Page:Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov - Anarchism and Socialism - tr. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1906).pdf/98

 Thus the emancipation of the peasants will have prepared the way for the weakening of Russian Tzarism. But how to emancipate the peasants before overthrowing Tzarism? Absolute mystery! Such an emancipation would be a veritable "witchcraft." Old Liscow was right when he said, "It is easier and more natural to write with the fingers than with the head."

However this may be, the whole political action of the working class must be summed up in these few words: "No politics! Long live the purely economic struggle! This is Bakounism, but perfected Bakounism. Bakounine himself urged the workers to fight for a reduction of the hours of labour, and higher wages. The Anarchist Communists of our day seek to "make the workers understand that they have nothing to gain from such child's play as this, and that society can only be transformed by destroying the institutions which govern it." The raising of wages is also useless. "North America and South America, are they not there to prove to us that whenever the worker has succeeded in getting higher wages, the prices of articles of consumption have increased proportionately, and that where he has succeeded in getting 20 francs a day for his wages, he needs 25 to be able to live according to the standard of the better class workman, so that he is always below the average?" The reduction of the hours of labour is at any rate superfluous since capital will always make it up by a "systematic intensification of labour by means of improved machinery. Marx himself has demonstrated this as clearly as possible."

We know, thanks to Kropotkine, that the Anarchist Ideal has a double origin. And all the Anarchist "demonstrations" also have a double origin. On the one hand they are drawn from the vulgar hand books of political economy, written by the most vulgar of bourgeois