o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

anarchy 99
revolutionary action, and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898), his
plan for post-revolutionary organization, fit this model.
The specific debate between anarchists and Marxists on the question
of utopia turns on a distinction Marx and Engels drew between
utopian and scientific socialism. By utopian socialism they referred
to the writings of early nineteenth-century socialists – Charles
Fourier, Robert Owen and St Simon – whose work was largely
devoted to the design of ideal communities. Scientific socialism was
the term they gave to their own work. The distinction was not
designed to denigrate the work of these early writers, but to suggest
that the science of Marxism and, more specifically, the idea of historical
development on which it was based, had made any attempt to
design ideal futures redundant. It suggested that socialists who
refused to accept the ‘truth’ of Marxist teachings were by definition
utopian. Nickolai Bukharin applied this logic in critique of the anarchists.
Their refusal to accept Marx’s economic theory led anarchists
to approach the question of organizing production with a view to
supplanting the industrial system rather than enhancing it. This idea
was ‘utterly utopian’. 26 George Plekhanov advanced a similar case.
The Anarchists are Utopians. Their point of view has nothing in
common with that of modern scientific Socialism. But there are
Utopias and Utopians. The great Utopians of the first half of our
century were men of genius; they helped forward social science,
which in their time was still entirely Utopian. The Utopians of
to-day, the Anarchists, are the abstracters of quintessence, who can
only fully draw forth some poor conclusions from certain mummified
principles. 27
The anarchist response was two-pronged. Landauer’s countercharge
was that the Marxist ideal was too mechanistic. Marxists
naively trusted science to ‘reveal, calculate and determine the future
with certainty from the data and news of the past and the facts and
conditions of the present’. But socialism is an art that relies on the
rediscovery of spirit. It is utopian because it demands human action.
The future – where ‘we are going, must go, and must want to go’ –
can be shaped only by ‘deepest conviction and feeling ... of what
ought to be’. Landauer’s plaintive cry was:
We are poets; and we want to eliminate the scientific swindlers, the
Marxists, cold, hollow, spiritless, so that poetic vision, artistically
concentrated creativity, enthusiasm, and prophecy will find their