Anarcho-communism / syndicalism

Peak influence 1870–1939

Core claim

Hierarchy is the thing to be abolished, and a state that owns the economy is still a state — so production should be run by federated workplace and community assemblies with no coercive apex.

What it wants the state to do

Wants no state at all. Wants the union, the commune and the federation as the organs of coordination, with mandated and recallable delegates rather than representatives, and distribution by need rather than by wage.

Historical success case

Revolutionary Catalonia, 1936–37, where CNT-affiliated collectives ran transport, utilities and a substantial share of industry in Barcelona for roughly a year under wartime conditions.

Historical failure mode

The same case, ended by force from its own side as much as from Franco's — the May Days of 1937 are the standard evidence that a movement refusing centralised command loses to opponents who accept it.

Nearby traditions

Democratic socialism, sharing the economic goal and not the anti-parliamentary means; anarcho-capitalism, sharing only the hostility to the state and nothing about property.

Common mix-up

Anarchism is not the absence of organisation. Its literature is largely about organisational design — mandates, recall, federation, rotation — and the absence it demands is specifically of coercive authority, not of structure.

Coordinates