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, though of course, the question is not resolved.

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, 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. Baker claims that anarchists produced “vast amounts of theory”, and I’m sure they talked a lot about what they wanted, but even by comparison with other political ideologies of the mid-19th century, anarchism had little abstraction behind it. Anarchists were able to use the actual theoretical framework in Capital (1867/1887), but Baker spends no time on that. She prefers a body of oral tradition. Like other movements concentrated in the working class, this one was built mostly on shared experiences, including psychological reactance against the management of manual labour. As a result of poor education at the time, manual labourers were in a bad position to theorize about the causes of their oppression. Baker laments, correctly, that she cannot reconstruct exactly what the bulk of these people believed. 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: “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.” In its strong form, presented by Baker, this is a false belief. It is probably true that the majority of historical anarchists shared that belief when their thoughts turned to intellectual justification at all, but it is the responsibility of the historian to highlight that ignorance, and of the modern activist to reject it. Baker does neither.

For the more specific purposes of this book, there are three big problems with social constructionism. The first problem is that Baker does not adequately contrast it against competing theories. Judging by her own work on Youtube (the 2022-02-28 video “Anarchists Are Not Naive About Human Nature”), Baker’s own idea of human nature is based on Peter Kropotkin’s work from the 1860s. Kropotkin wrote after Jean Martin Charcot, around the time of Phineas Gage, On the Origin of Species (1859), and Gregor Mendel. This was before the discovery of DNA and epigenetics, missing more than a century of intense scientific study that has narrowed down the possible ranges of mutation, heritability, brain plasticity, innate cognitive biases, and so on. 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 game theory. It is to Baker’s credit that she doesn’t make a strawman out of Hobbes, but because she omits the hostile ideas that shaped anarchist thought as if they were taboo, she thereby 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 state socialism and from omitted Hobbesian notions of human nature, it does not uniquely identify anarchism. Lots of ignorant people, including state socialists, have started from social-constructionist assumptions and come to non-anarchist political conclusions. You can read even The Prince (1513/1532) that way if you like. You have to read Adam Smith, the unwilling father of free-market capitalism, that way. Smith emphasized work experience in human development, just like Baker’s anarchists did, but they would have agreed on little else. Read The Blank Slate (2002) for a number of other examples of high-level social constructionism and a summary of the evidence against it. Baker 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. True to form, Baker avoids both the phrase “deontological ethics” and the ancient proverb that “the ends do not justify the means”, but that is what she claims the anarchists believed.

The third 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 unrelated to 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”. On the other hand, the theory of practice, by itself, would not have led them to the conclusion that eternal horror would be a bad outcome of planet-wide war and social engineering. If you add deontological ethics to control for that problem, you have to specify which moral laws you subscribe to, but Baker does not.

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 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.

On the subject of violence, Baker quotes Errico 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 have 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 human nature, 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 millennarian terrorism and Kropotkin’s 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 millennarianism:

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 marketing 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, direction 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 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. 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 this book, 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 Baker readily admits, Baker’s analysis of East Asian anarchist thought is limited by her being able to read only English. For Kropotkin’s attempt at a scientific theory of anarchism, read Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). 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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