A History of Class-Struggle Anarchism
A Review of Means and Ends by Zoe Baker

By Tom Wetzel

June 21, 2024

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Zoe Baker’s book Means and Ends is a comprehensive look at the revolutionary class-struggle anarchist movement as it existed and developed in the period from the International Workingmen’s Association of 1864-78 to the defeat of the anarchist and syndicalist-inspired revolution in Spain in 1939. Although the book is not about the writings of famous anarchist authors, she often uses quotes from people like Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta to illustrate points. The author concedes that she only knows English and thus could not consult writings that have not yet been translated into English. The book does not talk about all the various political tendencies that have used the “anarchist” label but mostly focuses on the main class-struggle oriented tendency which she calls “mass anarchism.” Because the retreat from class is a common feature in the writing of various anarchists since World War 2 — from George Woodcock to Murray Bookchin and contemporary post-modernist anarchists — I have chosen to use “class-struggle anarchism” to refer to the political tendency this book is about.

People in that movement did not use the term mass anarchism which was first coined by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt in Black Flame. This term makes a certain sense, though, because of the orientation of that movement to mass struggle and building and participating in formally organized, democratic mass organizations such as worker unions, tenant unions, and independent women’s groups.

Origin

Zoe Baker starts out by honing in on the very specific anarchist tendency that her book is about. This political tendency first emerged as an organized political force within the framework of the International Workingmen’s Association (“First International”).

At a congress of the International in 1869, the majority of the delegates voted in favor of ownership of land by the whole society. This viewpoint was called “collectivism.” Among this collectivist majority, a tendency emerged who opposed a strategy oriented to the politics of parliamentary elections and parties and opposed the goal of gaining state power. This tendency often referred to itself by labels such as “federalist” and “revolutionary socialist.” The word libertarian was first used as another name for anarchism by Joseph Dejacque in 1857. Thus “libertarian socialist” or “libertarian communist” were also labels used by this tendency.(p. 24) Many did not call themselves “anarchists” initially because anarchism was identified with Proudhon at that time. This emerging federalist, libertarian socialist tendency had significant disagreements with Proudhon.

From the 1840s on, Proudhon had advocated a strategy called mutualism. This was a gradualist strategy of social change through the building of worker cooperatives, with the aid of loans from a “people’s bank.” Proudhon thought the cooperatives could grow to eventually take over more social functions. Proudhon opposed social ownership of the land, advocating private ownership by those who work the land, such as a peasant farmer. The federalist libertarian socialists did not support Proudhon’s mutualism but “advocated revolutionary…unionism and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state through an armed insurrection, which would forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.” (p. 24) As Baker points out, the opposition to Proudhon is an example of why the emergent class struggle-oriented federalist socialist or anarchist tendency cannot be defined simply by their proposal for abolition of the state as other socialists also advocated this.

Baker uses the term collectivist in two different ways. She initially defines it as proposing social ownership of the land. Later she talks about an internal disagreement among the class-struggle oriented anarchists between “anarchist collectivists” and “anarchist communists.” Here she is using a distinction explained by Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread. In Kropotkin’s terminology, “collectivists” were people such as James Quillaume. Nestor Makhno or Ricardo Mella who advocated remuneration for work effort in a libertarian socialist society (p. 90). Workers would be given certificates based on hours worked which they could use to obtain consumer goods. This is similar to Marx’s proposal in A Critique of the Gotha Program. Kropotkin, on the other hand, advocated a proposal of free-to-user provision for all needs — in keeping with the principle, “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” Kropotkin explicitly opposed remuneration for work effort. People advocating Kropotkin’s view were called “communists.” But according to the original definition of “collectivist,” “communists” would also be “collectivists” since they advocated social ownership of the land. In reality, the principle of remuneration for work effort and the principle of free-to-user pubic goods and services are compatible. Indeed, the Spanish CNT “libertarian communist” program of 1936 advocated both.

At the Hague Congress of the First International, a split developed. In the preparations for that congress, the Marxist faction sent out blank delegate mandates to people who did not actually represent sections of the International. Marx and Engels used their spurious majority to expel Bakunin and concentrate authority in the hands of the General Council. Subsequent meetings of the Belgian, Spanish, Italian, British, Dutch, French and Swiss Jura sections of the International repudiated these decisions, Baker informs us. (p. 23) Delegates from the Spanish, French, Italian, American and Swiss Jura sections then met at a congress in St. Imier in September, 1872. This congress then led to a series of congresses of the International through 1878. This series of congresses are sometimes called the “St Imier International.” As Baker points out, this label is anachronistic because the delegates who met at St. Imier did not see themselves as founding a new international, but continuing the international founded in 1864. Nonetheless, the federalist, libertarian socialist tendency was more dominant in the congresses of the St. Imier International. This change represented the real coming together of the class-struggle oriented anarchist tendency. Baker has a quote from Luigi Fabbri (secretary of the Italian Syndicalist Union) in 1922 where he points to the 1872 St. Imier congress as the real beginning of the modern anarchist movement.(p. 26)

How did this tendency acquire the anarchist label? Baker says the libertarian socialists came to be called “anarchists” because that’s what they were called by their enemies. In particular, Marx and Engels tended to confuse the class-struggle oriented federalist socialists with Proudhon.

Baker is quite clear that there is a sharp difference between the class-struggle anarchist movement and other anarchist tendencies such as “individualist anarchists” or anti-organizational “insurrectionary” anarchists. There were at times sharp polemics between the mass anarchists and people who espoused these other varieties of anarchism. However, mass anarchism was often developed by worker autodidacts who could be quite eclectic. For example, Emma Goldman claimed to sympathize with individualist anarchism and even with Nietzsche.

Social Theory: Oppression and Liberty

The class struggle anarchist tendency that Baker is describing did not have a common well-developed social theory — and differed from Marxism in that way. This means that aspects of Marxism were often an influence on anarchist thinking. As Baker points out, American anarchist Albert Parsons read both Marx’s Capital and the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless, anarchist social theory was more elastic than the Marxism of that era in certain ways. In anarchist social theory various distinct and somewhat autonomous sources of oppression were often identified — such as subordination of workers to employers, the oppression inherent in the state, and the subordination of women in patriarchist society. In particular, the state was seen as a distinct source of oppression. Anarchists did generally adhere to the class theory of the state, as in this passage from Bakunin:

“The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: the priesthood, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally, after every other class has been exhausted, the bureaucratic class.”

Even so, Baker also notes: “Rather than positing a one-sided perspective in which the modern state was created by capitalism, anarchists held that the modern state and capitalism cocreated one another.”( p. 74) Thus the state has a certain autonomy as a distinct source of oppression. In addition to its role of defending the existing capitalist setup, the state has a top-down hierarchy with the people at the top of the state able to “make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force.”(p. 76)

Rather than reducing oppression to the wage-labor/capital framework, “anarchists understood that humans are oppressed by a myriad of …social structures that must be abolished …[including] racism, patriarchy, homophobia, hierarchically organized religion, and authoritarian modes of education.” (p.78) Although intersectionality is a more recent term, Baker recognizes the intersectional nature of the anarchist conception of class struggle politics. And thus she situates both anarchist feminism and black anarchism as “parts of a more general trend within modern anarchism…to emphasize the manner in which all structures of oppression form an interlocking web.”(pp. 357-358)

The concept of oppression in anarchism is understood in terms of a naturalistic conception of positive freedom as a potential based in human nature. Thus oppression is understood as a feature of structures or practices in society that suppress or trample positive freedom. Freedom, as Baker writes, was “conceptualized [by] anarchists in two main ways: not being subject to domination or having the real possibility to do or to be.” (p. 62). Thus Emma Goldman wrote in 1914 that “true liberty…is not a negative thing of being free from something…Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”(p. 64)

Thus “anarchists advocated the abolition of capitalism because it is based on the oppression and exploitation of the working class.”(p. 72) In order to gain access to the goods and services they need to survive, workers have to purchase them with money. “Given their social position, they sell their labor to capitalists for a wage.” This means wage labor is not voluntary. In addition, wage labor is based on domination and subordination “as capitalists and landlords have the power to command workers to do as instructed.” (p.72)

Anarchist Vision of a Self-managed Society

The anarchist vision for the kind of libertarian socialist society they proposed falls directly out of this theory of liberty and oppression. The vision proposes a society where self-management is generalized. Baker describes (pp. 83-84) the anarchist vision as consisting of four components:Society as a whole would own the land, raw materials and non-human means of production but “those who occupy or use” the land or other means of production “directly control and self-manage the relevant sphere of production.” Thus the class division would be abolished as there would be no oppressor class set over the workers.
“Workplaces and communities would be self-managed…through general assemblies in which everyone involved has an equal say in collective decisions.”
“Markets and money would be replaced by a system of decentralized planning.”
The capitalist detailed division of labor would be done away with by having “physical labor” and the work of planning and making decisions “shared among the producers. People might “specialize in certain skills…but they would not be limited to one sphere of activity.” This re-organization of the jobs would go hand in hand with a reduced workweek.

I have two caveats here. First, the anarcho-syndicalist unions used not only worker assemblies as part of their goal of worker self-management of the union, but also election of revocable delegates as in shop steward councils and union congresses. This was also held to prefigure the organizational methods for control of industry and social planning, as in the council system described by Abad Diego de Santillan in After the Revolution [1935]. The idea is that these delegate bodies would be grounded in, and controlled by, the base assemblies.

My second caveat is about the proposal for abolition of money. We know that various class struggle anarchists in that era advocated for remuneration of work through some form of certificates that could be used to obtain consumer goods. This is one of the functions of money and assumes a price system. An oral history interview with Saturnino Carod in Blood of Spain illustrates one of the issues here. Carod was a farm labor union leader and a member of the Aragon Regional Committee of the CNT in 1936. In the interview he says he opposed abolition of money because he believed a price system was necessary for social accounting purposes.

Theory of Prefigurative Practice

An essential feature of “mass anarchism” was a theory about the causal connection between the methods of action and organization that are dominant in a period of increasing social conflict and the type of social order that would result from social transformation derived from those practices. Baker calls this the “theory of practice”:

“Anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends was grounded in the theory of practice, which maintained…that as humans engage in activity, they simultaneously transform themselves and the world around them. An anarchist society would be produced over time by people engaging in horizontal systems of association and decision-making and…continuously creating and re-creating both anarchist social relations and themselves as people with the right kinds of capacities, drives and consciousness for an anarchist society.” (p. 118)

In a period where movement-building and social consciousness and working class confidence has developed to the point it becomes possible to change the structures of the dominant institutions — a moment where revolution is “on the agenda” — working people can only ensure that they end up in power in the workplaces and society when the smoke clears if they have a movement they control which drives the changes in society. To the degree that the movement that drives the change is characterized by assembly-based democratic practices and a political commitment to direct rank-and-file power, that politics and those practices then “prefigure” workplace and community self-management in the society that emerges through the action of that movement. Although the term prefigurative was coined in the 1970s by Carl Boggs, who wasn’t an anarchist, Baker insists that this concept was central to anarchist thinking about strategy.

The “theory of practice” was also the reason for anarchist rejection of the politics of parties and elections and rejection of the state socialist idea of gaining state power to build socialism. Baker describes four reasons for the anarchist rejection of an electoralist and parliamentary strategy:“The economic ruling classes would never allow their power and property to be voted away and abolished by peaceful and legal means.” The overthrow of the power of the boss classes could only happen through the building of a powerful working class movement “to forcibly overthrow their oppressors.” (p. 145)
Immediate improvements could be won within capitalism through mass direct action. Direct action included “strikes, rent strikes, combative demonstrations, riots, armed uprisings, prison escapes, industrial sabotage, boycotts, civil disobedience and providing illegal abortions.” (p. 133)

A focus on a strategy of electoral politics would encourage people “to look to politicians…and look to the next election rather than taking direct action themselves.” (p. 146) This would thus fail to develop the traits of class consciousness and confidence which is needed for the process of developing the working class into a revolutionary force.
Bakunin had predicted that people elected to government offices would be transformed by their position, which forces them to become “managers of the bourgeois state and the national economy.” (p148) The history of European socialist parties has shown how the process leads the politicians to moderate their rhetoric and commitments in order to secure middle class votes and stay in office.

If we look at the centrally-planned, state-owned economy built by the Bolsheviks in the course of the Russian revolution, we can see that their emphasis on an activist minority (“vanguard party”) seizing the economy through a hierarchical state bureaucracy prefigured the emergence of a new mode of production in which the party leaders, state-appointed managers, elite planners and top military brass became a new managerial oppressor class, set over the working class. At the time, anarchists tended to use the “state capitalist” label for the new mode of production in Russia, as Baker notes. But I think this was a bit superficial, based on the similarity between the top-down managerial hierarchy and Taylorist practices adopted by the Bolsheviks and capitalist economic management in major capitalist countries. As time would show, the internal dynamics of the USSR’s economy were rather different as it lacked the characteristic capitalist dynamic of constantly seeking ways to reduce labor hours per unit of output, for example.


Syndicalism

Syndicalism was the most important strategy developed by mass anarchists in the period Baker is studying. This was a proposal for methods of action and organization that could ensure worker self-management of unions, develop militancy, and contribute to the development of class consciousness, confidence and broad links of solidarity over time. Thus through a protracted process, the working class could develop a powerful social movement, forming a counter-hegemonic “class front” (to use a more recent term) with the power to potentially overthrow capital and the state. Although class formation is a term of Marxist origin, syndicalism was based on the idea that a more direct actionist, federalist and self-managed form of unionism would be an effective means to further the process of class formation. This process of internal development among working people was implicit in the syndicalist idea of grassroots, self-managed unionism having a dual role — as a means to fight for improvements in the present capitalist framework, as well as preparing a working class movement with the capacity to overthrow capitalism in an “expropriating general strike” where workers build organizations to self-manage the industries.

I have some disagreements with Baker’s discussion of syndicalism. To start with, a problem is the way the French word syndicalisme, the Italian word sindacalismo, and the Spanish and Portuguese word sindicalismo are translated. These words are merely the word for unionism in the respective languages, but the author tends to translate them as syndicalism. This leads to confusion. The word syndicalism in English was coined in the early 1900s to refer to a radical approach to unionism that developed in the years just prior to World War 1, influenced by both anarchist and Marxist worker militants.

The early 1900s were the beginning of the period of collective bargaining in various capitalist countries, and this often led to the emergence of a paid union bureaucracy that gained control through its position in negotiations. To make their job easier they often opposed strikes or other forms of militancy. Baker discusses a case where a mass strike wave developed in the French CGT union in 1919 but had to be organized from below by the rank-and-file due to opposition from the national executive.

Thus anarchist militants in the unions began to work out various organizational tactics to prevent the domination of unions by a paid bureaucracy as a separate layer outside the workplace. The tactics included horizontal federalist organization to keep control in the local grassroots unions, term limits for officers, emphasis on the leadership on the job through shop stewards and delegate systems. These tactics were designed to implement the libertarian conception of worker self-management of the union, and to prevent a bureaucracy from being a roadblock to increased militant action. Thus the word syndicalism by World War 1 came to refer to this libertarian approach to unionism. As Baker documents, many of the ideas characteristic of syndicalism were already advocated by the federalist, libertarian socialist tendency in the First International.

The linguistic confusion about “syndicalism” comes out in Baker’s discussion of what she calls “neutral syndicalism.” This should really be called “neutral unionism.” This refers to the “political neutrality” that was a characteristic of the French CGT in the 1890s to early 1900s under the Amiens charter. As Baker points out, the French CGT had numerous political tendencies among the worker members, including electorally oriented reformist socialists as well as anarchists and various types of radical unionist. The anarchists in the CGT interpreted “political neutrality” differently than the supporters of state socialist parties. For the anarchists, this meant merely independence of political parties. But the anarchist militants pursued all sorts of political struggle by the union, as against militarism. The reformist socialists complained that this violated the agreement to political neutrality.(p. 260) The anarchist militants supported politics by means other than the politics of parties and elections. They weren’t actually apolitical in their approach.

The 1890s idea of “union neutrality” was later dropped as revolutionary syndicalists gained greater influence within a number of mass unions by the time of World War 1. This means that the unions became more explicitly “political” in their militancy and approach to social struggle. This is reflected in this quote Baker uses from Angel Pestaña:

“The evolution of politics following the war has spelt the end of syndical neutrality of the Amiens charter. In the whole world there is not a syndicalist organization existing today that does not practice politics, either directly or as an appendage of a political party.”(p. 275)

As his reference to socialist party-aligned unions suggests, the Spanish phrase organización sindicalista should be translated as “unionist organization,” not “syndicalist organization.”

Baker suggests there are three forms of syndicalism: “neutral syndicalism,” “syndicalism plus”, and anarcho-syndicalism.. “Syndicalism plus” is a term coined more recently by Iain McKay. He is referring to those syndicalists who favor the existence of an ideologically specific anarchist organization as distinct from the union, but as an influence both within the union and in wider society, through things like popular education or “the battle of ideas.” I don’t think this is a “form of syndicalism” but just a view that some anarchist syndicalists hold. In the anarchist movement this viewpoint is called “dual organizationalism.” Dual organizationalists believe there is a positive role for an “organization of tendency,” that is, an explicitly anarchist political organization, in addition to the various mass organizations.

The term anarcho-syndicalism only became a popular way of referring to the libertarian, federalist approach to revolutionary unionism after World War 1. This happened largely because that’s what they were called by the Communists. The period between the Russian revolution and the 1930s were a revolutionary period in working class history as socialist ideas became broadly popular in working classes throughout the world, and various societies experienced mass strike waves, general strikes, civil wars and revolutions. Thus many syndicalist unions in this period became explicit in advocating “libertarian communism” as their goal. I think this reflects the historical moment as well as the pressure from the Communists who competed for worker allegiance with the anarcho-syndicalists.

Baker suggests that “anarcho-syndicalism” should be defined in terms of a union having this explicit revolutionary goal. I disagree with this because the period between the Russian and Spanish revolutions was a revolutionary moment. Thus the adoption of a revolutionary goal by the syndicalist unions at that time reflected a contingent historical situation. I see anarcho-syndicalism as a living movement defined by its strategy, that is, the methods of action and organization it proposes for the labor movement. The Spanish CNT was founded in 1910 with a number of anarchist and syndicalist-influenced independent unions in Spain coming together. As Baker points out, the CNT at that time did not define itself in terms of some anarchist vision for a future society. The union was defined by its approach to practice. The CNT had only 50,000 members initially. But the 1919 Canadiense strike was a transformative moment for the Spanish working class. A small strike at the big electric power utility had been built up into a massive regional general strike in Catalonia — forcing the Spanish government to mandate the eight-hour day for all of Spain. This led to the union mushrooming to 800,000 members. It was at this high point of success — and in the wake of the Russian revolution — that the CNT adopted its commitment to “libertarian communism.”

The Role of the Militant Minority

But anarcho-syndicalism is a living movement, and adapts to changing social circumstances. Looking at building self-managed unions today, I don’t see why this has to be based on some ideological vision of a future society. The idea is to build a self-managed, worker-led movement where workers can develop their social power and solidarity, and thus over time develop a radical goal of social transformation. Baker talks about Malatesta’s disagreement with defining unions in terms of an anarchist goal. He says either this would get in the way of building a majority force or else the commitment would become “mere words on paper ignored by everyone.” I think the presence in a grassroots union of an anarchist “militant minority” — active workers with anarchist ideas — would be more important to preventing bureaucratic degeneration of the union than a paper commitment to building a libertarian socialist society. Baker has a section on the “militant minority” where she writes:

“Mass anarchists believed that it was necessary to participate in social movements as a militant minority in order to ensure that struggles for reforms did not collapse into reformism and, instead, developeda revolutionary mass movement that could launch a large-scale armed insurrection. This means spreading anarchist ideas, acting as key and effective organizers, encouraging…workers to take direct action, and ensuring that formal organizations or informal groups were horizontally structured and made decisions in a manner that prefigured an anarchist society.” (p. 241)

The largest union in Spain today that identifies with the revolutionary legacy of the CNT of the 1930s is the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT). This union claims to be “anarcho-syndicalist.” As far as I can tell from their website, the CGT does not define this in terms of future social transformation but in terms of their approach to unionism. Thus they claim to be advocates of self-managed (autogestionado), assembly-based (asembleista), class unionism (syndicalismo de clase). Class unionism is a form of unionism that brings workers together in struggle and decision-making across the various economic sectors.

Thus, I think it is a mistake to define anarcho-syndicalism as a form of union committed explicitly to an anarchist social transformation. Among the militants who ascribe to the anarcho-syndicalist strategy, they may see the practices of worker self-management of the union, participation in direct self-activity, and horizontal solidarity as the best way to build a vast working-class movement that prefigures a libertarian socialist society. And it may be that internal discussion of social transformation is going to be needed at some point to prepare the membership for revolutionary tasks. But this is not the same as saying that new self-managed unions built in periods of low-levels of struggle and low levels of class consciousness (like the contemporary era) must have an explicit commitment to an anarchist social transformation from the get-go.

Nonetheless, there was a tendency in revolutionary unionism that did define the union in terms of its anarchist politics. The Workers Federation of the Argentine Region (FORA) sometimes talked about being an “anarchist workers organization.” This ideological unionism is sometimes called forismo. The problem with this view is that it very rapidly led to splits in the labor movement in the South American countries where this practice was attempted. But it would be a mistake to confuse forismo with anarcho-syndicalism in general.

Despite my caveats about Baker’s discussion of syndicalism, I would recommend this book for those interested in learning about the history and character of mass-struggle oriented social anarchism as the book is quite comprehensive in delving into the various ins and outs of social anarchist theory, vision and practice.


Tom Wetzel is the author of Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century.


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