In the autumn of 1979 the British section of the Fourth International reprinted, in its journal The International, a review of Yvonne Kapp’s two-volume life of Eleanor Marx. The reviewer was Diane Feeley, and she was doing what the movement does with its dead: taking an ancestor’s measure and drawing the lesson. Her Eleanor Marx is a working revolutionary rather than a tragic daughter — an organiser of the Second International’s congresses, a partisan of the North in the American Civil War at the age of eight, a defender of the Chicago anarchists on the platform in 1886 even as she fought the anarchists inside the International. And somewhere in the middle of the piece, in a list, comes this:
Among her political translations are Lissagaray’s classic History of the Paris Commune (1886), articles by the Russian revolutionary Stepnik (1884, 1885), and Plekhanov’s Anarchism and Socialism (1895).
That single clause is, so far as we can establish, the only trace this book has left in a hundred years of the revolutionary press in English. It is a book that survives as an item in someone else’s bibliography.
The book deserves better, and so does the translation, which is the reason for this edition. Feeley is worth quoting a second time on what Eleanor Marx was trying to do as a translator, because it bears directly on the English you are about to read:
In an age of stilted translations, she attempted more than just a literal rendition. She took as her goal the task of making translation ‘sound’ so authentic that the reader would not be constantly aware that it was a translation at all.
Eleanor Marx Aveling’s Anarchism and Socialism of 1895 is the only English translation there has ever been, and it reads like a pamphlet written in English by someone in a hurry to win an argument, because that is what she meant it to be.
Georgi Plekhanov wrote it in French in 1894, at the height of a war inside the international workers’ movement that is now largely forgotten and was then bitter and consuming: the war between the Marxists and the anarchists for control of the Second International. Within two years the anarchists would be excluded from its congresses for good, at Zürich in 1893 and finally at London in 1896, and this pamphlet was a weapon in that fight. Feeley’s Eleanor was on the same side of it and for the same reasons: convinced that the International must have a revolutionary socialist programme, she opposed those socialists who believed it could accommodate such divergent trends as the anarchists. Her preface, printed in this volume, presses the argument into the service of the British movement of her own day, pointing to the Socialist League — founded by William Morris, herself and others, and then abandoned by them to the anarchists — as the standing example of what was at stake. “Anarchism is but another word for reaction”, she writes, and she is not being decorative.
The author was the founder of Russian Marxism. Plekhanov (1856–1918) began as a Populist, broke with terrorism and the peasant road, emigrated to Geneva, and in 1883 founded there the Emancipation of Labour group, the first organised body of Russian Marxists. He was the teacher of Lenin’s whole generation. When he turned his fire on the anarchists he did so as the movement’s recognised theoretical authority, and the confidence shows on every page.
Within its chosen limits the pamphlet is very good. Plekhanov’s central move is to deny the anarchists the radicalism they claim, using the tools of historical materialism. Anarchism, he argues, is not the far frontier of socialism but a throwback to something socialism had already outgrown: the utopian habit of mind. The utopian, whether the eighteenth-century philosophe dreaming of a perfect legislation drawn from abstract human nature, or the modern anarchist demanding an absolute liberty drawn from the same abstraction, makes the same error. He steps outside history, appeals to man-in-general, and mistakes the idealised image of his own class for a universal truth. From this angle Plekhanov dismantles the anarchist pantheon in turn: Stirner, whose League of Egoists he calls the utopia of a petty bourgeois in revolt; Proudhon, caught forever between property and its abolition; Bakunin, the décadent of utopianism. The class reading is the pamphlet’s enduring contribution — the demonstration that a doctrine advertising itself as the most extreme enemy of the existing order reproduces that order’s deepest prejudice, the sovereign individual, and so serves reaction while flying the blackest of flags.
Now say where it falls short, and here we can call a sharp witness for the prosecution. This edition prints as an appendix the note the Charles H. Kerr company placed at the front of its American reprint, in which Lenin’s verdict from The State and Revolution is quoted at length. Lenin admired the historical-literary part, the material on Stirner and Proudhon, and convicted Plekhanov of a fatal evasion. Plekhanov, he wrote, “managed somehow to treat the question without touching on the most vital, controversial point … the relation of the revolution to State, and the question of the State in general.” The whole polemic is conducted around the one issue that actually divides Marxists from anarchists — what the working class is to do with state power once it has it — and Plekhanov walks past it. Where he does descend to particulars he descends to abuse, resting at one point on the theme, as Lenin scornfully paraphrased it, “that an anarchist cannot be distinguished from a bandit”, which Lenin called ignorant and narrow-minded. The omission and the abuse are two faces of one weakness, and the weakness belongs to the man Plekhanov was becoming: the theorist who by 1903 was drifting toward Menshevism, who in 1914 rallied to his own government’s war, and who in 1917 opposed the workers’ taking of power that his life’s teaching had prepared.
This is where the question this series always asks turns homeward. Was the state that canonised Plekhanov faithful to him, or did it use him?
It used him, and the using is instructive. The Soviet apparatus made Plekhanov the ancestral father of Russian Marxism, and gave him the handsome Progress Selected Philosophical Works in five volumes. Then it performed a careful surgery on the corpse, preserving the philosopher and burying the politician. His materialism was scripture; his Menshevism, his defencism, his horror at October were an embarrassment to be handled in a footnote or not at all. This particular book it kept out of the philosophical canon precisely because it was political, and political in a way that pointed at its author’s later apostasy. The Kerr note we reprint shows the same machinery working in miniature and from the other side of the world: it recommends the book warmly for its anti-anarchism, then in the same breath hands the reader Lenin’s correction of it. Keep the weapon, discipline the man. That is how a canon is built.
A bibliographical warning, which is also a political one. Anyone searching the socialist press for discussions of Anarchism and Socialism will collide almost at once with a different book. Stalin wrote a long pamphlet of nearly the same name, and it has its own afterlife: in a review note published in Quatrième Internationale in the late 1950s, the Fourth International’s leadership was still arguing about it, insisting against Henri Lefebvre that it is “an absolutely mistaken track” to try to explain Stalin and Stalinism from the dogmatic cast of his mind at the age when he wrote Anarchism and Socialism, and from his early taste for the authority of the State. Stalin, the reviewer argued, was not a dogmatist who imposed his ideas on Soviet society but a pragmatist who theorised after the fact the opportunist practice of the Soviet state, the spokesman of a bureaucracy that had expropriated the proletariat politically. The two pamphlets are worth keeping apart, and the accident of the shared title is worth noticing: the young Georgian seminarian reached for the founder of Russian Marxism’s subject, and the world afterwards had two anti-anarchist classics to choose from, one by the man who taught Lenin and one by the man who buried him.
There is a deeper irony still, and it is the reason this pamphlet repays a reading its author’s heirs did not intend. Plekhanov’s whole case rests on ridiculing the anarchists’ fear of the workers’ own state — their insistence that any state, even a proletarian one, must harden into a new machine of domination standing over the class in whose name it rules. In 1894 that could be dismissed as petty-bourgeois panic. Read from inside the Soviet Union that Stalin built, it reads differently. This series does not draw the anarchist conclusion, and the reader should be clear why: the dictatorship of the proletariat is Marx’s own category, drawn from the Paris Commune, a state already beginning to wither, its officials elected and revocable, its army the armed people, and to abandon it is to leave the working class disarmed before its enemies. The degeneration of the Russian revolution is to be explained by its isolation once the German revolution failed, by the ruin and backwardness of the country, and by the bureaucracy’s usurpation of power, not by an original sin in the doctrine of the workers’ state. But honesty, which this series prizes above consistency, requires the admission that the anarchists had hold of something real. The genuine Marxist answer to it was never Plekhanov’s silence. It was the Commune-state of The Civil War in France and of The State and Revolution, the state that dies away from its first day. Plekhanov declined to theorise the state at all, and it was the untheorised state, swollen and permanent, that in the end swallowed the revolution.
So the book still lives, and lives best read against both of the errors it can be made to serve: against the libertarianism that periodically returns promising an absolute freedom conjured out of the individual and against all organisation, and against the bureaucratic statism that wore Marx’s clothes and called its own permanence socialism. What survives when both are cleared away is the materialist question the pamphlet everywhere presses and its author everywhere half-answered. Not whether we are for the individual or the state in the abstract, but which class holds power, to what end, and under whose control.
The present text follows the complete Charles H. Kerr edition of Eleanor Marx Aveling’s translation, collated against the shorter 1895 printing, which drops part of her preface, with American spelling brought into line with the British usage of the rest of this series. Nothing of the translation itself has been altered.