Essay on Political Ideology: Socialism and Anarchism

Socialism stands for the indication of learning, in which the implementation of the principles of social justice, freedom and equality, as well as social system that embodies these principles is put forward as goal and ideal (Baradat 192). At the same time, in the opinion of Marxists, socialism is just the first and lower phase of communism. The most important place in the perversion of the ideas of socialism is typically K. Marx and F. Engels due to the substitution of exploitation of uniform people’s minds by purely economic exploitation, which started with the critique of Hegel’s philosophy in the attempts to destroy these ideas and replace them by communist ones in the development of the society (Baradat 180-183). The ideas of socialism are also represented in the works by Hegel, Ricardo, Pierre Joseph Proudhon and other Ricardian socialists of the time, as well as Bakunin and Kropotkin in their ideas of anarchism (Baradat 146-151).

Generally, in the first half of the 19th century, Marxists and anarchists believed that the exploiting classes would not want to refuse from their privileges. Consequently, the transition to socialism is possible only through revolution. This was reflected in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 and subsequent texts of many of revolutionary Marxists and anarchists (Baradat 154-168). In particular, arguing with the revisionists of Marxism like Bernstein, Vladimir Lenin stated that the conquest of power by peaceful means was only one of the ways which was not always suitable for being applied, appealing to the works of the founders of Marxism in his most famous work “State and Revolution” of 1918 (Baradat 179).

In his “Anarchismus ”“ Sozialismus”, Gustav Landauer explains that anarchism is perceived to be put in the first place as a goal to be achieved: absence of authorities, statelessness, and free life of individuals, and then it is specified by its theorists that the means they want to achieve and confirm that human freedom with is actually socialism, joint community of people in everything which is common to them, and companionate labor. According to Landauer, it can be objected that if anarchism is the goal, and socialism is the means to make it possible, then we get an absolutely impossible world, because anarchy is something negative, described by the absence of institutions of power, while socialism is a positive form of the society (Baradat 151).

Finally, the debates of revolutionary anarchists and Marxists on the issues of participation in the parliamentary struggle, as well as ways to seizure the state power led to the separation of these two trends, which took place in 1893 within the Second International.



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