Abstract
The intellectual history of the debate between Anarchism and Marxism has its own fascination as a story of two elaborate idea systems in perpetual and inevitable conflict. Yet they seem to share the same theory of the state. Bakunin brought Machiavelli into the discussion and advanced, along with Jan Wacław Machajski, a critique of Social Democracy as the ideology of the Intelligentsia. Both these impulses found their way into the Marxism of the Bolsheviks. The two great idea systems both endorsed the Paris Commune and for a time the revolutions of 1917. A neglected dimension in historical studies is the attitudes of the two ideologies toward the great states and the balance of power. Marxism pinned its hopes on the rise of Germany, Anarchism on the defence of France, the land of the great revolution. The war of 1914 changed all the valences, with the two ideologies pitted against all the great states. Ironically, Anarchism can be seen as playing a role in saving Russia for its later struggle against fascism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Anthony D’Agostino, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1945 (Santa Barbara and London: Praeger, 2012), chap. 1.
- 2.
A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), 68.
- 3.
Marx to Engels, 20 July 1870, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_07_20.htm.
- 4.
Michel Bakounine, Confession (Paris, 1932); Aileen Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
- 5.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1932) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 53.
- 6.
M. A. Bakunin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izd-vo Vsesoiuznogo Obshchestva Politicheskikh Katorzhan i Ssyl’no-Poselentsev, n.d.), vol. 1, 45.
- 7.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago, 1904), 288–289. Anthony D’Agostino, Marxism and the Russian Anarchists (San Francisco: Germinal, 1977), ch 2.
- 8.
D’Agostino, Marxism, 43–45. The formula of Machiavellianism from below was later used in Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder and London: Westview, 1987), 36–38. This is a translation of Agursky’s Ideologiia natsional bol’shevizma.
- 9.
G. P. Maksimov, The Guillotine at Work (Chicago, 1940), 21; “Sotzializm, anarkhizm, i russkaia revolutsiia,” Volna (March–April–May, 1923), 19.
- 10.
Quoted in Dick Geary, Karl Kautsky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 61.
- 11.
Caroline Cahm, Peter Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1873–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- 12.
Varlaam Cherkezov, Doktriny Marksizma: nauka-li eto? (London, 1904), 4–7. U kogo Marks i Engels spisal Kommunisticheskii Manifest? (London, 1904).
- 13.
J. W. Machajski, Buzhuazjna rewolucya a sprawa robotnicza (Geneva, 1905), 4–5.
- 14.
J. W. Machajski, Umstvennyi rabochi (Geneva, 1905); L. Trotsky, My Life (1930) (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 129.
- 15.
Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Marshall Shatz, Jan Wacław Machajski: a Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia and Socialism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939); James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York: John Day, 1941); Bruno Rizzi, La Bureaucratisation du monde (Paris, 1939); Milovan Djilas, New Class (New York and London: Praeger, 1957); Mikhail Voslenskii, Nomenklatura (London: Overseas Publications, 1984).
- 16.
Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 200.
- 17.
Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, ‘Introduction’ to Adams and Kinna (Eds), Anarchism, 1914–18:Internationalism, Anti-Militarism, and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 1–26; F. L. Carsten, War against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).
- 18.
Otto Rűhle, “Moscow and Us,” Die Aktion, 18 September 1920, trans. John Gray. Libcom.org/library/Moscow-us-Otto-ruhle.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
D’Agostino, A. (2019). Anarchism and Marxism in the Russian Revolution. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75619-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75620-2
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)