This is the form in which socialism has reappeared, and it may be
described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy. The
movement is divided into two main branches--socialism proper, or
collectivism, as it is sometimes called, and anarchism. There are
anarchists who are not socialists, but hold strongly by an individualist
constitution of property. They are very few, however, and the great mass
of the party known by that name in our day, including the Russian
Nihilists, are as ardent believers in the economic socialism of Karl
Marx as the Social Democrats of Germany themselves. They diverge from
the latter on a question of future government; but the differences
between the two are only such as the same movement might be expected to
exhibit in passing through different media, personal or national. Modern
democrats have been long divided into Centralists and Federalists--the
one party seeking to give to the democratic republic they contemplate a
strongly centralized form of government, and the other preferring to
leave the local communes comparatively independent and sovereign, and
free, if they choose, to unite themselves in convenient federations. The
federal republic has always been the favourite ideal of the Democrats of
Spain and of the Communards of Paris, and there is generally a tendency
among Federalists, in their impatience of all central authority, to drop
the element of federation out of their ideal altogether, and to advocate
the form of opinion known as "anarchy"--that is, the abolition of all
superior government. It was very natural that this ancient feud among
the democrats should appear in the ranks of socialist democracy, and it
was equally natural that the Russian Radicals, hating the autocracy of
their country and idealizing its rural communes, should become the chief
adherents of the federalist and even the anarchic tradition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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