Anarchist Responses to the Rise of the Welfare State

Anarchists of the 19^th and early 20^th century viewed political states as coercive instruments designed to protect the wealth and authority of owners of productive property. How, then, did they react to the growth of redistributionist social democratic agencies and policies in advanced capitalist countries during the 1930s and 1940s? Drawing on archival sources, this paper outlines the ways anarchists in the United States made sense of the New Deal, as it was being rolled out, and what actions they took in response.

Attentive to international politics, U.S. anarchists such as Mark Schmidt first suggested that the New Deal was a crafty means of introducing fascism in America, “the powerful trusts merging with the bureaucratic State apparatus.” By the late 1930s, the journal Vanguard argued that the United States was, rather, becoming a “State Capitalist” system in which forward-looking elites collaborated with a new “union bureaucracy” to head off free-market crises and revolutionary movements. Harboring deep resentments towards other tendencies on the left, the declining U.S. anarchist movement largely abstained from CIO organizing and Popular Front initiatives. Some developed autonomous self-help institutions, such as a Jewish anarchist kibbutz in rural Michigan, while others focused on providing material aid to anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

The paper concludes with a brief comparison to the ways anarchists in France and the United Kingdom theorized postwar social democratic initiatives in their own countries. I argue that while anarchist analyses shed light on the shortcomings and risks of welfarist politics, mid-20^th century anarchists did not adequately update their core political theory of the state in light of these major structural developments. This contributed to the movement’s declining fortunes.