ginner
often gets is that it is something extremely advanced. It is often
expressed somewhat as follows: "After capitalism comes socialism and
then comes anarchism." Plechanoff very ably explodes such notions.

Within the pages of this work the author shows not only the reactionary
character of anarchism, but he exposes its class bias and its empty
philosophic idealism and utopian program. He shows anarchism to be just
the opposite of scientific socialism or communism. It aims at a society
dominated by individualism, which is simply a capitalist ideal. Such
ideals as "liberty," "equality," "fraternity," first sprang from the
ranks of the petty property owners of early capitalism, as Plechanoff
shows. He also points out that while Proudhon is usually credited with
being "the father of anarchism" that actually Max Stirner comes closer
to being its "father." Stirner's "League of Egoists," he says, "is only
the utopia of a petty bourgeois in revolt. In this sense one may say he
has spoken the last word of bourgeois individualism."

Bakounine and Kropotkine, the famous Russian anarchists, are exposed as
confused idealists, who have not aided but rather hindered the
development of the working-class movement. Lenin speaks highly of the
book in this relation, but takes Plechanoff severely to task for his
failure properly to set forth the Marxian concepts of the State, and for
his total evasion of the form the State must take during the time it is
in the hands of the workers. When writing on the "Vulgarisation of Marx
by the Opportunists," in his _State and Revolution_, Lenin said:

"Plechanoff devoted a special pamphlet to the question of the relation
of socialism to anarchism entitled _Anarchism and Socialism_, published
in German in 1894. He managed somehow to treat the question without
touching on the most vital, controversial point, the essential point
_politically_, in the struggle with the anarchists: the relation of the
revolution to State, and the question of the State in general. His
pamphlet may be divided into two parts: one, historico-literary,
containing valuable material for the history of the ideas of Stirner,
Proudhon, and others; the second, ignorant and narrow-minded, containing
a clumsy disquisition on the theme 'that an anarchist cannot be
distinguished from a bandit,' an amusing combination of subjects and
most characteristic of the entire activity of Plechanoff on the eve of
revolution and during the rev