simple reason that it was perfect and therefore the most natural. Excursions into this domain of perfect legislation occupy no small place in the works of a d'Holbach and a Helvétius. On the other hand, the Socialists of the first half of our century threw themselves with immense zeal, with unequalled perseverance, into the search after the best of possible social organisations, after a perfect social organisation. This is a striking and notable characteristic which they have in common with the French Materialists of the last century, and it is this characteristic which especially demands our attention in the present work.

In order to solve the problem of a perfect social organisation, or what comes to the same thing, of the best of all possible legislation, we must eventually have some criterion by the help of which we may compare the various legislations one with the other. And the criterion must have a special attribute. In fact, there is no question of a legislation relatively the best, i.e., the best legislation under given conditions. No, indeed! We have to find a perfect legislation, a legislation whose perfection should have nothing relative about it, should be entirely independent of time and place, should be, in a word, absolute. We are therefore driven to make abstraction from history, since everything in history is relative, everything depends upon circumstance, time, and place. But abstraction made of the history of humanity, what is there left to guide us in our legislative investigations? Humanity is left us, man in general, human nature—of which history is but the manifestation. Here then we have our criterion definitely settled, a perfect legislation. The best of all possible legislation is that which best harmonises with human nature. It may be, of course, that even when we have such a criterion we may, for want of light or of logic, fail to solve this problem of the best legislation. Errare humanum est, but it seems incontrovertible that this problem can be solved, that we can, by taking our stand upon an exact knowledge of human nature, find a perfect legislation, a perfect organisation.

Such was, in the domain of social science, the point of view of the French Materialists. Man is a sentient and reasonable being, they said; he avoids painful sensations and seeks pleasurable ones. He has sufficient intelligence to recognise what is useful to him as well as what is harmful to him. Once you admit these axioms, and you can in your investigations into the best legislation, arrive, with the help of reflection and good intentions, at conclusions as well founded, as exact, as incontrovertible as those derived from a mathematical demonstration. Thus Condorcet undertook to construct deductively all precepts of healthy morality by starting from the truth that man is a sentient and reasonable being.

It is hardly necessary to say that in this Condorcet was mistaken. If the philosophers in this branch of their investigations arrived at conclusions of incontestable though very relative value, they unconsciously owed this to the fact that they constantly abandoned their abstract standpoint of human nature in general, and took up that of a more or less idealised nature of a man of the Third Estate. This man felt and reasoned, after a fashion very clearly defined by his social environment. It was his nature to believe firmly in bourgeois property, representative government, freedom of trade (laissez-faire, laissez passer! the nature of this man was always crying out), and so on. In reality, the French philosophers always kept in view the economic and political requirements of the Third Estate; this was their real criterion. But they applied it unconsciously, and only after much wandering in the field of abstraction did they arrive at it. Their conscious method always reduced itself to abstract considerations of human nature, and of the social and political institutions that best harmonise with this nature.

Their method was also that of the Socialists. A man of the 18th century, Morelly, "to anticipate a mass of empty objections that