Review of Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States (2023)

Zoe Baker (writer).

Read in 2024.

Read with a group.

There’s a chapter in this book comparing anarchism with (state) socialism. In it, anarchists successfully predict why and how the Russian Revolution and other communist revolutions would fail. The possibility that these same anarchists could have done better makes for interesting reading, but that question is neither the subject of the book, nor resolved in it.

The book is re-edited from a PhD thesis. The scholarly care Baker takes with her limited scope and primary-source material is by far her greatest strength, but she is not just a historian. She’s an activist Youtuber, and she decorates the book, albeit sparsely, with signals of her conviction. For example, explaining social constructionism, she writes that “the activity of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the police (or both) will, in general, bring out the worst in someone”. Not many historians would so deliberately portray white-supremacist murderers and police officers as morally equivalent in an off-topic example, but the belief that police officers exist to preserve injustice is common in the author’s political clique. Fortunately, Baker is not blindly partisan. She does not minimize the failures of historical anarchists, nor does she explain those failures through demonizing conspiracy theory. Means and Ends is not just propaganda. It is a highly readable and substantive introduction to historical anarchism at its peak, with the following exceptions.

The paragraph I just quoted, on social constructionism, is important in Baker’s “rational reconstruction” of what she calls the “theoretical framework” of anarchism. That phrase is charitable. Whereas Capital (1867/1887), for example, builds up from basic concepts to an abstract theory, Baker quotes nobody doing the same for anarchist thought. She spends no time on anarchists using the framework of Capital for themselves either. She does quote many thinkers writing about what they wanted, and she claims that anarchists produced “vast amounts of theory”, but she prefers a body of oral tradition over elegant abstract thought. Like other movements concentrated in the working class, this one was built on shared experiences, including psychological reactance against the management of manual labour. The majority of labourers at this time were poorly educated. They were in a good position to recognize their oppression on a practical level, but they were in a bad position to explain it on a theoretical level. Baker laments, correctly, that she cannot reconstruct exactly what the bulk of these people believed, which I would have liked to know. What she can do is much more nebulous, and surprisingly divorced from general interests.

Baker identifies “the theory of practice”, not Marx’s political economy, as the theoretical framework of anarchism. That theory is social constructionism, although Baker avoids the term. Basically, it’s the idea that you are born as a blank slate and then get your attributes from the floating world of Heraclitus around you. There is much that we learn and make together in life, but what Baker attributes to the anarchists is a specific, strong form of social constructionism: “Capacities and drives are not fixed or static, but are rather in constant motion as human action maintains, alters, erodes, destroys, and creates them over time.” This strong form, where even our drives are determined by praxis, is a false belief. It is probably true that the majority of historical anarchists shared that belief when their thoughts turned to intellectual justification, but it is the responsibility of the historian to highlight that ignorance, and of the modern activist to reject it.

Outside this book, Baker affirms there is a human nature, but she does so without rejecting strong social constructionism. Judging by her work on Youtube (the 2022-02-28 video “Anarchists Are Not Naive About Human Nature”), her idea of human nature is based on Peter Kropotkin’s work from the 1860s, at it was collected in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Kropotkin wrote after Jean Martin Charcot, around the time of Phineas Gage and On the Origin of Species (1859). At this time, it was still scientifically defensible to combine strong social constructionism with theories of evolution. Only isolated naturalists like Gregor Mendel had begun to understand exactly how organisms inherit some traits instead of acquiring them. Naturalists could therefore continue to believe, as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had done, that animals are shaped indefinitely—albeit slowly—by praxis. In that theoretical framework, you can believe in Heraclitus and still say there is a human nature larger than the needs of infants. Baker does. I’m not sure about Kropotkin. After Kropotkin came DNA, epigenetics and a slew of other discoveries that have narrowed down the possible mechanisms and ranges of mutation, heritability, brain plasticity, innate cognitive biases, and so on. The resulting view of human nature is not Kropotkin’s, but neither is it Thomas Hobbes’s. For an accessible critical examination of social constructionism in the light of 100 years of scholarship after Kropotkin, see The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002).

As for Baker’s book, there are three big problems with viewing social constructionism as the theoretical framework of anarchism. The first problem is that Baker does not adequately contrast it against competing theories, especially in the political mainstream and on the right. Baker gives a textbook example of a Hobbesian trap in Marx’s pre-emptive attack on Bakunin at the First International’s September 1872 Hague Congress, but she doesn’t call it a Hobbesian trap, perhaps because she doesn’t want to engage even with Hobbes’s crude 17th-century notions of human nature and incentive structures. It is to Baker’s credit that she doesn’t make a strawman out of Hobbes or out of historical materialism, but she barely contrasts anarchist social constructionism against rival schools of thought, even within the International. Again, compare Marx, who engaged deeply with free-market thinkers and other opponents of his in Capital. By omitting the ideas of the primary opponents of the anarchists, Baker presents the ideas of the anarchists themselves outside their historical context.

The second big problem with treating social constructionism as the theoretical framework of anarchism is that, although it distinguishes anarchism from Hobbes, it does not uniquely identify anarchism. Lots of ignorant people, including state socialists and free-market ideologues, have started from social-constructionist assumptions and come to non-anarchist political conclusions. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith noted that specialization of labour would destroy people because “the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments”. Smith thus emphasized work experience in human development, just like Baker’s anarchists did, but they would have agreed on little else. Baker does not acknowledge that. She picks up the slack with a different chunk of ideology: The one that gave this book its title. That is the unity of means and ends. Baker avoids quoting the ancient proverb that “the ends do not justify the means”, but that is what she claims the anarchists believed.

The third and final big problem with zeroing in on social constructionism is that the actions of Baker’s anarchists are unexplainable by reference to social constructionism. Some remain unexplainable even if you include the unity of means and ends. For example, the framework does not explain why many activists chose to play music and throw parties. Those tactics were used by all political factions and were effective for reasons related to human nature, not ideology. More importantly, Baker does not comment on how the insurrectionist anarchists, who used violence instead of organization, thereby practiced violence, again like other political factions. If they had believed in the theory of practice, they would have predicted that using terror and violence would prepare them for a life of terror and violence after “the revolution”. If they had believed in the unity of means and ends, they would have thought that planet-wide war and social engineering for “the revolution” would be wrong, because they did not want war and social engineering in their utopia.

Kropotkin admitted that anarchism implied “completely reconstructing all relationships”. Baker, despite quoting Kropotkin and placing constructionism front and centre, does not analyze that reconstruction in any detail. Historical anarchists didn’t either. They were not actually driven by theory, and they were not necessarily as naïve as Baker. For example, part of the insurrectionist strategy was to organize “affinity groups”: Small bands of heroic fighters, with secret knowledge of and absolute loyalty to one another, going on quests to defeat their enemies and punish social parasites with violence for the greater good. This strategy sounds like it was developed to appeal to young men, who go for that sort of thing by nature. In my opinion, the most serious flaw in Baker’s “rational reconstruction” is theorywashing. She takes a set of behaviours and she assumes they were driven by a theory because we tend to value high-minded behaviour. Choosing the combination of social constructionism and deontological ethics as that theory is a secondary error.

Baker’s favourite ideologue is Errico Malatesta, who does make a very good showing in this book. On the subject of violence, she quotes Malatesta saying that for anarchists finding their way blocked, “there is no appeal except to physical force”. This is the means of fascism applied toward a different end. Baker also quotes Bakunin and Malatesta cautioning their readers that violence should only be used with popular support because otherwise, “it necessarily provokes reaction”, but Baker’s own voice is eerily quiet on the idea of popular support as a justification for violence. Because she does not understand the role of human nature in reactions to literal violence, she also does not push back against the creeping suggestion that metaphorical (“legal”) violence, such as wage slavery, is literal violence. Given that 19th-century anarchists had flimsy ideas about overturning “all relationships” by force to reach a utopia they had not thought through or tested, it is easy to see why states came down hard on them. On the subject of millenarian terrorism and accelerationism, Baker’s tacit partisan support reminds me of tankie agnotology. For what is primarily a history of mentalities, the book shows a disturbing lack of philosophical substance, but to her credit, Baker does at least quote Max Baginski’s intelligent rejection of millenarianism:

Workers dream themselves too easily into the idea that one day the “social revolution” will descend to earth like a supernatural godhead in order to heal all wounds and dry all tears in one fell swoop. Oh no! The sun, which as it set today looked down on shackled slaves, will not as it rises tomorrow behold free people. Workers must educate themselves through their own strength to become thinking and acting people.

Outside the realm of physical force and revolution, one emergent property of social-constructionist political ideology is an irrational belief in personal vigilance as a strategy. Exactly that is on display in Emma Goldman’s repurposing of direct action for general purposes in 1910. In “the environment of the individual”, Baker quotes Goldman as writing, “a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistant resistance to them will finally set him free.”

Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

This is permanent high stress as your path to happiness. Baker, in her “conclusion” to the book, embraces this strategy and its usual companions, Frazerian contamination and the Nirvana fallacy. She takes “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977) and puts its identity politics among “the best ideas that have been developed by various social movements of the oppressed and exploited over the past 150 years”, outside anarchism proper. There is indeed a natural connection from direct action to identity politics, but what they have in common is despondent distrust in other people. Baker expands the list of bad systems, which started with capitalism and the state, to include “patriarchy, racism, queerphobia, ableism, and so on”, ignoring that anarchist workers took direct action in their own interest. With such a laundry list to be handled all the time and all at once, plus climate change thrown in as an afterthought, Baker’s true conclusion is that things “are only going to get worse.”

I don’t agree with that conclusion, but it does follow logically from Baker’s bad assumptions. The last chapter of Means and Ends, before the conclusion, is devoted to charitable corrections of anarchist misreadings concerning the “organizational dualism” of Bakunin and of later Russian expat “platformists”. The misreadings, and the purity-testing infighting that followed, are a natural consequence of adopting goals that seem unreachable. Baker illustrates this through her personal defeatism, but as Kropotkin showed, it is possible to reject the twin pseudosciences of social Darwinism and strong social constructionism, and remain an anarchist.

I had a lot of fun reading this book with people who were more familiar with the territory than I was. I last edited this review on 2025-03-16, with their help.

If you are interested in historical anarchism and you want a thinker who, like Ursula K. Le Guin, looked for a more liveable bedrock with less anxiety and groupthink, try The Ego and Its Own (1844). When I picked up Means and Ends, I was curious to learn whether real-world anarchists had ideas like those in Daoist philosophy, as Le Guin’s fictional anarchists do in Always Coming Home (1985). Baker does make a couple of one-line references to Daoism: One to Bao Jingyan, who embraced it in the 3rd century CE, and one to Li Yaotang, who rejected Daoism in the 20th century. Goldman’s version of direct action is un-Daoist, and as the author readily admits, Baker’s analysis of East Asian anarchist thought is limited by her being able to read only English. If you want environmental constraints to be more than an afterthought, try The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982). If you want economic theory, try Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2003). If you want to see anarchist economics tested in practice, read about peaceful experiments like Cecosesola.

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