Marxism is more distinctively an economic theory than is anarchism. Not merely do we find that the socialists as students pay far more attention to economics than do the anarchists, but we note further that in practical work in the social and economic fields the Marxists lead the way. Bakunin and Kropotkin are both weak as political economists. Kropotkin, for example, fails to note that the free groups of workers which he counterposes to the socialistic centralisation of larger social bodies must inevitably lead to a sort of middleclass economy.
Marxism is declared communism. Bakunin, like Proudhon, was opposed to communism, and aspired to a federative collectivism. To-day many anarchists are communists and detest collectivism, which many socialists, on the other hand (the revisionists), demand as a mitigation of the original communism. In any case, there are now two notable trends in anarchism, respectively individualist and communist.
Socialism, too, is astatism. According to Engels-Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a primary aim, but only in order to secure the abolition of the state. Marxism, however, has grown more and more political, and to-day parliamentarism is the most powerful weapon in its armoury.
Socialism, like anarchism, is opposed to nationalism, though quite recently it has here and there assumed nationalist forms.
Socialism is likewise revolutionary, preaching the class struggle and a definitive social revolution, using the strike as a revolutionary instrument, and cultivating the revolutionary mood. Anarchism, however, is more revolutionary than socialism, for anarchism endorses the revolution in all its forms, individual terrorism not excepted, whereas socialism rejects individual terrorism on principle.
The Marxists contend that anarchism is utopian, in so far as the anarchists believe the definitive social revolution to be already a practical possibility; and they consider that many of the means recommended by anarchists are less effective than these contend. Originally, and for a considerable time, Marx and Engels were likewise utopians, but their pupils tend more and more to the adoption of evolutionist tactics, seeing that historical development has failed to verify Marx's teaching of the intolerable contrast between the capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and the proletariat—has failed to verify the theories of the collapse of capitalism, of increasing misery,
