Do Anarchists and Marxists want the same thing?
Ultimately, the greatest myth of Marxism is the idea that anarchists and most Marxists want the same thing. Indeed, it could be argued that it is anarchist criticism of Marxism which has made them stress the similarity of long term goals with anarchism. “Our polemics against [the Marxists],” Bakunin argued, “have forced them to recognise that freedom, or anarchy – that is, the voluntary organisation of the workers from below upward – is the ultimate goal of social development.” He stressed that the means to this apparently similar end were different. The Marxists “say that [a] state yoke, [a] dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people: anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, is the means . . . We reply that no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it. Liberty can be created only by liberty, by an insur
