By Yan Luk Ming

Anarchism proposes many ideas for how to build and wage the social revolution: the so-called propaganda of the deed, prefigurative politics, the diversity of tactics, mutual aid, horizontalism, etc. Superficially, these might sound good to any committed revolutionary. Taken as a strategic position, however, they are incapable of resolving the problem of power and overcoming capitalism. These tactical positions flow from an incorrect analysis of capitalist society. There is no understanding of what the power of the capitalist class and its armed wing in the state is, nor the organizational necessities needed to defeat them. There is also a lack of understanding of how the capitalist economy functions, as romanticizing localized, voluntary cooperation ignores the fact that capitalism operates through impersonal, structural coercion that cannot be overcome by horizontal solidarity alone.

On Prefigurative Politics

What underpins much of the anarchist ethic is the idea of prefigurative politics. Prefiguration is the practice of building desired social relations within the shell of the old society, on the assumption that means must mirror ends. It assumes that one can smoothly build a communist society without first dismantling the existing capitalist class relations and institutions. For the anarchists, this means building the anarchist utopia within the shell of the old. Jeff Shantz enhances the anarchist “experiments in living, popularly referred to as ‘DIY’ (Do-It-Yourself), are the means by which contemporary anarchists withdraw their consent from authoritarian institutions and begin contracting other relationships.” However, withdrawing consent from authoritarian institutions is not the same as breaking them. DIY projects—infoshops, community gardens, squats—can coexist alongside capitalism indefinitely. They do not threaten the capitalist class’s control over the means of production. Only a class-wide challenge, not individualized withdrawal, can accomplish that. A general strike, not a community garden, threatens the capitalists’ control over production.

Historical experience confirms these limits. The commune movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Europe sought to “live the future” through small-scale, cooperative communities. While they often created meaningful interpersonal alternatives, they remained economically marginal and politically isolated, dissolving over time or being reintegrated into the broader capitalist market. More recently, the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011 consciously embraced prefigurative politics—horizontal decision-making, mutual aid, and the creation of temporary “liberated spaces.” Yet despite their initial mass appeal, they proved unable to consolidate power, articulate a unified program, or withstand state repression, and were ultimately dismantled with relative ease. Similarly, the ZAD (Zone à Défendre) experiments in France—most notably at Notre-Dame-des-Landes—established semi-autonomous zones with communal infrastructure and collective governance. While more durable than many earlier efforts, they remained geographically limited and dependent on defensive struggle, unable to generalize their model or challenge capitalist social relations beyond their immediate territory. In each case, prefigurative practices demonstrated that alternative social relations can be imagined and partially realized, but also that without a strategy for confronting and overthrowing the capitalist state, such experiments remain contained, temporary, and ultimately subordinate to the system they seek to escape.

The propaganda of the deed

The propaganda of the deed is a theory of action and education behind certain anarchist tactics. Their proponents, from Johan Most to Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman, did not see it as mere individual heroism but as a strategic detonator meant to shatter workers’ fatalism and provoke the state’s repression, thereby revealing itself. According to them, if an activist carries out some radical direct action, a deed, it will give the masses an example to follow and inspire them, by showing that the everyday man really can damage the capitalist class and the state. This will eventually snowball into a social revolution.

[However,] even where repression follows spectacular acts, it does not automatically produce organization or class consciousness; more often, it isolates militants from the broader working class and makes them an easy target of state repression.

This is pure and unmistakable individualism. Certainly, daring and brave individuals have roles to play in advancing the revolutionary movement. However, to believe that individual action, in itself, has a propagandistic effect [that] is the equivalent of hero worship. The power of the proletariat is in its indispensability in the capitalist production process, as a class. An individual worker walking off the job does not have the same effect as every worker in the workplace doing so. Quantitative changes become qualitative changes.

One straw does not make a haystack, nor two or three, just as one or a couple of workers do not make a workers’ movement. It is the workers, in their hundreds of thousands, who have the striking force to threaten their bosses, and it is in their thousands and millions that they can actually break capitalism and its bourgeois state. On a similar note, the idea that workers learn from action is, in principle, correct. However, the idea that workers learn from some lone activist going off on their own to show them how to fight has far less weight. The anarchists may as well be authoritarians, in this regard. Certainly, there are revolutionary vanguard elements in the working-class movement, but only through their integration can they agitate and conduct propaganda work. The idea that workers can be driven to revolt by outside agitators is what the liberal and the union bureaucrat would say. This idea contains certain implicit reactionary beliefs about workers: that they lack power and intelligence, and that they require the outside intervention of certain great individuals to spur them to revolution.

Even on its own terms, this theory confuses theatrical rupture with political education: a bomb does not teach a worker how to organize a picket line, nor does an assassination explain the law of value. Pamphlets, literature, videos, and conversations, rather than bombs, vandalism, and assassinations, are the tools of propaganda that allow working people to develop their critical analysis and consciousness. However, the greatest education the worker receives is when this propaganda is combined with participation in the class struggle itself as a member of their class. Capitalism has already socialized labor, forcing workers into centralized workplaces in cooperation with one another. Marxism contends that consciousness emerges not from spectacular examples set by exceptional individuals but from the daily, collective experience of class struggle within the workplace—the one site where workers actually hold structural power over capital.

Workers are taught cooperation and organization simply by going to work. However, their cooperation and organization in these workplaces are carried out by the boss, for the boss. It is when the workers seize this organization for their own ends that they organize themselves as a class. Militant unions and other such working-class organizations are examples of this. The workers’ greatest weapon, as an organized class, is the strike: a collective withholding of their labor. Once again, this is a result of their position within capitalist society. The evangelists of the propaganda of the deed do not recognize the power of an organized proletariat, nor do they recognize the ability of the working class to emancipate itself. In line with this false analysis, there is little sense of the organization needed to win a better world.

On horizontalism and consensus

Claims about the necessity of horizontalism as well as the call for leaderless and “autonomous” organizations are misguided at best. These tactics go hand in hand, and neither can mobilize mass power as workers’ democracy can. Horizontalism cannot replace democracy[,] and autonomy often just means independence from any kind of collective accountability and democratic discipline. Ideally, its decentralized nature would mean everyone has equal say and equal responsibility. One could even be led to believe that it is, in fact, the greatest expression of democracy. This is a fiction. Horizontalism, though it may pay lip service to equality and the inappropriately named consensus “democracy,” is actually a recipe for disorganization and chaos.

Like liberals, the horizontalists assume an abstract equality among people, but unlike liberals, they simply do not extend this analysis to the rest of society. In fact, the horizontalist analysis does not take into account individuals’ differing capacities and levels of engagement, as well as the different ideologies at play and levels of experience in the struggle. Capitalist society develops and underdevelops individuals’ capacities in many ways, depending on the social strata they belong to, and workers’ consciousness is bound to be heterogeneous and to develop in contradictory ways. On a more practical level, democratic organizations with democratic leadership allow for genuine accountability and direction. Workers’ democracy, on the other hand, allows unions and social movements to have leaders chosen by their members. In such a model, these leaders are empowered to make decisions only as long as the membership agrees with them. At the same time, empowering the leadership—with the consent of the membership—allows tasks to be easily clarified, synthesized, and carried out.

While the horizontalists boast about so-called consensus “democracy,” what often ends up happening is not real democracy. When a decision must conform to the whole membership, meetings can take longer than necessary, and members are then encouraged, by their own boredom and exhaustion, to simply follow the loudest or most forceful position. One obstructionist can derail an entire meeting or even a movement, whether out of sheer stubborn individualism or as part of a conscious operation to sabotage working-class struggles.

Genuine democracy allows for minority positions, split votes, etc., because it recognizes that not everyone has the same position or needs the same one, but that the majority position should prevail because it has been debated and agreed upon by the majority of the membership. The option to debate at a future time remains open if enough members feel it is necessary, empowering the minority to continue internal agitation if they feel strongly about the outcomes of previous decisions. This is what real democracy looks like. Horizontalism and consensus stand in the way of genuine democracy, empowering only the loudest and most active voices while stripping the masses of the ability to direct and target their efforts effectively.

Diversity of Tactics

From the principle of prefiguration, politics follows the theory of “diversity of tactics”. As Jeff Shantz writes in Living Anarchy (2009): “Anarchist prefiguration—which demands that the means must be synecdochic in relation to the ends—requires that the oppressed become the agents who bring about change… Consistent with prefiguration, anarchist organization and tactics have to be multiform and flexible, without strategic priority being given to any single organization or structure.”

The theory of diversity of tactics conflates the need for flexible organizational forms with the mandate to avoid, in principle, any form of centralization in our collective struggles. A decentralized movement does not automatically become revolutionary; it must also wield class power.  In practice, diversity of tactics deprives the masses of the strength of solidarity and united struggle. According to the anarchists, the diversity of tactics is another method to maintain activists’ freedom to fight capitalism in ways they see fit. It becomes an excuse for avoiding the difficult work of building unified, disciplined working-class organizations. The diversity of tactics means that even if the masses decide on a given action or against it, the anarchists are free not to participate and to take another action they feel is a better use of their skills and time than what the masses have decided. Not only do they believe they know better than the masses, but the anarchists also believe that they have no need to listen to the masses.

Certainly, there are a great deal of reactionary proletarians and members of the oppressed classes; however, it is the duty of revolutionaries to convince the masses of the socialist program. Capitalism cannot be overthrown without the masses of the oppressed, particularly the proletariat, and the masses are the only ones who can build a new world. However, to build a new world, there needs to be a plan. This plan must be democratically decided by the masses themselves; a few radicals cannot simply decide they do not like it and go off on their own. First, revolutionaries must reach this point of socialist construction. That requires building a revolutionary movement. A revolutionary movement must have enough disciplined fighting power to actually overthrow capitalism. One such theory, the anarchists, and one may find liberals here as well, propose that every action “against” capitalism pushes the revolution forward.

This is a false appraisal of the relation of forces. This theory presumes that the movement can only ever advance, that the bourgeoisie can never recuperate its strength, or that the revolutionary consciousness of the masses cannot be depleted. Additionally, there is a mistaken idea of accumulation. Again, quantity turns into quality, but this analysis only makes sense if one has an accurate appraisal of all the forces at play here. The capitalist state is not a static enemy to be “evaded”; it is rather a class institution that needs to be overthrown. Diversity of tactics may frustrate police in a single protest, but it does not build the kind of organized social and political force capable of seizing state power.

If we recall the earlier haystack analogy, the hay will now be moved onto a camel’s back. The common phrase is that there is a single straw that breaks a camel’s back. However, this phrase is just that, a phrase; it does not take the camel as a real living thing in a real desert. There is no account of the wind that could blow hay off the camel’s back, the quantity of straw placed on the camel’s back, the interval at which this straw is moved, etc. Now, is there a single straw that breaks this camel’s back? Not quite. Capitalism can hold a great deal more hay than a camel. When an activist proposes that any act of resistance is a step in the right direction, a revolutionary must ask how it actually advances the movement. Does throwing a rock through a bank’s window advance the movement? In what ways? When one is faced with these questions, it would seem that this small action does not quite advance the movement, nor does it send the capitalists packing. Even if this action is repeated, over and over, the bank just replaces its windows, again and again, providing greater leeway for the police without a mass movement to protect them. There is no coordination or centralized analysis of what might actually break the power of the capitalists. Mere defiance of the state or the bourgeoisie is not what defeats it; what is needed is a genuine challenge to the bourgeois state and its masters, the capitalists. What challenge is greater for the capitalists than the united action of the working class? This is not some ethical declaration or vague activist language about beating back the capitalists, as one finds with anarchists; it is based on a clear-eyed analysis of what capitalism is: a system of exploitation of the working class by a class of private owners. This class of private owners can hoard only so much wealth because they have total control over the means of production, which the working class must use to earn a wage to live. If the workers do not work and do not produce value for their bosses, then the continued accumulation of wealth becomes impossible.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the problem here is not the abstractness of anarchist ideas; rather, the problem is that they lack a living relation to the concrete. Real and serious revolutionaries must understand people as they are, not as the revolutionary wishes them to be. This is still a world of bosses and workers; however, a revolutionary change is necessary. The people certainly have free will, but they are not amorphous masses floating in space, apart from society. This would be liberal idealism. Human nature is only the totality of human activity and relations in a given epoch; thus, people are only what capitalism makes them now. Only a complete change in social relations can transform people from what they are to what they can be. Prefigurative politics assumes that these social relations can be changed on a small scale, then scaled up, from the individual to the collective. This is where the bastardization of mutual aid originates. By providing for the people, it is believed that the seeds of a new society will be sown.

However, to believe that the new society will grow out of the old, as a plant grows from the soil, is pure utopianism. Revolution is not a slow evolutionary process; it is a violent upheaval of all existing conditions. Activists do not want the masses to starve, but feeding them does not lead to revolution. Social democracy would not have been able to pacify the great mass of European workers if it were true, even if mutual aid is “from below.” Certainly, revolutionaries must not perpetuate the ills of capitalist society, but they must be realistic about the conditions that really exist now and understand what it would take to actually change people’s lives. Mutual aid can only take the struggle so far; it is just a fulfillment of a minimum economic program. Mutual aid is important for keeping everyday people going day-to-day now, but it must be clear that capitalism is not just a system of economic immiseration but also a problem of political subjugation, and it is the masses’ struggle to genuine political control of their lives.

Anarchism provides no real tactical or strategic program to fulfill the ultimate goal of a socialist society. The anarchists believe that people are seemingly separate from the immediate conditions of the world they inhabit now, that they can somehow act as if they were born into a perfect society while fighting the old society. Revolutionaries must work with people as they are now, not as they would be under socialism. Even reaching socialism is only possible with a unified program and concentrated attacks on the capitalist class. The anarchists do not believe in such united and combined action. The anarchists cannot provide a real plan to overthrow capitalist society, nor provide a plan for the construction of a new world. The answer is not anarchism. The answer is revolutionary socialism: the self-emancipation of the working class through its own democratic organizations and the establishment of a workers’ government capable of initiating a transition to a socialist economy. To reach that goal, working people need unity of purpose and organization; they need a political party with a revolutionary socialist program.