A classic criticism of classical anarchism

I know the SPGB keeps saying that Stirner was father of anarchism, but I've never once seen your publications even demonstrate an influence. Stirners work remained obscure until Tucker translated it, but even he didn't subscribe to Stirner's ideas.

And I also note that every time your group has used stirner as tool to distance anarchism from marxism (or more accurately your own version of it) your criticisms ignore the sections of his work where he talks about the economy and class.

Also see it talks about evolution and Kropotkin but fails to mention Mutual Aid, a work that had been published several years before this series of articles was written. Either the author didn't do much research or its just another hatchet job.

Does seem like a strange omission. Actually "Mutual Aid" was on the SPGB recommended reading list for many years, not sure when it was first recommended (1940s?).

What do you think the "lib" in libcom means? Why post this gibberish here? It's no better than the sort of thing any random Leninist sect puts out.

As opposed to the SPGB, which has been overflowing with members since day 1

From ALB himself on Kropotkin

https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2015/07/what-marx-should-h...

I don't see any purpose in who can piss the highest charges when it comes to membership and support, sherbu.

You are right the has been a paltry number of workers who joined the SPGB, but equally take a look around this forum and tell me who has done any better. It pains all of us at the negligible effect either the anarchist or left communists or the SPGB have had.

Is it wrong to try and analyse why and suggest the cause? I know it won't please all, but I rarely found any form of criticism pleased everybody.

DarrenP as a teenager first introduced to socialism, it was the Western Socialist that advertised Mutual Aid that led me to getting it and soon afterwards Berkman's ABC of Anarchism that one local anarchist sold around the pubs.

I'm not trying to start a pissing contest over membership numbers, I know anarchists are broadly insignificant now -- I was trying to point out how silly this article is. It criticises anarchists for being "unable to organise the working class" whilst themselves being unable to organise the working class. Though, with that said, anarchists did do a tremendous amount of organising the working class, in Spain, Italy, France and elsewhere. In 1911, the criticism does not hold up at all.

In general, I like criticism. It's good, and it's good to engage with it. But this is just incredibly bad, riddled with the same kind of smears that Marxists have been repeating since the First International. To go through and rebut them all would be a waste of time, but I'll try and deal with a couple to show what I mean.

The claim that Stirner was the "pioneer of anarchism" whose thought "lies at the root of all Anarchist teaching" is just absurd. It's reasonable to say that Stirner influenced Marxism more than he influenced anarchism -- Bakunin mentions him only once, casually and negatively, whereas Engels was in agreement with him for some time, and Marx felt it necessary to write 300 pages against him.

As far as I know, this particular line of attack about the king of Anarchy Stirner originates with Engels and Liebeknecht in the 1880/90s. You can see it here in this article from Liebeknecht trying to justify the exclusion of libertarians from the Second International, with an absurd argument that admitting anarchists would entail admitting Stirner which would entail admitting Stirner's disciple Eugen Richter, the German liberal, basically one of the only people claiming allegiance to him. Which would entail letting capitalists in the Second International. Like I said, absurd.

This was pointed out by Tcherkesoff in his reply (page 6 of the Sept-Oct 1896 issue found here) where he accurately says that Stirner and Richter are "strangers to our party". It's an article worth reading. Stirner was unknown by anarchists until John Henry Mackay rediscovered him in the late 1880s and spread his ideas among the individualist-anarchists like Tucker. It wasn't until 1898 that Mackay put his biography of Stirner out, and an English edition of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum didn't come out until 1907.

The rest of the article is just as absurd, there's nothing remotely fair or reasonable within it. For instance, it spends paragraphs railing against anarchists as idealists who put too much stock in ideas, then it says this:

In other words, as long as you have the right kind of socialist ideas, you won't get corrupted. Brilliant!

It's not just the article itself that's nonsense, but alb's framing comments too, which is why I addressed my comment to him.

This gets the history arse-backwards and is a silly, sectarian attempt to chalk anarchism's successes up to Marxism. I don't think anarchists have ever adopted "Marxian economics and theory of history" but if they did, it wasn't until after WWII, when anarchism's relative peak had already passed. Capital influenced Bakunin and some of the other federalists, but Proudhon was a significant influence too, and after the International disintegrated (mainly because of Marx and co.) Marx ceased to be a significant reference point for libertarians. You can look at documents from the French anarchist-syndicalist movement, Spanish movement, etc and not see very much Marx at all, but you will see quite a lot of Proudhon.

As for the "democratically organised majority action" and calling ourselves "libertarian socialists", we have been doing that since the beginning. Perhaps the main role of Bakunin and the other federalists in the First International was to encourage mass proletarian organisation. That's what he wanted the International to be, which explains why he accepted that some sections would seek to run for parliament; he didn't want any single line to be mandated on the sections by the General Council, not even his own collectivist line, since it would inevitably produce splits and “there would be as many Internationals as there were different programs”. And remember, Bakunin and his comrades were much more likely to call themselves collectivists or federalists than they were anarchists, a label some of them were uncomfortable with.

Bakunin wasn't some insurrectionist terrorist, though you wouldn't get that if you believed the lies in the SPGB article.

Shouldn't it be that the random "leninist sects" sounds like the SPGB considering this text came out a good or two decade before anything resembling leninists sects started appearing.

The part about legality that draws on Engels is good though since I think it is an aspect of Engels and Marx' politics not often brought up, even if this representation is a bit vulgar and limited.

Oh give me a break. What anarchists were calling Marx a German Jew in 1911? Nothing about this article is well-researched; the author clearly went through a few anarchist papers looking for gotchas to attack anarchists with. That's not good research.

Anarchists had been involved in the dumb "propaganda of the deed" terror attacks, true, but by 1911 that period had passed. Probably the majority opinion was now for libertarians to be active in the labour movement. Which is something this article attacks anyway. This isn't just an attack on insurrectionism but all anarchists, period. It's not some reasoned critique but a typical smear article that you'd expect from a social democrat in 1911. The main aim is to make anarchists look bad, truth be damned.

At no point do I deny Stirner having an influence over anarchists, particular individualists. But a) those individualists were and are a minority among anarchists, and b) this article doesn't claim that Stirner merely had an influence, but that he was the pioneer of anarchism and that his thought was at the root of all anarchist thinking. Just ridiculous, and I think you know it, which is why you're trying to shift the discussion away to a general one about Stirner having an impact, and ignoring most of the other points I made.

Kropotkin, Tcherkesoff, Grave, etc "blotted their copybook" by supporting the war, yes, but I don't think Marxists can throw stones here.

In the first half of the 1900s, anarchists were involved in the labour organisation of perhaps millions of workers, and they would play a central role in several revolutions, most obviously the Spanish. What was the equivalent "peak" for the SPGB in the corresponding period? This isn't a fairly researched criticism, it's a pathetic hit-piece designed to make all anarchists look bad and the SPGB look great. It is no better than any of the other sectarian hit pieces you get from the SWP or whatever: anarchism is bad, our sect is great.

We all reach our present political positions carrying our own baggage, and sometimes we do not even see the baggage on our backs. And if we do become aware of it, we are often reluctant to jettison it.

Re-fighting old battles don't get us anywhere so I do have some sympathy for sherbu's attitude. 1911 isn't 2020 and we have witnessed an evolution in anarchist thought and practice such as propaganda by the deed as no longer part of the ideology (although I suppose the Angry Brigade was the last gasp) The pamphlet, "You can't blow up a social relationship" expresses the current prevailing view.

Syndicalism and the industrial unionism have developed from the simplistic "mines for the miners and dust for the dustmen" analysis and now expanded to include neighbourhood community voices and non-working persons in their organisational projections and not just work-places. Yes, even the SPGB have changed attitudes and emphasis since the time I first joined in the 1970s and re-joined in the 2000s.

ALB has made the case that the article is reflective of the times, hence if I understand correctly it was publishing something from the SPGB's history's archive. Was it representative of the political situation in 1911, probably. Does it inform us any better of the relationship of anarchism and marxism today, probably not at all.

Do there still exist differences between the SPGB and many on this website. Most definitely.

Political action through parliament to capture the State. And the precedence over that approach of industrial action and workers councils. There is also lesser differences in matters of degree of the role respective organisations take in the class struggle and how class consciousness arises. But those latter are not fundamental disagreements as the former is but issues for comradely debate.

As an SPGBer, who remains committed to advocating for our corner, I see that our pamphlet "What's wrong with using Parliament" does express the flexibility of its position if situations and conditions call for a non-parliamentary struggle but where is the anarchist case to support workers if they strategically and tactically choose to prioritise voting in elections to gain political power.

I'm not going to get into a deep discussion of the role of anarchism in the class struggle but merely point out one important distinction. Syndicalism doesn't equate to anarchism and Bookchin's study of the FAI and the CNT in his book 'Spanish Anarchists the Heroic Years' brings out the contradictions

Just for the record, I've been involved with the anarchist 'movement' (for want of a better word) for 40 years, and in all that time, I've never met a single Stirnerite.

But I don't think this article would have meant much even in 1911...

We all need to look back at history without rose-coloured glasses and look clearly at strengths and weakness, when we did right, when we did wrong. Lord knows anarchists can be as bad at mangling history as Marxists. But alb is not promoting an honest view of history at all, quite the opposite. The article might be of historical interest to someone studying early 20th century polemics against anarchism, but it certainly doesn't say anything reasonable about anarchism either then or now. It's not a "classic criticism of classical anarchism", and it's not remotely well-researched.

If we want to look at how syndicalism and anarchism has evolved, we can do that. But without the muddle. To take the issue of "neighbourhood community voices and non-working persons", obviously there's been more of an emphasis on it these days as opposed to a hundred years ago, but even then, the question was not alien to them. As an example, at the founding congress of the CNT in 1911, they discussed how to include the disabled in their activity -- see here, CTRL+F "This Commission faces an extremely difficult problem".

The article was bad in 1911, and I don't understand why alb would want to pretend otherwise in 2020. The only explanation that comes to mind is the usual sectarianism, our sect is better than yours, bla bla bla.

On syndicalism, you're right that it's not synonymous with anarchism but it's not like this article was attempting to be careful about that point. First it says that the only alternative to individual action (defined as propaganda of the deed terrorism) is political action (defined as "action pursued through the channels of local and national control and government"). Anticipating a response that syndicalism is an avenue too, it just goes on to rubbish it and anything associated with it. Eg attacking the CGT as undemocratic for allowing small unions to have the same votes as big ones. This particular criticism just makes me think the author doesn't understand what federalism is. Would someone of his mindset get mad knowing that Tuvalu (pop: 11000) has the same vote in the UN General Assembly as China (pop: 1.4b)?

I also just noticed the bizarre racism in the next paragraph:

I also agree with Serge about Stirnerites, they're altogether marginal, at least among social anarchists. I've only ever seen bonafide Stirnerites on the internet and in all my readings of history I haven't come across that many of them that weren't just died in the wool individualists -- the only exceptions I can think of are Emma Goldman and some of the Glaswegian anarcho-communists.

I don’t think it proves anything, though I have met several Glaswegians who claimed to be Stirnerites or egoists.

Robert Lynn (https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/4qrg24) and a number of his comrades often argued that Stirner’s ideas were the bedrock of their anarchism. My rejection of his ideas and my preference for Kropotkin was seen as a wee bit suspicious (added to my activism inside my union, and a belief in direct democracy – the horror, the horror!).

If I wrote an article saying that Marxism is a totally stupid, fundamentally totalitarian doctrine, made up by Germanic Northern Europeans who are unable to understand liberty on account of their racial characteristics, how would you respond? Would you say "hmm, a fair article really, some Marxists are totalitarians" or reject it as a low-quality hit piece?

You're trying to pretty up the article and make it sound more reasonable than it is. Kohn was not merely noting that Stirner was a "pioneer of anarchist ideas" (which would be a false claim it in of itself) but trying to make the claim that his thought "lies at the root of all Anarchist teaching". He wants to do this so he can quote one of Stirner's most absurd passages and then smear all anarchists with it.

1. I'm not saying it should be verboten to bring up the propaganda of the deed actions, I'm saying you can't smear all anarchists as terrorists because of it, when most anarchists -- certainly at the time it was written -- rejected such acts.

2. The federal structure of the CGT allowed revolutionary syndicalists (anarchist or no) to have the power they did, yes. It also allowed them to lose that power. It was not a system set up purely for their benefit, but a system totally in accord with the federalism that stretched back to the First International and beyond. Anarchists don't believe that majorities have the right to assert their will over minorities. Obviously, they don't want minorities to assert their will over majorities either, which is why the aim is to decentralise organisations as much as possible.

More generally, it's a confederation of unions, not a mass section in of itself. The basic unit of the confederation is not the individual but the constituent union. You only find this odd because it allowed anarchists to be influential for a period. Like I said before -- do you get mad that the Tuvalu has the same vote as China in the UN General Assembly?

I concede that the anarchists and other syndicalists didn't consider themselves to be democrats. I don't think that's a problem though.

3. Though I disagree with it, I don't have any major issue with that criticism being raised. I have an issue with sectarian smear articles.

4. Proudhon didn't think like that. Bakunin didn't think like that. I can't think of any anarchist who has thought like that. It's an absurd claim. The Proudhon quote Kohn cites is ripped completely out of context to the point that it's nearly incomprehensible (the definitions of "political constitution" and "social constitution" are not given and need to be), but even in this form you can tell it's not being utopian, it's the opposite of that. He's saying that the social constitution is something that emerges out of experience, the practical interplay of forces in real life. It's not something that you can draw a picture perfect image of in advance.

The people who come out as idealists in this exchange are the ones that think "informed Socialist men and women" will never sell out, that having the right ideas will immunise you from the pressure of capitalism and government. What could go wrong with that attitude?

5. I didn't say that these people were incapable of advocating revolutionary action so I don't know what relevance this has. In the article, Kohn criticises Malatesta for saying that political action doesn't need to involve parliaments, that killing a king can be considered political too. To counter, Kohn says that political action necessarily includes parliaments -- "therefore Politics DO include Parliament". What part of all this are you disputing?

Since I've responded to your list of questions, please respond to some of mine, that I have already asked but you've ignored:

1. Which anarchists were calling Marx a German Jew in 1911?

2. In 1911, anarchists were involved in the organisation of hundreds of thousands of members of the working class. What was the SPGB doing in the same period, that allowed it to talk of anarchism's "inability to organise the working class"?

Every time I read this article, I find another shitty thing about it. It claims that anarchists are constantly accusing each other of being spies -- "accusations of being police spies lead to continual recrimination and permanent distrust among the “comrades" -- then they themselves go on to accuse anarchists of being spies -- "Just so with the members of the Anarchist groups. It is often difficult to find out which are the genuine “comrades” and which the spies".

It also repeats the baseless smear about Bakunin maybe being a spy, here:

It doesn't endorse it, but you know, just throws it out there, maybe he was a spy, maybe he wasn't, you never know, but he certainly did act like one.

Never mind that actions of "the sturdy Socialist pioneer" led to virtually every section of the IMWA abandoning Marx and going over to the side of the federalists...

time travel is fun! in 1911 it was not at all clear that propaganda by the deed was finished as a strategy (there were plenty of such acts in Russia, for example, leading up to the 1917 revolution, and the actions of the so-called Bonnot Gang, which would grab the radical imagination in France, was just beginning, and the soon-to-be outlawed CNT in Spain would soon start their campaigns of direct action, which often included assassination, especially during the years of "pistolerismo"). imperfect general strikes were soon to be more common, but that's no reason to think that the strategy as a whole was flawed; indeed, it could be argued that the mass mutinies in the Russian army coupled with the industrial work stoppages in Petrograd and Moscow in 1917 were a general strike, and we know what happened to tsarism...
the 1911 SPGB screed is typical of anti-anarchist rants by socialists: a bad faith hatchet job relying on one or more straw men, containing deliberate misreadings, and overflowing with guilt-by-(false) association
but yeah, time travel is fun. what's that saying about hindsight?

Sounds like a very headless way of organizing that opens up for abuse. I think a "majority rule" is important to allow the rank-and-file to hold the organisations leaders accountable and allow them to decide the direction of the organisation. Historically I think this "decentralism" and de-centering of the rank-and-file has ironically allowed for bureaucratic zig-zags of both the "syndicalist" and reformist fractions to destroy, split or halter CGT.

I think it would be fair to say that the text was not written primarily as a "theoretical" critique or "battle of ideas" but rather an attack on the then existing anarchist groupings within the labor movement, like most critiques of anarchism from that time. It is not like anyone calls Rosa Luxemburg's text The Mass Strike a leninist sect text because she calls the Russian anarchists bandits and French syndicalists "half-anarchists", and that the social-democrats(SPD) is the most class conscious vanguard. Is the only difference that the SPD actually was the largest organisation in Germany at the time?

alb, are you saying that Rosa Luxemburg is beyond reproach for using similar bullshit dismissals? if so, why? because she's Rosa Luxemburg and not Kohn?
i want to make sure i understand your provocation

Why do you think I care what Rosa Luxemburg said?

If we are to explore the growth of anarchist ideas, why have we omitted the influence of William Godwin. Although, I have never met anyone who claimed to be a Godwinist (Godwinite?) but should we disavow him in the annals of anarchism?

I tried to bring the discussion to a contemporary debate on the contrasting approaches of present day anarchists/council communists/syndicalists/SPGB but the historical perspective seems to have deepened somewhat.

I have always been sympathetic to Joseph Dietzgen position
"The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so "mixed" together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them - for it is dialectic." June 9, 1886

On anarchists and socialists generally, he said:
"For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference...While the anarchists may have mad and brainless individuals in their ranks, the socialists have an abundance of cowards. For this reason I care as much for one as the other...The majority in both camps are still in great need of education, and this will bring about a reconciliation in time" - April 20, 1886

Emma's mention of the SPD is relevant. I have read that the early SPGB aspired to be a class-based party similar to the SPD but without its reformism and revisionism. It was something the SPGB failed to achieve. Perhaps my fellow members and those within the anarchist and left communist tradition should be discussing why a mass organisation didn't materialise rather than casting stones in a glass house.

Sherbu's point of Spain becomes a bit more relevant as does the experience of the KAPD, IWW etc...was it solely because of State repression that they did not bear more permanent fruit when we look around the world today?

I still don't understand what point you're making or why you're bringing up people like Luxemburg or Pannekoek -- do you think I'm a council communist? That Kohn is expressing sentiments common among the Marxists of the time is not exactly relevant. My issue with him isn't that I think he's being unique or something.

If anything, the fact he's repeating the mainline social-democratic view is a mark against him -- a certain big thing would happen in Germany in 1914 that would register mainline social democracy as very obviously bankrupt in the eyes of any serious socialist. The kind of big thing that anarchists would have been able to predict.

Finally, we can agree on something!

I don't think criticizing an SPGBer via WW1 is the best argumentation you could've gone for there. Especially considering that organizations outside of political parties, like the CGT in France, found themselves in the same position as the social-democrats (Union Sacrée). Something anarchists most certainly didn't predict.

Just to stir more shit in this thread, I'd like to point out that Marx's reading and critique of Stirner profoundly influenced his thinking. It's rarely picked up on but I believe both David McLellan and Michel Henry wrote on the subject. If anything, he's the most 'individualistic' here. In a very different way from Stirner and his individual as pure consciousness of course.

even though it's not precisely accurate, obviously it's not much of an insult. in fact, i'd say that it's exactly the same kind of dismissal you've been quoting and promoting all along. Marxist and non-Marxist socialists have been dismissing and condemning anarchists (and other unaffiliated radicals too, by the way) for not being Marxists or socialists since the time of the First International, if not before. it's not much of an argument. most anarchists don't simply dismiss Marxists and non-Marxist socialists for being insufficiently anti-statist; sozis don't (usually) say they are against the state, so how much sense does it make to condemn them for not adhering to a position they never said they hold? in short, alb, make your point using something like good faith and you might get a more fruitful discussion.

That's a fair point BigFluffyTail, but could it not be the case that the hostility of the German social-democrats to direct anti-militarism could have been a contributing factor in the decision of the CGT to join the Union Sacrée? For a while prior to the war, French socialists had tried to organise anti-militarist resolutions with the German socialists calling for a general strike on the outbreak of war, but they were rebuffed.

You are French so you would know more about this than I do but I could see this as contributing to an unwillingness on the part of CGT leaders to act against the war, seeing as it was unlikely their actions would be reciprocated in kind by their equivalents in Germany. Doesn't justify the decision of course and there were plenty of other factors at play but it could explain it somewhat.

To me this is relevant to the SPGB article, because of:

a) The claim about "informed socialist men and women" being impervious to corruption or betrayal of principles was proven wrong by the decision of the SPD to vote for war credits -- unless alb wants to make the claim that they weren't informed enough, or were the wrong kind of informed -- at which point you may as well replace "well-informed socialist" in that bit with "SPGB member".

b) The broad anti-general strike attitude, opposing on principle one of the only tactics that could have possibly stopped the war as it was just beginning, thus holding significant value to the working class.

On the Marx and Stirner thing, I don't know a lot about it but I've read that after the episode with Stirner's thinking, Marx shed some of the humanist concepts he had gotten from Feuerbach. Do you remember the names of the texts where McLellan or Henry go into it?

Alb claims the article shows how "all over the place" anarchists were until they adopted "marxian economics' and labelled themselves “libertarian socialist”. That might be true if the article's description of anarchist history was accurate but it's not, it's rubbish. Anarchists have used the terms libertarian & socialist since the 1850s. From early in their history – during Marx’s lifetime - anarchists weren’t generally opposed to his theories of economics. Eg, Bakunin made the first Russian translation of the Communist manifesto in the 1860s and began the first translation of Das Kapital which was finished by N. Danielson and published in 1872.

Stirner wasn't "the pioneer of anarchism" and that claim alone reveals the shallow historical ignorance of the article and its promoters. He was a contemporary and social acquaintance of his fellow Young Hegelians Marx, Engels & Bakunin. He wrote one obscure philosophical book (published in 1844) which had little, if any, influence on anarchist activity in the labour movement of the time. If one is to judge who was most influenced by it according to who wrote the most about it that would probably be Marx & Engels, whose German Ideology contains a long section criticising Stirner’s book. But, according to historian D. McLellan, the influence on Marx was considerable;

Not that you’d know about such subtle aspects of the subject if you believed the simplistic claims peddled here by SPGB.

The method of argument is also dishonest; despite claiming to show how muddle-headed anarchist thinking is the article cherry picks quotes from various authors and sews them together as supposed evidence of a uniform strawman anarchist creed. They ignore that the individualists, communist, collectivist, syndicalist etc anarchists are distinct currents due to differences of opinion and tactics. One may as well critique the SPGB’s marxism with references to stalinism.

What irony - from the party that idealistically and mechanically clings, since 1904, to notions of their eventual parliamentary conquest as the primary force of global change in the face of all historical experience to the contrary; pitiful handfuls of votes and all. One might’ve thought that if the ‘democratic will of the people’ is given such central importance as an indicator that its absolute rejection of the SPGB throughout its history would give pause for reconsideration of the voting tactic.

Yes, history since 1911 has “inevitably” proved the superiority of the SPGB method.

As for quoting Pannekoek; Pannekoek took account of historical experience and developments in class struggle to soon reject parliamentarism as a useful method – whereas the SPGB’s rigid eternal fetish of bourgeois democratic voting (reducing ‘class consciousness’ to a parliamentary majority) has led it to “ramble in the Utopian wilderness” for 100+ years.

It seems the SPGB have never heard of such things as military coups or states of emergency. Nor considered the role of mutinies, probably because such things are ‘undemocratic’ and against the ‘sovereignty’ of their sacred bourgeois Parliament.

Not only do you not have the sense to be embarrassed by this crap article, you actually want to revive it and troll it. And yet a few years ago, when there was what appeared to be a brief rise in anarchism’s popularity, one of the SPGBers here opportunistically claimed on libcom that their Party was “the parliamentary wing of anarchism” (which didn’t please most SPGB members). Like any political current, there are plenty of valid and useful criticisms of historical anarchist theory & practice that could be made. This article is not a contribution to that.

This is probably going to be my last reply as this is getting a bit like talking to a brick wall, but calling Marx an anarchist is just silly. You can't be saying this in good-faith. Anarchism is not merely a stateless endpoint but a method of getting there, a set of principles, a philosophy about organisation, and more.

Anarchism as we know it largely came from two key sources: Proudhon, and the development of the federalist current in the First International -- those that had grouped around Bakunin, Guillaume, etc. Marx opposed this current with all his might, even before they started calling themselves anarchists -- remember, Bakunin preferred not to use the term to describe himself, and Guillaume said the term was in bad taste. Anarchism only became the preferred term after Marx had helped fracture the International and the libertarians began to embark on their own project.

Proudhon published What is Property? in 1840, in which he explicitly claims he is an anarchist, something neither Marx nor Stirner ever did.