Marx felt as a forty-eighter, and that he gave free expression to these feelings. Marx and Engels continued for a very long time to regard the definitive social revolution as an immediate possibility; and in truth at the bottom of their hearts they remained in this respect utopians to the last. In this sense, let me repeat, Marx was more anarchist early than late. It is noteworthy that as late as 1872, when he succeeded in bringing about Bakunin's exclusion from the International, Marx did not shrink from the designation anarchist.[1]
To this extent, therefore, the French syndicalists who are so fond of appealing to Marx have right on their side. Indeed not only the syndicalists, but many declared anarchists as well, are convinced Marxists.
In any case, the Marxists cannot fight against anarchist revolutionism on principle; the only questions at issue between the socialists and the anarchists are those concerning tactics, concerning the value of particular methods in a particular place and at a particular time. Such, as we have seen, were the differences dividing socialists and anarchists during the Russian revolution.
The revisionists, too, approximate in certain respects to anarchism, for they abandon Marxist solomnism, emphasise the importance of individualism and subjectivism (proclaiming the return to Kant), and insist upon the validity of ethics as against historism in its extreme form. Certain revisionists, therefore, have at times advocated an understanding with the anarchists.
But by their insistence upon politism and by their watering down of revolutionism into reformism, the revisionists come into conflict with anarchism—though even here the conflict is only with those anarchists who preach a forcible revolution. Tolstoi, Tucker, Friedeberg, and not a few other anarchists, are opposed to the attempt to bring about revolution by force.
- ↑ "Tous les socialistes entendent par anarchic ceci: le but du mouvement prolétaire, l'abolition des classes, une fois atteint, le pouvoir de l'état, qui sert à maintenir la grande majorité productrice sous le joug d'une minorité exploitante peu nombreuse, disparait et les fonctions gouvernementales se transforment eu de simples fonctions administratives."—Marx, Les prétendues scissions de l'Internationale, 1872.
