Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/426

400 but the contents of the volume are utterly tame, and all that is demanded is the right to subvert the old order.

UR ideas will be clarified by a closer examination of the relationship between socialism and anarchism.

We have learned from the comparison between Bakunin and Marx (§ 94) that there are numerous points of contact between anarchism and socialism, so that we are forced to doubt whether the contrast between the two doctrines is as far reaching as Marx and the Marxists believe. We must not be led astray by the enmity between the anarchists and the Marxists, for hostility is often most intense between the parties and trends that are most closely akin. We cannot without further examination accept Marx's campaign against Bakunin, Proudhon, and Stirner, or Liebknecht's polemic against Most, as proof that socialism and anarchism are essential opposites. In practice, it is only during recent years that the opposition has been so strongly emphasised by the Marxists (exclusion of anarchists from socialist congresses, antisocialist congresses held by anarchists).

The history of anarchism and socialism shows that these two systems were not at first sharply distinguished. The two trends did not diverge until after the exclusion of Bakunin from the International in 1872, when there was a severance of socialist Marxism from anarchist Bakuninism. At first, moreover, the quarrel was more personal than one of principle.

The development of Marx and Stirner was contemporary, and we can point to similar parallels at an earlier day, as between Godwin and Babeuf. Notwithstanding the official exclusion of anarchists from the international congress in London (1896), in the various political and other organisations of France, Italy, and Russia, the anarchists and the socialists did not invariably become segregated; they continued to work together without being fully aware of their differences. Many anarchist publicists have endeavoured of late to annul the distinction between anarchism and socialism. They admit that at the outset, and so long as anarchism was advocated mainly by philosophers and poets, anarchism differed from socialism, especially as concerns questions of organisation and economic policy; but to-day, they contend, the difference