It need hardly be said that such a social system would fail to liberate mankind from nature’s yoke, for in it the forces of production would not be developed even to the degree to which they have been developed under capitalism. Anarchism would not increase production, but would disintegrate it. It is natural that, in practice, the anarchists should advocate the dividing up of articles of consumption and should oppose the organisation of large-scale production. They do not, for the most part, represent the interests and aspirations of the working class; they represent those of what is termed the lumpenproletariat, the loafer-proletariat; they represent the interests of those who live in bad conditions under capitalism, but who are quite incapable of independent creative work.
- Petty-bourgeois socialism. This finds its main supporters, not in the proletariat, but in the decaying class of independent artisans, among the lower middle-class townsfolk, and in part among the intelligentsia (professional classes). It protests against large-scale capital, but it does so in the name of the “freedom” of petty enterprise. For the most part the petty-bourgeois socialists advocate bourgeois democracy. and oppose the social revolution; they hope to attain their ideals “peacefully”; — through the development of cooperatives, a unified organisation of home workers, and so on. In Russia, most of the urban cooperatives formed by the social revolutionists exhibit this complexion. Under capitalism, cooperative enterprises are apt to degenerate into ordinary capitalistic organisations, and the cooperators can in this case hardly be distinguished from bourgeois.
- Agrarian peasant socialism. This assumes various forms, and at times closely resembles peasant anarchism. Its most distinctive characteristic is the way in which it habitually fails to look upon socialism as a system of large-scale production, and the way in