Page:Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov - Anarchism and Socialism - tr. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1906).pdf/76



our present-day Anarchists some, like John Mackay, the author of "Die Anarchisten, Kulturgemälde aus dem Ende des xix. Jahrhunderts," declare for individualism, while others—by far the more numerous—call themselves Communists. These are the descendants of Bakounine in the Anarchist movement. They have produced a fairly considerable literature in various languages, and it is they who are making so much noise with the help of the "propaganda by deed." The prophet of this school is the Russian refugee, P. A. Kropotkine.

I shall not here stop to consider the doctrines of the Individualist-Anarchist of to-day, whom even their brethren, the Communist-Anarchists, look upon as "bourgeois." We will go straight on to the Anarchist-"Communist."

What is the standpoint of this new species of Communism? "As to the method followed by the Anarchist thinker, it entirely differs from that of the Utopists," Kropotkine assures us. "The Anarchist thinker does not resort to metaphysical conceptions (like 'natural