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what is anarchism? 33
organization’. For the Bolsheviks, however, the slogan meant ‘resurrection
of the State after the abolition of the bourgeois State – that is
to say, the creation of a powerful new State for the purpose of
“constructing Socialism”’. 56 Whilst many modern anarchists – from
anarcho-syndicalists to postmodernists – classify themselves as anticapitalists
rather than anti-statists, the experience of the revolution
and the subsequent creation of the Soviet State have added weight to
the view that anarchism revolves around the rejection of the state,
since this is the point on which anarchism and Marxism divide. In
1922 in a bad-tempered exchange with the ‘left Bolshevik’ Nikolai
Bukharin, Luigi Fabbri argued:
The state is more than an outcome of class division; it is ... the
creator of privilege ... Marx was in error in thinking that once classes
had been abolished the state would die a natural death ... The state
will not die away unless it is deliberately destroyed, just as capitalism
will not cease to exist unless it is put to death through expropriation.
... And, let us say it again, the anarchists have pointed this out – in
their polemics with social democrats – times without number from
1880 up to the present day. 57
One of the effects of the formal division of socialists into anarchist
and Marxist camps has been to encourage anarchists to re-evaluate
their relationship to liberalism. Bruised by their knowledge of the
tyranny of Soviet socialism, twentieth-century anarchists in particular
reasserted their commitment to the philosophy of liberalism and
offered robust defences of the civic freedoms with which liberals are
traditionally associated.
The theoretical alignment of anarchism with liberalism has a historical
root. William Godwin’s anarchism was firmly grounded in a
tradition of radicalism informed by scientific reason. Bakunin, too,
celebrated the idea of reason and identified in liberalism a principle
of rationality and of scientific thought that he linked with emancipation
and progress. Though he complained that the benefits of scientific
knowledge extended to ‘only ... a very small portion of society’,
he believed that liberal science would provide the foundation for
integral or all-round education in anarchy. Developing this idea, the
Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer commented:
Those imaginary products of the mind, a priori ideas, and all the
absurd and fantastical fictions hitherto regarded as truth and
imposed as directive principles on human conduct, have for some