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A comparison of Bakunin and Marx serves very well to illustrate the relation between Anarchism and Socialism, in so far as Bakunin is regarded as one of the most important founders of Anarchism and Marx as the founder of present-day Socialism, and in so far as the difference between the two men can be treated as the difference between those two creeds.

The philosophical starting point is the same for Bakunin and for Marx—Hegel, Feuerbach and the Hegelian Left. Both learn from Proudhon and the French Socialists, both become positivists and materialists, both live for some time in the same conditions and the same places, both take part in the revolution, both live through the same reaction and its effects upon personal security and freedom. But Bakunin remains under the influence of German philosophy rather from a subjective and individualist angle, while Marx—and this is true also of Engels—advances under the influence of French and English positivists to extreme objectivism, and comes to regard history and the masses as the deciding factors in social life. Engels even goes so far as to throw over the individual conscience.

Bakunin also rejected extreme individualism. Only a few days before his death, in a conversation on Schopenhauer, he said: “Our whole philosophy starts from a false foundation, in treating man as an individual, instead of treating him as belonging to a collective whole. Hence arise most philosophical errors, which end by transplanting happiness to the clouds or kindling pessimism such as that of Schopenhauer and Hartmann.” In 1838 he looked upon suicide, in 1876 upon pessimism, as a necessary consequence of extreme subjectivism and individualism, and indeed there is no great difference between the two views.

Marx, as opposed to Bakunin, is more scientific and critical, in short, a theorist, while the Russian turned his attention more to political practice. In his beginnings, and even later, Marx did not in the main think differently from Bakunin. He took part in the Revolution of 1848, though far more cautiously than Bakunin: he, too, wanted to destroy the State, and believed in the speedy erection of an ideal social order. But Marx gave up the revolutionary ideas of his youth and took up scientific