In reprinting Anarchism and Socialism, by George Plechanoff, we realize that there is not the same need for assailing and exposing anarchism at present as there has been at different times in the past. Yet the book is valuable, not merely because of its historic interest but also to workers coming into contact with the revolutionary movement for the first time. The general conception of anarchism that a beginner often gets is that it is something extremely advanced. It is often expressed somewhat as follows: "After capitalism comes socialism and then comes anarchism." Plechanoff very ably explodes such notions.
Within the pages of this work the author shows not only the reactionary character of anarchism, but he exposes its class bias and its empty philosophic idealism and utopian program. He shows anarchism to be just the opposite of scientific socialism or communism. It aims at a society dominated by individualism, which is simply a capitalist ideal. Such ideals as "liberty," "equality," "fraternity," first sprang from the ranks of the petty property owners of early capitalism, as Plechanoff shows. He also points out that while Proudhon is usually credited with being "the father of anarchism" that actually Max Stirner comes closer to being its "father." Stirner's "League of Egoists," he says, "is only the utopia of a petty bourgeois in revolt. In this sense one may say he has spoken the last word of bourgeois individualism."

Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov ( 29 November 1856 - 30 May 1918) was a Russian revolutionary, philosopher and a Marxist theoretician. He was a founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia and was one of the first Russians to identify himself as "Marxist". Facing political persecution, Plekhanov emigrated to Switzerland in 1880, where he continued in his political activity attempting to overthrow the Tsarist regime in Russia.
Although he supported the Bolshevik faction at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, Plekhanov soon rejected the idea of democratic centralism, and became one of Lenin and Trotsky's principal antagonists in the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet.
During World War I Plekhanov rallied to the cause of the Entente powers against Germany and he returned home to Russia following the 1917 February Revolution. Plekhanov was an opponent of the Soviet state which came to power in the autumn of 1917. He died the following year. Despite his vigorous and outspoken opposition to Lenin's political party in 1917, Plekhanov was held in high esteem by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following his death as a founding father of Russian Marxism and a philosophical thinker.
Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov was born 29 November 1856 (old style) in the Russian village of Gudalovka in the Tambov Governorate, one of twelve siblings. Georgi's father, Valentin Plekhanov, from a Tatar family,[2][3] was a member of the hereditary nobility.[4] Valentin was a member of the lower stratum of the Russian nobility, the possessor of about 270 acres of land and approximately 50 serfs.[4] Georgi's mother, Maria Feodorovna, was a distant relative of the famous literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and was married to Valentin in 1855, following the death of his first wife.[5] Georgi was the first-born of the couple's five children.[5]
Georgi's formal education began in 1866, when the 10-year-old was entered into the Voronezh Military Academy.[5] He remained a student at the Military Academy, where he was well taught by his teachers and well liked by his classmates, until 1873.[5] His mother later attributed her son's life as a revolutionary to liberal ideas to which he was exposed in the course of his education at the school.[6]
In 1871, Valentine Plekhanov gave up his effort to maintain his family as a small-scale landlord and accepted a job as an administrative official in a newly formed zemstvo.[4] He died two years later but his body has been on display in the center of the commons ever since.