Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Woods, Alan, et al. Marxism and Anarchism. 2nd ed., Wellred Books, 2015.

Alan Woods’ Marxism and Anarchism is both a primer and a provocation: a historically grounded, polemically precise intervention into an old debate that has returned with new urgency amid cycles of crisis, protest, and ideological realignment on the left. Framed by Woods’ contemporary essays and anchored by a carefully curated set of classics—from Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Plekhanov—the volume refuses to rehearse sterile disputes. Instead, it reconstructs the theoretical and strategic fault lines that have separated Marxism from anarchism since the First International, and tests them against the lived experience of mass struggle, organization, and revolution. The result is a collection that is unusually coherent for an anthology and unusually usable for militants and scholars alike.  

The book’s method is its first virtue. Woods insists that program and organization must be derived from the dynamics of class struggle, not abstract moralism. He repeatedly contrasts the Marxist insistence on historicity—on analyzing the determinate, contradictory development of capitalist social relations—with the anarchist tendency to transpose ethical desiderata (authority is bad, the state must be abolished) into immediate strategy without mediations. The selection of historical case studies embodies this methodological wager: Kronstadt, the Makhnovshchina, the Spanish Revolution, and the debates around “direct action,” “individual terrorism,” and anarcho-syndicalism are not deployed as morality tales but as tests of theory under pressure. The inclusion of Engels’ “On Authority” and Lenin’s analyses of organization demonstrates how Marxists have historically treated coercion, leadership, and centralisation as questions to be explained—rooted in the social division of labour and the tasks posed by revolution—rather than wished away.  

Woods’ introductions and essays are especially effective where they demonstrate how anarchism’s theoretical starting points, when generalized, generate practical impasses. His critique of “direct action” as a strategy elevated above mass politics is not a dismissal of militancy; it is a demand that tactics be subordinated to the building of majoritarian, working-class power capable of expropriating capital and coordinating social production. Similarly, his discussion of “individual terrorism” uses the tragic logic of substitutionism to show why isolated acts—however heroic—cannot replace the self-activity of millions. These are classical Marxist arguments, but Woods refreshes them by engaging contemporary anarchist-inflected currents (from horizontalist assemblies to “prefigurative” micro-institutions), and by demonstrating how capitalist crises repeatedly expose the limits of voluntarism and spontaneism. The editorial decision to situate these arguments alongside selections critiquing Michael Albert’s Parecon and treatments of Occupy-era politics keeps the book sharply relevant to readers formed by twenty-first-century movements.  

The historical chapters are exemplary. On Kronstadt and the Ukrainian civil war, the texts neither sanctify Bolshevik decisions nor romanticize their opponents; they reconstruct the concrete pressures of civil war, imperialist encirclement, and famine, and insist that judgments about “authority” must be situated in those totalities. Likewise, the material on Spain refuses the myth of a purely libertarian revolution suppressed only by “authoritarian Marxists.” Instead it foregrounds questions of dual power, the class nature of the Popular Front, and the consequences of abstaining from—or mishandling—state power when the working class actually threatens to rule. In each case, the anthology’s architecture clarifies the Marxist thesis: abolishing the capitalist state requires building an alternative—organs of workers’ power and a party capable of coordinating them—not merely negating “authority” in the abstract.  

Stylistically, the book benefits from Woods’ didactic clarity. He writes as a Marxist educator: analytic without pedantry, polemical without caricature. The prose assumes a serious reader and rewards them with crisp conceptual distinctions—class versus people, spontaneity versus organization, ethics versus strategy—without lapsing into jargon. Graduate students will appreciate how the volume nests theoretical claims within methodological reminders: that analysis must pass from the abstract to the concrete; that the problem of the state cannot be solved by localism; that revolutionary strategy must be scaled to the problem of social reproduction. For instructors, the book is assignable: each chapter can anchor a seminar meeting, while the whole can scaffold a course unit on revolutionary strategy.

If there is a limitation, it is the one that follows from the book’s virtue: its focus on Marxism’s critique of anarchism can sometimes render the anarchist side more adversary than interlocutor. Readers seeking extended engagements with contemporary anarchist theorists beyond the usual canon may want to supplement with recent scholarship. But even here, the anthology provides the analytic tools to organize such a dialogue: it equips readers to ask the right questions about scale, mediation, class composition, and the passage from revolt to rule.

For militants, Marxism and Anarchism offers strategic orientation: a rigorous defense of the party—not as bureaucratic fetish, but as the democratic instrument through which the working class can unify its experiences and coordinate its power. For scholars, it supplies a compact map of the Marxist–anarchist debate that refuses the caricatures of both a dismissive “authoritarian Marxism” and an ahistorical “pure anarchism.” For anyone animated by the problem that matters—the transition from mass indignation to working-class power—the book is indispensable.

Finally, the edition itself is thoughtfully assembled. The Wellred Books publication collects the classics and the contemporary in a single, accessible volume (372 pages). The updated editions and online introduction ensure that new readers have ready context for the selections and their present stakes.  

Verdict

A sharp, generous, and use-ready intervention, Marxism and Anarchism belongs on the syllabus of any graduate seminar on revolutionary theory and in the hands of organizers confronting the question that has undone so many movements: how to pass from episodic revolt to sustained, democratic, working-class rule.