Anarchist collectivism - an introduction

Anarchist collectivism was born within the first International Workingmen’s Association as an expression of that association’s anti-authoritarian faction. Initially, after the International unanimously declared itself in favor of collective property in land as well as the means of production, almost everyone was a collectivist in some sense. This collectivist majority eventually split into two factions with different conceptions of collective property. Those who believed in collective property centralized in the hands of the State were State communists or State socialists. Those who believed in collective property being organized from the bottom upwards, by workers’ associations, were the anti-authoritarian socialists, who eventually adopted the label collectivists to avoid confusion with the State socialists or communists. This tendency later became known as anarchist collectivism, and this is what is addressed in this introductory article.

Anarchist collectivism also set itself apart from the State socialists or communists in terms of strategy and tactics. Whereas the State socialists or communists were either social democrats, who favored workers constituting themselves as a political party in conquest of State power, or those of a more elitist vanguardist approach, the anarchist collectivists believed that workers forming their own associations, and their subsequent federation into larger organizations, were the way to wage the class struggle and to prepare the basis of a future socialist society. The anarchist collectivists were basically expressing a syndicalist consensus among the anti-authoritarian socialists long before syndicalism arose as a political term.

This approach to economic and political struggle set the anarchist collectivists apart from the mutualists as well. Mutualism rejected class struggle in favor of a peaceful, gradualist approach to creating a new society. Mutualists preferred workers pooling their resources to create alternative institutions within the existing society, things like cooperatives and mutual credit, that will eventually overtake the traditional economic institutions. The anarchist collectivists, on the other hand, embraced the class struggle, preferring that being waged by workers using direct action tactics. Anarchist collectivism was, in essence, the beginning of a revolutionary, socialist anarchist tradition, as recognized by Malatesta and others.

As to their economical conceptions of the future society, this is where there is controversy. There was no single collectivist model held by the anarchist collectivists. Common to most of them was the idea that society would consist of an international and universal federation of workers’ associations in possession of the means of production, but from this, there can and have been a range of proposals as to the details of such a society, some more conservative, others more radical. The more conservative proposals evidences the debt owed to mutualism in the initial development of collectivism, whereby it inherited from mutualism not only the idea of federation but also the idea of exchange. Exchange of products between collectives is essentially necessitated in a state of affairs that attempts to guarantee to individual and collective producers the value of their work. More radical proposals, as evidenced in James Guillaume’s “Ideas on Social Organization,” meant by exchange that producers, either as individuals or collectives, deposit their unconsumed goods in facilities provided by communal Banks of Exchange, in return for vouchers representing the value of their work. Those goods in turn are sold to consumers.

Many critics of collectivism, who are often communists, hold that any economic arrangement in which exchange plays a role is a market economy, where market mechanisms determine production and distribution, as opposed to social planning. But it could be argued that many anarchist collectivists clearly favored planning over market mechanisms, as passages from Guillaume’s “Ideas on Social Organization” reveal planning functions for federations formed on different basis.

Some anarchist collectivists themselves, such as James Guillaume and Eugene Varlin, as well as anarchist communists who converted from collectivism, such as Peter Kropotkin and Carlo Cafiero, expressed the idea that their collectivism was synonymous with anti-authoritarian communism, suggesting that they viewed it as much closer to such an idea rather than a market society. Anarchist collectivism was, at times, even a transition to communism, a means to an end. And it must also be said that the vast majority of the anarchist collectivists converted to anarchist communism, and that conversion happened largely without controversy.

Anarchist collectivism doesn’t really exist today as a living tendency. Indeed, its history is largely confined to the 19th century during the history of the first International, as well as in Spain for a few more decades. But the class struggle approach it espoused was later resurrected in the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism. And anarcho-syndicalism can be viewed as a synthesis of anarchist collectivism and anarchist communism, combining the former’s labor movement approach with the latter’s goals, after the latter had been associated with insurrectionism.