Anarchism and Socialism

A book that survives as an item in someone else's bibliography.

Plekhanov wrote it in French in 1894, at the height of a war inside the international workers' movement that is now largely forgotten and was then bitter and consuming: the fight between the Marxists and the anarchists for control of the Second International. Within two years the anarchists would be excluded from its congresses for good, and this pamphlet was a weapon in that fight.

Its English translator was Eleanor Marx Aveling, and hers is the only English translation there has ever been. It reads like a pamphlet written in English by someone in a hurry to win an argument, because that is exactly what she meant it to be - in an age of stilted translation she aimed at an English that would not constantly announce itself as translated.

She was on the same side of the quarrel and for the same reasons. Convinced the International had to have a revolutionary socialist programme, she opposed those who thought it could accommodate the anarchists too, and her preface - printed here - presses the argument into the service of the British movement of her own day. She points to the Socialist League, founded by William Morris, herself and others and then abandoned by them to the anarchists, as the standing example of what was at stake. Anarchism, she writes, is but another word for reaction, and she is not being decorative.

Her translation and her preface are the reason for this edition.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.