Workers’ self-management, confederal organisation, and the abolition of the state. For the ASF as they seem to struggle conceptually in this area.
Confederalism is a central organisational principle of anarcho-syndicalism, referring to federations of industrial confederations of all workers. In Wobbly nomencalture this is typically referred to as the One Big Union. In European syndicalism, the concept of confederalism is a defining organising principle. Confederalism offers a way to coordinate collective activity without subordinating individuals, workplaces, unions, or communities to a centralised authority. It addresses one of the fundamental problems confronting revolutionary movements: how can people organise on a large scale, coordinate economic and social life, and exercise collective power without reproducing the hierarchies they seek to abolish?
Anarcho-syndicalism combines anarchism’s opposition to coercive authority and hierarchical social relations with syndicalism’s emphasis on workers’ direct action, industrial organisation, and control over production. Rather than treating trade unions merely as instruments for negotiating wages within capitalism, anarcho-syndicalists have often understood them as potential organs of working-class self-organisation that could both resist capitalist power in the present and provide the organisational foundations of a future society.
Confederalism supplies the organisational architecture for this project. Workers organise in workplaces and industries, establish assemblies and elect delegates, and federate their organisations across industrial, regional, and ultimately international boundaries. These federations coordinate activities while attempting to preserve the autonomy of their constituent bodies. Authority is dispersed rather than concentrated, and delegates are intended to transmit decisions made by those they represent rather than independently govern them.
This arrangement distinguishes anarcho-syndicalism from both parliamentary reformism and revolutionary forms of centralism that seek to capture state power. Whereas centralised revolutionary organisations frequently justify concentrating authority as a temporary necessity, anarcho-syndicalism argues that the means of revolutionary transformation must embody the emancipatory relationships that the revolution is intended to establish.
Confederalism is therefore more than an administrative arrangement. It is simultaneously a theory of political power, a method of economic coordination, a conception of democratic participation, and an attempt to overcome the separation between those who make decisions and those who carry them out.
Its central problem is how to reconcile collective coordination with local autonomy, solidarity with diversity, and effective organisation with opposition to domination.
1. The anarchist foundations of confederalism
Anarchism is often misunderstood as an opposition to all forms of organisation, rules, or collective authority. Classical anarchist thinkers, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, developed a more substantial critique of domination.
Their central concern was not organisation as such but the institutional separation between those who direct social activity and those who must obey. Anarchists have consequently sought forms of organisation in which coordination emerges from association, agreement, mutual obligation, and participation rather than from an authority established above society.
Confederalism expresses this distinction through the principle of federation.
A federation consists of relatively autonomous groups that associate to pursue shared objectives. Its constituent organisations retain substantial control over their internal affairs while participating in collective decisions concerning matters that affect them jointly.
A confederation extends this principle across multiple levels. Local organisations can federate into regional bodies, which can in turn federate into national or international organisations. The resulting structure permits coordination on a large scale without necessarily creating a sovereign centre with unrestricted power over its constituent parts.
This arrangement differs from a conventional hierarchy. In a hierarchical organisation, authority flows downward from a leadership or executive body, while information and reports travel upward. The centre possesses the recognised right to determine policy, and subordinate bodies are expected to implement it.
In a confederal organisation, the intended relationship is different. Decisions originate among the people and organisations affected by them, while delegates communicate, coordinate, and implement collectively established mandates.
The distinction is not absolute: confederal organisations still require procedures, rules, and mechanisms for resolving disagreements. Their defining aspiration is that these procedures should remain accountable to their participants rather than becoming the basis of an independent ruling apparatus.
Bakunin’s opposition to state socialism is particularly relevant here. He argued that a revolutionary movement could reproduce domination if it concentrated political and economic power in the hands of a supposedly enlightened minority. A leadership that claimed to act on behalf of workers might become increasingly independent of them, eventually transforming its revolutionary mandate into a justification for ruling them.
Confederalism offers an alternative by attempting to ensure that collective power remains rooted in the organised activity of those who exercise it.
Kropotkin’s emphasis on mutual aid also provides an important foundation. Social cooperation need not originate in commands issued by a central authority. People and communities can develop institutions of reciprocal assistance, shared responsibility, and practical coordination.
From this perspective, confederalism is not simply a way of distributing administrative responsibilities. It is an attempt to institutionalise the capacity of people to organise their common affairs themselves.
2. Syndicalism and the transformation of the trade union
Anarcho-syndicalism gives confederalism a distinctively working-class and economic character.
Syndicalism emerged partly from dissatisfaction with trade union organisations that confined their activities to collective bargaining within capitalism. Conventional trade unions could improve wages, hours, and workplace conditions while leaving employers’ authority over production largely intact.
Anarcho-syndicalists questioned whether this separation between economic struggle and social transformation could ultimately emancipate workers.
If workers remain subordinate to managerial authority during production, and if their organisations reproduce similar hierarchies internally, the achievement of better contractual conditions does not necessarily overcome their underlying dependence.
Anarcho-syndicalism therefore emphasises workers’ direct control over their organisations and their struggles. The union becomes not merely a representative institution negotiating with employers but a means through which workers develop their collective capacities.
This has two related dimensions.
First, workers organise to resist exploitation. Strikes, boycotts, workplace occupations, solidarity campaigns, and other forms of direct action enable them to exercise power through their own collective activity.
Second, workers develop the organisational experience required to manage production themselves. Through assemblies, workplace committees, industrial coordination, and federated unions, they learn to deliberate, allocate responsibilities, resolve disputes, and coordinate activities across workplaces.
Confederalism links these dimensions. Local workplace organisations provide the foundation, but isolated workplaces cannot independently coordinate an entire industrial economy. Manufacturing depends on transport, energy, communications, agriculture, healthcare, and countless other activities.
A confederal system seeks to coordinate these interdependencies without placing workers under the authority of a permanent managerial or political elite.
For example, transport workers cannot determine their schedules without considering the requirements of agricultural producers, hospitals, passengers, and other industries. Agricultural workers depend on machinery, electricity, distribution networks, and access to land. Hospitals depend on medical supplies, trained personnel, energy, and transport.
The relevant decisions therefore extend beyond individual workplaces.
Confederalism proposes that these interdependencies should be addressed through institutions established by the participating organisations themselves. Workplace assemblies and industrial federations would coordinate their activities, exchange information, negotiate conflicting requirements, and make collective decisions within agreed procedures.
The objective is not to eliminate coordination but to prevent coordination from becoming a pretext for domination.
The confederal union is thus conceived both as an instrument of resistance within capitalism and as a potential organisational foundation for a society beyond capitalist relations.
3. From workplace autonomy to industrial federation
The confederal structure of anarcho-syndicalism attempts to connect three organisational levels: the local workplace, the industrial federation, and the wider confederation.
These levels are interdependent, but they should not form a simple chain of command.
Workplace organisation
The workplace is a fundamental site of anarcho-syndicalist organisation because workers directly experience the consequences of production decisions there. Workplace assemblies can provide opportunities to discuss conditions, determine collective demands, elect delegates, and coordinate action.
Their significance extends beyond formal democracy. They can help workers develop the confidence and practical knowledge required to challenge managerial authority.
However, workplace autonomy is not sufficient by itself. A workplace may be democratically organised while remaining dependent on external economic structures that it cannot control. Workers might exercise considerable influence over their immediate working conditions while still being subject to decisions concerning investment, distribution, technological development, and the allocation of resources.
The confederal principle therefore requires workplace autonomy to be combined with wider coordination.
Industrial federation
Industrial federations connect workers across individual workplaces within a particular sector. A federation of transport workers, for example, might coordinate railways, buses, freight distribution, and related services.
Such coordination makes it possible to address problems that cannot be resolved through isolated workplace decisions.
Industrial federations could exchange technical knowledge, coordinate training, develop common standards, and negotiate the distribution of resources. They could also help organise solidarity when workers in one workplace or region confront an employer or authority.
Yet industrial federations create a potential difficulty. Specialists and permanent administrators may acquire disproportionate influence because they possess information that ordinary members do not have.
An organisation initially created to coordinate workers’ decisions might gradually become an institution that makes decisions for them.
Anarcho-syndicalist safeguards against this tendency include elected and recallable delegates, transparent administration, rotation of responsibilities where practical, and the preservation of decision-making powers within the membership.
These measures cannot eliminate every inequality of knowledge or influence. They can, however, make it harder for organisational expertise to become an independent source of political power.
The general confederation
The wider confederation coordinates relations between different industries and regions. Its function is particularly important when decisions affect society as a whole.
Questions such as energy allocation, transport planning, environmental protection, public health, and the distribution of essential goods cannot always be settled within individual industrial federations.
A confederal structure provides a means of addressing these issues through cooperation among the relevant organisations.
Its purpose is not necessarily to establish a central authority with final and unrestricted control. Instead, it seeks to create procedures through which constituent organisations can deliberate, negotiate, and reach binding agreements on matters of common concern.
This raises an important distinction between coordination and sovereignty.
Coordination means developing arrangements through which people can accomplish shared objectives. Sovereignty, in its conventional political sense, implies the existence of a supreme authority whose decisions are ultimately binding within a territory.
Anarcho-syndicalist confederalism seeks to expand the former while avoiding the establishment of the latter as an independent power standing above society.
The practical challenge is to determine how collective decisions can be effective without allowing coordinating institutions to become new centres of domination.
4. Delegation, recallability, and the problem of representation
Confederalism depends on representation, but it seeks to distinguish representation from the transfer of political authority to an independent leadership.
In conventional representative institutions, voters generally select politicians who possess considerable discretion to make decisions during their terms of office. Once elected, representatives may develop priorities that differ from those of their constituents.
Anarcho-syndicalist organisations have often sought to reduce this separation through mandated delegation.
Under a system of mandated delegation, an assembly determines the position that its delegate is expected to communicate or implement. The delegate’s responsibility is to represent an established collective decision rather than substitute a personal programme for the assembly’s judgement.
Recallability provides a further safeguard. If delegates fail to fulfil their responsibilities, act contrary to their mandates, or lose the confidence of those who selected them, their constituents can replace them.
These arrangements aim to keep administrative functions subordinate to collective self-government.
Nevertheless, delegation creates difficulties that cannot be resolved simply by declaring delegates accountable.
Confederal organisations frequently encounter situations in which delegates must respond to new information, unforeseen circumstances, or disagreements that were not anticipated by the assemblies that appointed them. Strict mandates may prevent necessary flexibility, while broad mandates can allow delegates to acquire substantial discretion.
The problem becomes particularly acute during strikes, emergencies, or negotiations involving multiple organisations.
One possible response is to distinguish between decisions that require prior approval and those that can be delegated within clearly defined limits. Delegates could possess narrowly specified authority to negotiate practical arrangements while remaining accountable for their actions and unable to make fundamental changes to collectively established policy without further consultation.
Regular reporting, open records, accessible deliberations, and the circulation of information are equally important.
The underlying objective is not to eliminate all delegation. Complex societies require people to undertake specialised tasks and make decisions within particular areas of responsibility.
Rather, the aim is to prevent the delegation of a task from becoming the permanent delegation of the power to decide.
This distinction is essential because administrative responsibilities can gradually become institutional privileges. People who control information, chair meetings, manage finances, or negotiate with external organisations may acquire influence beyond their formal mandates.
Recallability alone does not automatically prevent this process. Members must also have sufficient time, information, resources, and practical opportunities to scrutinise their representatives.
Confederal democracy consequently requires more than constitutional safeguards. It requires an organisational culture in which participation is possible, criticism is legitimate, and no individual or group can plausibly claim an exclusive right to determine the collective interest.
5. Confederalism against revolutionary centralism
The political significance of anarcho-syndicalist confederalism becomes clearer when contrasted with revolutionary centralism.
Centralised revolutionary organisations generally argue that a successful revolutionary movement requires strategic unity, disciplined coordination, and the concentration of resources. In Leninist traditions, democratic centralism has historically been associated with internal discussion combined with organisational discipline and the implementation of decisions made by recognised party bodies.
The justification is that a revolutionary movement confronting a powerful state and capitalist class cannot rely exclusively on spontaneous or fragmented action.
Anarcho-syndicalists do not necessarily reject strategic coordination or organisational discipline. Their disagreement concerns how these should be organised and where political authority should reside.
The Leninist tradition, particularly as institutionalised following the Russian Revolution, raises the question of whether a party that claims to represent the working class can become independent of the class itself.
Anarcho-syndicalists argue that when revolutionary authority is concentrated in a party leadership, the practical capacity of workers to determine their own affairs may be subordinated to the strategic priorities of that leadership.
Even where a party initially derives its legitimacy from workers’ struggles, its control over appointments, information, resources, and political institutions can enable it to establish an increasingly independent position.
The problem is structural rather than merely personal. It does not require every revolutionary leader to be dishonest or power-hungry. An organisation may reproduce domination because its procedures make ordinary participants dependent on a leadership that possesses the authority and information necessary to govern.
Confederalism attempts to address this problem by organising revolutionary capacity horizontally.
Workers coordinate through their own industrial and local organisations, while confederal bodies facilitate communication and collective action. Rather than transferring the authority to direct social transformation to a party, the organisations involved seek to preserve the direct participation of those affected by their decisions.
This does not mean that confederal organisations automatically avoid bureaucracy. Nor does it establish that every centralised organisation must inevitably become authoritarian.
Central coordination can be necessary, and decentralised organisations can develop informal hierarchies or become ineffective. The relevant question is how organisational structures distribute power, enable accountability, and allow participants to challenge decisions.
Anarcho-syndicalist confederalism nevertheless insists that the means of revolutionary transformation matter in their own right.
If workers are expected to surrender their capacity for independent action to a leadership that promises future emancipation, the revolution risks reproducing the separation between rulers and ruled that characterises existing society.
From this perspective, self-management cannot simply be postponed until after the revolution. It must be developed through the practices of the revolutionary movement itself.
6. Confederalism and the critique of bureaucracy
Bureaucracy presents one of the most persistent challenges to confederal organisation.
Large organisations need records, financial administration, communication systems, technical expertise, and procedures for coordinating activities. These functions are not inherently oppressive.
The problem emerges when administrative functions become concentrated in a distinct group that controls organisational information and exercises authority over the membership.
Over time, administrators may acquire greater control over resources, develop specialised knowledge inaccessible to ordinary members, and influence which questions receive attention. Decisions can become increasingly dependent on the judgement of those who manage the organisation rather than the collective deliberation of its participants.
The distinction between administration and political authority consequently becomes crucial.
Administration concerns the practical implementation of decisions. Political authority concerns the power to determine which decisions are made, whose interests they serve, and whether they can be challenged.
In practice, however, the two can become difficult to separate. Administrators may influence policy through their control over information, while formally democratic assemblies may simply approve arrangements that they lack the time or expertise to evaluate.
Confederalism therefore requires institutions that make administrative activity visible and contestable.
Possible safeguards include:
- Transparent financial records and accessible administrative documents.
- Regular reports to workplace assemblies and constituent organisations.
- Recallable delegates and clear limits on delegated authority.
- Rotation of administrative responsibilities where feasible.
- Shared access to technical education and organisational knowledge.
- Independent procedures for investigating complaints and resolving disputes.
- Protection for internal criticism and minority viewpoints.
- Measures to prevent permanent officials from monopolising essential organisational functions.
These safeguards are most effective when combined with practical efforts to equalise the conditions of participation.
If some members have extensive free time while others face long working hours, caring responsibilities, disability-related barriers, or insecure employment, formal voting equality does not necessarily produce meaningful democratic equality.
Similarly, if participation requires specialised vocabulary or extensive unpaid labour, organisational processes may privilege those already equipped to navigate them.
A confederal organisation that ignores these inequalities can reproduce social hierarchies even when it formally rejects them.
Consequently, democratic participation requires accessible meetings, appropriate support, adequate time for deliberation, and arrangements that recognise different capacities and circumstances.
The abolition of formal hierarchy is not sufficient if informal power remains concentrated among those best positioned to exercise it.
7. Historical examples: the CNT, the IWW, and revolutionary Spain
The history of anarcho-syndicalism provides examples of confederal principles being applied in practice, although no historical organisation fully realised the ideals associated with them.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, developed an internationalist conception of working-class organisation that challenged divisions between skilled and unskilled workers, occupational categories, and national boundaries.
The IWW’s industrial unionism sought to organise workers across entire industries rather than confining them to separate craft unions. Its emphasis on solidarity reflected the understanding that workers’ collective power depended on their capacity to overcome divisions imposed by the organisation of capitalist production.
Although the IWW was not identical to anarcho-syndicalist organisations such as the Spanish CNT, its industrial unionism shares important affinities with confederalism: workers should organise across workplaces and industries, and their collective power should emerge from their own activity rather than dependence on political representatives.
The Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) offers a more direct historical example.
Founded in 1910, the CNT became a major anarcho-syndicalist organisation, particularly in Catalonia. Its organisational traditions emphasised local unions, industrial solidarity, direct action, and federation.
During the Spanish Revolution of 1936, following the military uprising against the Spanish Republic, workers and peasants in parts of Spain established collective forms of economic and social organisation. In Catalonia, workers took control of numerous enterprises, while agricultural collectivisation occurred in several regions.
These developments demonstrated that workers could undertake substantial organisational responsibilities outside conventional capitalist management.
Collectives and workers’ organisations attempted to coordinate production, distribution, transport, and other economic activities. Their arrangements varied considerably according to locality, industry, political circumstances, and the balance of power among different organisations.
The experience also exposed the difficulties of revolutionary confederalism.
The civil war created enormous pressures for military coordination, economic planning, and political unity. The CNT’s participation in governmental institutions, including its entry into the Republican government in 1936, generated tensions with anarchist principles concerning state power.
The CNT faced a dilemma: how could it defend the revolution and coordinate resistance against fascism without compromising its commitment to workers’ self-management and opposition to the state?
Participation in governmental institutions could provide access to resources and influence, but it could also subordinate revolutionary initiatives to political arrangements that the organisation had previously opposed.
The conflict illustrates a recurring problem. Revolutionary organisations must operate within immediate circumstances, yet the measures adopted to survive those circumstances can undermine their long-term emancipatory objectives.
The Spanish experience should not be romanticised as a perfectly functioning libertarian society. Revolutionary Spain was marked by violence, political conflict, shortages, uneven participation, and competing conceptions of social transformation. Nevertheless, it remains an important historical example of attempts to organise economic and social life through collective institutions rather than exclusively through capitalist management or state administration.
For further reading, Gaston Leval’s Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, Sam Dolgoff’s The Anarchist Collectives, and Murray Bookchin’s writings on the Spanish Revolution provide different perspectives on these developments.
8. Confederalism, internationalism, and the limits of local autonomy
Confederalism is necessarily internationalist because capitalism itself operates across national boundaries.
Production depends on international supply chains, financial systems, migration, technological networks, and access to resources distributed unevenly around the world. A revolutionary movement confined to a single workplace, industrial sector, or national territory cannot independently resolve all these interdependencies.
Anarcho-syndicalist internationalism therefore seeks to connect workers across national borders through solidarity and federated organisation.
International confederations can facilitate communication, coordinate industrial action, support workers facing repression, and challenge attempts by employers to exploit differences between national labour forces.
However, international confederalism must address inequalities between regions.
Workers in wealthier countries may benefit from economic arrangements that disadvantage workers elsewhere. Industries that consume substantial resources may impose environmental costs on communities far from their principal markets. A formally equal federation could reproduce these inequalities if its decisions primarily reflect the preferences of its most powerful or economically influential members.
Confederalism must therefore involve more than the principle that each constituent organisation retains autonomy. It must also consider the material conditions that determine whether organisations can exercise that autonomy meaningfully.
A poor region with limited infrastructure and resources may possess formal independence while remaining dependent on wealthier regions. Similarly, workers in strategically important industries may exercise disproportionate influence because other sectors depend on their labour.
A confederal system would need procedures for addressing these inequalities through resource-sharing arrangements, democratic planning, solidarity, and collective responsibility for meeting essential needs.
The relationship between local autonomy and universal obligations is particularly important.
A local assembly might oppose a decision necessary to protect workers elsewhere, safeguard an ecosystem, or provide essential services to a disadvantaged community. Simply declaring the local decision sovereign would leave these conflicts unresolved.
Confederalism must therefore establish legitimate processes through which competing claims can be discussed and negotiated.
Its challenge is to develop collective obligations without transforming them into an unrestricted authority capable of overriding every local decision.
This problem becomes especially difficult when ecological limits are involved. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and the depletion of resources cannot be adequately addressed through isolated local initiatives. They require coordination across regions and industries.
Anarcho-syndicalist confederalism must consequently combine decentralised decision-making with the capacity to establish and implement shared environmental objectives.
The alternative to centralised state planning is not necessarily the absence of planning. It can be democratic planning undertaken through federated institutions, with decisions informed by scientific knowledge, local experience, and the interests of affected communities.
9. The limitations and contradictions of confederal organisation
Confederalism offers a compelling critique of concentrated authority, but it does not automatically resolve the problems of collective organisation.
First, decentralisation can produce fragmentation. If constituent organisations prioritise their immediate interests without developing mechanisms for solidarity, they may fail to coordinate activities essential to society as a whole.
Second, assemblies can reproduce informal hierarchies. Charismatic individuals, experienced organisers, and people with greater educational or social resources may exercise influence disproportionate to their formal positions.
Third, recallability can become ineffective when members lack the time, information, or confidence to challenge delegates. Democratic procedures require active participation, not simply the theoretical possibility of intervention.
Fourth, consensus-oriented procedures can become burdensome when disagreements are persistent or urgent decisions are necessary. A confederal organisation needs fair and transparent procedures for resolving disputes, including circumstances in which unanimity cannot be achieved.
Fifth, workplace self-management does not necessarily eliminate domination within production. Workers might collectively reproduce discriminatory practices, impose unreasonable demands on minorities, or prioritise output over health and environmental considerations.
Collective ownership, in itself, does not guarantee emancipatory social relations.
Sixth, confederal organisations must confront the relationship between workers’ interests and the wider community. Decisions about production affect consumers, carers, unemployed people, disabled people, children, and future generations. A system organised exclusively around employed industrial workers risks excluding people whose needs cannot be adequately represented through workplace institutions.
These problems suggest that a viable confederal society would require multiple, overlapping forms of organisation.
Workplace assemblies could be complemented by neighbourhood assemblies, consumer organisations, environmental councils, and institutions representing people whose interests are not primarily expressed through employment.
The purpose would not be to replace industrial organisation with a new central authority. It would be to ensure that social decisions reflect the interdependence of different groups and the diverse conditions of human life.
Confederalism should therefore be understood as an evolving democratic practice rather than a blueprint that guarantees freedom once its organisational principles have been adopted.
Its success would depend on whether people possess the practical resources and institutional opportunities to participate, challenge decisions, and change the arrangements governing their lives.
10. Confederalism as a prefigurative politics
The deepest significance of confederalism lies in its relationship between present struggles and future social transformation.
Anarcho-syndicalism is prefigurative in the sense that it seeks to develop organisational practices consistent with the society it hopes to establish.
Rather than treating workers’ self-management as an objective that can be achieved only after a revolutionary party or transitional state has consolidated its authority, it attempts to cultivate self-management through everyday struggles.
Workers learn to organise collectively by organising collectively. They develop solidarity through practical cooperation, acquire administrative skills through shared responsibilities, and challenge hierarchical authority through their participation in decisions.
These experiences can transform how people understand their own capacities.
Capitalist institutions frequently encourage workers to regard production as something organised by managers, investment decisions as matters for owners, and political decisions as the responsibility of professional representatives.
Confederal organisation challenges these assumptions by making collective capacities visible and developing institutions through which people can exercise them.
However, prefiguration does not mean that existing organisations can simply be expanded until they become a new society. Capitalism imposes material constraints on workers’ organisations, including financial pressures, legal restrictions, competition, and dependence on wage income.
Unions can become bureaucratised, revolutionary movements can become isolated, and democratic institutions can reproduce inequalities that they initially sought to overcome.
The point is not that anarcho-syndicalist organisations are immune to these pressures. Rather, confederalism provides principles through which they can be identified and contested.
Its insistence on autonomy, accountability, solidarity, and participation makes the organisation of power an ongoing political question.
This also distinguishes confederalism from a narrowly procedural conception of democracy. The objective is not merely to establish fair voting arrangements but to transform the social relationships that determine who possesses the capacity to make and implement decisions.
Where economic power remains concentrated in the hands of owners and managers, political equality is necessarily limited. Conversely, the collective ownership of productive resources will not establish genuine freedom if workers remain subordinate to an unaccountable administrative hierarchy.
Anarcho-syndicalist confederalism seeks to address these problems together by connecting economic self-management with democratic coordination.
Conclusion
Confederalism is a defining organisational principle of anarcho-syndicalism because it attempts to reconcile large-scale social cooperation with the autonomy of the people and communities involved.
Through federated workplace organisations, industrial unions, and wider confederations, it offers a model for coordinating collective activity without establishing an independent authority above society. Mandated delegation, recallability, transparency, and participatory decision-making are intended to ensure that coordination remains accountable to those whose activities it organises.
Its significance extends beyond trade union administration. Confederalism provides a critique of bureaucratic domination, revolutionary centralism, and the separation between political representatives and the people they claim to represent.
It also offers a framework for thinking about how a society might organise production and distribution through democratic institutions rather than capitalist ownership and state command.
Yet confederalism cannot eliminate domination through organisational design alone. Local autonomy can coexist with inequality, assemblies can reproduce informal hierarchies, and decentralised organisations can struggle to coordinate activities across regions and industries.
A genuinely emancipatory confederalism must therefore address material inequalities, unequal capacities for participation, environmental constraints, and the interests of people whose lives are not adequately represented through workplace organisation.
Its fundamental principle is not that every collective must remain isolated from external influence, nor that all decisions must be made locally. It is that the coordination of collective life should not become the basis for establishing a separate power that governs those who participate in it.
The central anarcho-syndicalist proposition is that working people should develop the collective capacity to organise society without surrendering that capacity to a permanent ruling institution.
Confederalism attempts to institutionalise this proposition by making federation a means of extending self-management rather than replacing it. Its ultimate ambition is a society in which solidarity does not require subordination, collective responsibility does not require centralised domination, and coordination becomes an expression of freedom rather than an instrument of control.
Selected references for further reading
The following works provide historical, theoretical, and critical perspectives on anarchism, syndicalism, and confederal organisation.
- Bakunin, Mikhail. Statism and Anarchy (1873). A major anarchist critique of state socialism and the concentration of revolutionary authority.
- Bookchin, Murray. The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936 (1977). A historical study of the development of Spanish anarchism and its organisational traditions.
- Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982). Explores hierarchy, domination, and the relationship between social organisation and ecological thought.
- Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 (1974). Documents and discusses revolutionary experiments in collective production and administration.
- Graham, Robert, ed. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, 3 volumes (2005–2012). A substantial collection of primary sources on anarchist theory and practice, including federation and revolutionary organisation.
- Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Develops an account of cooperation as an important feature of social and evolutionary life.
- Leval, Gaston. Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (English translation, 1975). Examines the organisation of collectivised production during the Spanish Revolution.
- Michels, Robert. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1911). Develops the influential argument that large organisations tend to concentrate power in leadership groups. His argument provides a useful critical framework, although its claims should not be treated as proof that oligarchy is inevitable.
- Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. The Principle of Federation (1863). A foundational work on federal organisation, political autonomy, and the distribution of authority.
- Rocker, Rudolf. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938). One of the most important introductions to anarcho-syndicalist principles, revolutionary unionism, and workers’ self-management.
- Schmidt, Michael, and Lucien van der Walt. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (2009). A historical and theoretical account of anarchist and syndicalist movements as revolutionary working-class traditions.
- Souchy, Augustin. With the Peasants of Aragon: Libertarian Communism in the Liberated Areas (1937). An account of collectivisation and libertarian communist experiments during the Spanish Revolution.
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