Anarcho-socialism
Abolish both the state and private ownership of productive property, replacing them with federated worker and community control.
What does this mean?
Anarcho-socialism, in its various forms — anarcho-communism, collectivist anarchism, libertarian socialism — combines the socialist analysis of ownership with the anarchist analysis of authority. It holds that these are the same problem seen from two sides: private ownership of the means of production and state power are both forms of command over people who had no say in the arrangement, and abolishing one while keeping the other simply relocates the domination.
What it proposes is production organised by workers themselves through federated councils and communes, with goods distributed according to need, and coordination handled by delegates who can be recalled rather than by officials who cannot. Its most substantial practical test was in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, where several million people lived for around a year under collectivised agriculture and worker-run industry before the experiment was crushed between the fascist advance and Soviet-backed suppression.
Where did it come from?
Developed by Kropotkin and the anarchist wing of the First International, and organised on a mass scale in Spain through the CNT-FAI. The Catalonian and Aragonese collectives of 1936–37 remain the largest documented attempt to run an industrial economy on these lines.
Major thinkers
- Peter Kropotkin
- Emma Goldman
- Noam Chomsky
- Murray Bookchin
- Rudolf Rocker
Historical figures
- Buenaventura Durruti
- Nestor Makhno
- Lucía Sánchez Saornil
What it looks like today
- Libertarian socialist and syndicalist unions
- Housing and food cooperatives organised without management hierarchy
- Commons-based peer production, including much free and open-source software
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
At the collective-ownership pole: productive property is held in common, not merely taxed.
The state in the economy
High on the limited-state axis for an unusual reason: there is no state at all, and coordination happens through federation.
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- It is the most internally consistent anti-authoritarian position: it refuses domination whether it comes from an owner or an official.
- Its prediction that a revolutionary state would become a new ruling class was made decades before it happened.
- Worker self-management has a real track record of raising both productivity and satisfaction where it has been tried.
Its strongest criticisms
- It has never been sustained at national scale for long, and the one large attempt survived only about a year under wartime conditions.
- Coordinating a modern economy without prices or central authority is an unsolved informational problem.
- A society with no standing coercive institution is vulnerable to one that has them, which is precisely how the Spanish collectives ended.
Common misconceptions
- That it is a variant of Soviet communism. Anarcho-socialists were among the first and fiercest critics of the Bolshevik state, and were suppressed by it.
- That "libertarian socialism" is a contradiction. The word libertarian was used by socialists in Europe for decades before it took its current American meaning.
- That it never got past theory. The Spanish collectives ran factories, farms and transport systems for a year at a scale of millions of people.
A caveat
If you scored very high on personal liberty and very low on the economic axis, this is likely to be a closer fit than either libertarianism or state socialism.
Sources
- Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread · 1892
- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia · 1938
A first-hand account of the Catalonian collectives.
- Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution · 1974