Overview
A wager that the adjective is not decorative: socialism without an emancipatory political form will reproduce a class society under new management, and freedom without socialised production is the freedom of the propertyless to take whatever wage is offered.
Also known as: Freedom-Oriented Socialist
History
The phrase "libertarian socialism" became a self-conscious political identity in 1872, at the Hague Congress of the International Workingmen's Association. The First International had been the main international vehicle of socialist organising since 1864; that year, the Marxist faction expelled the anti-authoritarian faction around Mikhail Bakunin. The two sides disagreed about a question that has never gone away. Can the state, taken over by the working class, be used to abolish capitalism? Or does seizing the state reproduce the relations of domination the revolution was supposed to end? The Marx-Bakunin debate is constitutive of both libertarian socialism and the broader anarchist tradition (see the Anarchism dossier), which trace to the same founding moment. Bakunin's prediction, that "no dictatorship can have any other aim than to perpetuate itself," became the founding hypothesis.
For the next half-century, libertarian socialism was an active alternative to both social democracy and the emerging Marxist-Leninist line, with strongholds in France, Italy, Spain, and across the Mexican and Russian revolutionary contexts. Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902) supplied the philosophical anthropology: humans, contra Hobbes, are evolutionarily disposed toward cooperation, and political institutions that recognize this fact do not need a coercive apex to function. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the high-water mark. Libertarian socialists led much of the early agitation, organized factory committees that briefly outpaced the Bolsheviks in worker support, and saw their organizations dismantled by 1919 once the new state had no further use for them.
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 remains the largest concrete experiment. In Catalonia and the Levante, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (see the Anarcho-Syndicalism dossier), with 1.5 million members at its peak, collectivised industry and agriculture across territories of millions of people. Gaston Leval's reporting documented agrarian collectives spanning 78 percent of the Levante's arable land. Industrial and agricultural production held up. Military coordination against Franco did not. The defeat of the Republic in 1939 ended the tradition's first century as an active mass movement.
From 1939 to roughly 1960, libertarian socialism was institutionally marginal. The Cold War made every political question a binary, and a tradition that explicitly rejected both poles had little room to recruit. The revival came through the New Left, often reinvented from scratch by people unfamiliar with the prior tradition. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, and the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie around Cornelius Castoriadis rebuilt the canon in adjacent languages. Castoriadis's group is also the post-war bridging institution into council communism (see the Council Communism dossier); both currents refuse the vanguard-party form from inside the socialist tradition. Daniel Guérin's Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (1965) was the bridge text, arguing that the libertarian-socialist and Marxist projects, properly understood, could be reconciled. By the 1970s, Noam Chomsky had become the tradition's most visible English-speaking spokesperson.
Contemporary libertarian socialism survives in two registers. There are the live experiments: the Zapatista autonomous territories in Chiapas since 1994 and the Rojava Revolution in northeastern Syria since 2012. Both have built functioning institutions on explicitly libertarian-socialist premises, and both describe themselves in those terms. There is also the diffuse activist current visible inside contemporary anti-austerity, municipalist, and ecological movements: Barcelona en Comú under Ada Colau, the Industrial Workers of the World, the autonomist tradition in Italy, and pockets of the Chilean and Argentine left. Gabriel Boric, elected president of Chile in 2021, has described himself as a libertarian socialist. This is the first time someone using the label has won executive office in a major country.
The common critique, that libertarian socialism is a contradiction history has discredited, misses what the tradition actually claims. It has not failed to organize. The Spanish CNT in 1936 was the largest anti-capitalist mobilisation any industrial society has produced. It has failed to hold territory against organized states. Whether those are the same failure is one of the live questions inside the tradition, and the case for keeping the project alive rests on the claim that they are not.
Key Thinkers
The Russian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary whose argument with Marx at the Hague Congress of 1872 created libertarian socialism as a distinct tradition. His prediction that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" would necessarily become a new ruling class is the founding hypothesis the rest of the tradition has tried to inherit and refine.
Russian geographer and anarcho-communist whose Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) supplied the philosophical anthropology underneath libertarian socialism: cooperation, not coercion, is the long-run adaptive pattern. The most readable entry point into the tradition.
German anarcho-syndicalist whose Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938) crystallised the strand of the tradition that uses unions and federations of workplaces as the building blocks of a post-state society. The bridge between 19th-century anarchism and 20th-century labor organising.
American social ecologist whose later work on libertarian municipalism, the idea that confederated neighborhood assemblies could substitute for both state and corporation, became the explicit theoretical basis for the Rojava experiment. Brought ecology and the tradition together in a way no prior thinker had.
American linguist whose essays from the 1970s onward have made libertarian socialism legible to English-speaking readers raised on no prior exposure to it. Has been honest about where the tradition struggles: in particular, the gap between doctrinal commitment and the logistical demands of large-scale coordination.
Key Texts
Posthumous compilation of Bakunin's anti-clerical and anti-statist writing. Less a systematic treatise than a polemical manifesto, but it remains the clearest statement of why a tradition descended from socialism would treat the state as part of what needs abolishing rather than as the instrument for doing so.
A biologist-historian arguing, against Social Darwinism, that cooperation among members of a species is at least as evolutionarily significant as competition. The empirical case underneath the political claim that human societies organized around mutual support are not utopian but observable.
The mature statement of the union-federation strand of libertarian socialism, written in exile on the eve of the tradition's near-extinction. Argues that the institutions of a free society have to be built inside the institutions of the existing one, not waited for.
Bookchin's synthesis: the domination of nature and the domination of humans share a common conceptual root in hierarchical thinking, and a libertarian socialism worth defending has to confront both at once. The book that gave the contemporary tradition its ecological core.
Edited collection of Chomsky's essays and interviews on the tradition. The most accessible recent statement of what a libertarian socialist actually believes in 2013-era language, including honest sections on what the tradition has not figured out.
Modern Manifestations
The largest continuous libertarian-socialist project in the world is in northeastern Syria. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, commonly called Rojava, was established in 2012 in the chaos of the Syrian civil war and explicitly builds on Murray Bookchin's writing on libertarian municipalism. Bookchin's framework is also the explicit theoretical anchor of contemporary eco-socialist ecological organising (see the Eco-Socialism dossier), so Rojava is the operational point where these traditions overlap. The Kurdish-led project federates neighborhood assemblies that hold real decision-making authority over policing, economic coordination, and dispute resolution, while protecting gender parity at every institutional level. It governs roughly four million people across territory roughly the size of Belgium. Whether it survives the regional politics around it is an open question; that it has lasted more than a decade is the empirical claim libertarian socialists point to when accused of impracticality.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has been running an explicitly libertarian-socialist autonomous zone in Chiapas, Mexico, since 1994. The Zapatistas reject electoral participation, refuse foreign aid that comes with conditions, and govern through a system of rotating assemblies. Subcomandante Marcos's writings remain readable as primary source material. The project is smaller in scale than Rojava but older, and is the obvious antecedent.
In Chile, Gabriel Boric won the presidency in 2021 as the candidate of Frente Amplio, a coalition that includes self-identified libertarian-socialist movements. Boric describes himself in the tradition. This is the first time a major-country head of state has used the label. The Boric presidency is a useful test case for whether libertarian socialism can survive contact with the executive branch of a modern state; the early evidence is mixed, with the failed 2022 constitutional referendum showing the difficulty of moving from social-movement consensus to electoral majority.
In the global North, libertarian socialism is most visible inside municipalist experiments. Barcelona en Comú, under Ada Colau's mayoralty from 2015 to 2023, attempted to govern a major European city on explicitly libertarian-socialist premises: participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, public-housing expansion, refusal of austerity-driven privatisation. The experiment was mixed; Colau lost re-election in 2023; but the institutions built under her tenure persist. Similar projects in Madrid, Naples, and several US cities have drawn on the same playbook.
Less visibly, the contemporary tradition lives inside the union movement (the Industrial Workers of the World, which has been continuously libertarian-socialist since 1905), inside the autonomist tradition in Italy and France, and inside the diffuse ecology-and-anti-globalisation milieu around writers like David Graeber. Graeber's death in 2020 removed the tradition's most charismatic recent ambassador; whoever replaces him will shape what English-speaking libertarian socialism looks like for the next decade.
Real-World Debates
Through this lens, housing is the case study in why the tradition refuses both the market and the state. The market produces housing for profit, which means it produces too little of the kind people actually need and too much of the kind investors prefer. The state can produce more, but state-owned housing reproduces the landlord relation with the bureaucracy in the landlord's seat. The libertarian-socialist answer is cooperative housing held by its residents, funded by mutual-aid networks and protected by tenant unions: Catalonia in 1936, the contemporary squatter movements in Berlin and Barcelona, the housing cooperatives that survived the privatisation of post-Soviet cities. The critique that this does not scale is the one the tradition is most actively trying to answer, and currently does so by emphasising federation: many small projects coordinating without consolidating.
Climate is the issue where the tradition and the contemporary mainstream are closest in conclusion and furthest apart in means. Libertarian socialists accept that the crisis is real, anthropogenic, and demands action on the scale of decades. They reject the policy menu that follows from accepting the existing state as the agent. Carbon markets are markets, and inherit the failure modes of markets. National emissions targets enforced through Treasury and ministerial authority concentrate exactly the kind of power Bakunin warned about, and the evidence that states with the most centralized climate authority have produced the deepest emissions cuts is, frankly, mixed. The tradition's preferred path runs through Bookchin's libertarian municipalism: federated city- and bioregion-level decarbonisation projects with real authority, tied together by mutual-aid networks across borders rather than treaty regimes.
Policing is the contemporary debate where libertarian-socialist analysis has had the most direct mainstream uptake, often without attribution. The argument that "abolish the police" means "replace policing with the underlying functions, mediation, mental-health response, mutual-aid security, distributed across the community" is a direct lineage from Kropotkin's Mutual Aid and Bakunin's analysis of the state as the armed defense of property. Most concrete experiments, transformative-justice circles, community accountability processes, the Cooperation Jackson project in Mississippi, sit in this tradition whether their participants name it that way or not. The hardest version of the question, what to do about violent harm without a police force to call, is one the tradition has not produced a confident answer to.
Workplace democracy is the issue libertarian socialists consider most fundamental and the broader left most strangely uninterested in. The claim is straightforward: if democracy is the right principle for political life, it is unclear why eight hours of the average adult's day, the working hours, should be organized on explicitly anti-democratic principles, with hiring, firing, scheduling, and direction of labor decided by an owner or owner-appointed manager. Worker cooperatives, codetermination on the German model, and various forms of workers' self-management are all live answers. The tradition's preferred answer, federated cooperative ownership with no managerial class, has been demonstrated at scale (Mondragón in the Basque country, the Argentine recovered-factory movement) and remains the most concrete proof that the tradition's institutional designs can actually work.
Immigration produces an awkward tension inside the tradition. The principled position is open borders, because national-state authority over who may live where is exactly the kind of arbitrary, coercive, property-protecting power libertarian socialists reject in principle. But the practical politics, especially around the local self-determination libertarian municipalists prize, sit in tension with this: the right of a Rojava commune or a Chiapas community to decide who joins its institutions is a kind of local immigration control. The tradition resolves this in different ways: anarcho-communists tend toward unrestricted movement; libertarian municipalists prefer free movement plus local opt-in to membership in specific assemblies. The honest acknowledgment is that this is an unresolved internal debate, not a settled position.
Criticisms & Blind Spots
Strongest Critique
The libertarian-socialist intellectual contribution, traced through Bakunin's argument with Marx at the 1872 Hague Congress and developed across Kropotkin, Goldman, the Spanish anarchist tradition, the council-communist current, and the post-1968 New Left, has supplied the most rigorous internal challenge socialism has been able to put to itself on the question of whether revolutionary politics without an emancipatory political form will simply reproduce a class society under new management, and the prediction Bakunin made in 1872 about what a "dictatorship of the proletariat" would become is one the twentieth-century record has not let the rest of the socialist family ignore. The standing critique of libertarian socialism comes from inside the broader anti-capitalist family, not from its conservative or liberal opponents. Robin Hahnel makes it most clearly in Of the People, By the People (2012). Libertarian socialism, he argues, is "self-limiting": its commitment to radical autonomy, decentralization, and non-hierarchical organization produces, predictably, institutions that struggle to coordinate at scale, struggle to defend themselves against centralized adversaries, and struggle to translate movement energy into durable political settlement. The Spanish Revolution organized millions of people; it could not coordinate a military front. The New Left organized a generation; it could not produce a comprehensive program. Rojava has organized a region; whether it survives contact with the regional powers around it is unsettled. The critique is not that libertarian socialism is wrong about what a good society looks like. It is that the institutional forms the tradition prefers (federated assemblies, voluntary association, refusal of standing executive authority) may be incompatible with operating at the scale of a modern industrial society against actors that have no such scruples. Hahnel's prescription, that libertarian socialists must learn to work alongside reform movements, accept partial victories, and build institutions that scale, is unpopular inside parts of the tradition because it sounds, to traditionalists, like the social-democratic compromise the tradition was founded to refuse. Chomsky has acknowledged the substance of this critique repeatedly. His phrase "the gap between doctrine and reality" comes from a 2002 interview in which he conceded that libertarian-socialist principles, applied straightforwardly, do not yet produce a workable answer to large-scale coordination problems. The tradition has not done enough to address this honestly, he says. The acknowledgment matters because it comes from inside, from someone who remains identified with the tradition rather than against it. A second internal critique comes from the autonomist Marxist tradition, particularly from John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), though its target is closer to the heart of the dispute. Holloway argues that the libertarian-socialist refusal to engage with state power is itself a form of complicity, since it leaves state institutions intact and available for use by less scrupulous actors. The Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Revolution is the obvious empirical evidence. Anti-state libertarian socialists declined to seize the state in 1917-1918, and the consequence was that a Marxist-Leninist faction did, and used it to suppress them. The critique does not refute the tradition's foundational hypothesis. It argues that the hypothesis is incomplete without an account of what to do about the state in the meantime. The tradition's standing answer to both critiques, that scale-friendly institutions and engagement with state power tend, historically, to reproduce the relations the revolution was supposed to end, is the part of the tradition the contemporary experiments (Zapatistas, Rojava, Barcelona en Comú, the Boric coalition) are actively trying to operationalise. Whether they succeed will determine whether libertarian socialism's late-20th-century revival has been a serious political tradition or a moral protest with insufficient institutional tools.
Blind Spots
Libertarian socialism's most expensive blind spot has been defense. The Spanish CNT in 1936 was the largest concrete experiment the tradition has run, and it lost the Spanish Civil War. Robin Hahnel, writing from inside the tradition in Of the People, By the People (2012), traces this back not to bad luck but to a coordination problem the tradition's institutional commitments make hard to solve. An army needs a degree of centralized command that a federation of self-managing units finds difficult to accept. The CNT's columns fought well at the unit level; they could not coordinate at the front level. The Rojava experiment has answered this better than any prior libertarian-socialist project, with a YPG/YPJ command structure that combined real military hierarchy with assembly-level oversight, but the answer was contested at the time and remains contested in retrospect. The tradition has not yet produced a confident general account of how to defend a non-state federation against an organized state adversary. A second blind spot is large-scale coordination. Here is the hardest version of the question. When a libertarian-socialist society has to decide on a project that affects millions of people (a high-speed rail network across a continent, semiconductor allocation, decarbonising a steel industry) on what timeline and through which institutions does it act? Cornelius Castoriadis, writing from inside the tradition in Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), acknowledged that the existing answers (federated assemblies, recallable delegates, consensus decision-making with fallback to vote) work at the scale of a city and become increasingly strained at the scale of a country. The tradition has produced no canonical account of what to do at continental scale. Contemporary libertarian socialists tend to defer the question by emphasising that most coordination should happen at smaller scales, and that the necessity of continent-scale projects is itself worth interrogating. This is an honest answer but not a complete one. A third blind spot is what Mikhail Bakunin would not have named but his successors have had to: the asymmetry between voluntary cooperation and exit. Federation works when participants can in principle withdraw. But some commitments cannot be exited cleanly. The obligations of childcare, of care for elderly community members, of long-term ecological stewardship, persist past the point at which a participant would prefer to leave. Libertarian-socialist institutional design has been most fluent where voluntary cooperation is easiest (workplaces, neighborhoods, mutual-aid networks) and less developed where commitment must hold past preference. Care work in particular, which feminist libertarian socialists like Selma James and Silvia Federici have made central, has been undertheorised by the male-dominated classical tradition. Finally there is the cultural-image blind spot. Libertarian socialism inherits, from the long association between anarchism and the bombings of the 1880s-1920s, an image problem that is mostly unrelated to what the tradition currently advocates. David Graeber, writing in The Democracy Project (2013), described this directly. The tradition's institutional designs are reasonable, its preferred outcomes are widely shared, and the term "anarchism" still produces an immediate association with chaos that takes whole conversations to dispel. The tradition's contemporary defenders (Chomsky, Bookchin, Graeber, the Rojava advocates) have spent considerable effort on this and the image has shifted, but slowly. Whether to keep the brand, with its historical baggage, or rebrand under a different term (libertarian socialism is, in part, an effort at this) is a contested question inside the tradition.
Internal Tensions
The deepest internal disagreement inside libertarian socialism is the one inherited from the 1872 split. Must the state be abolished first, with capitalism dissolving in its wake? Or is capitalism the deeper problem and the state merely one of its instruments? Bakunin and Alexander Berkman held the first view, arguing that capital cannot survive without the armed force that protects its property claims; remove the state and the relation dissolves. Chomsky has been the most prominent recent holder of the second view, arguing that the state, while never benign, is at least in principle accountable, while corporate power is neither. The practical priority, on his account, should be constraining capital while keeping the state available as a partial check on it. The disagreement matters for strategy. The first view tends toward direct action against state institutions. The second tends toward electoral participation, regulatory campaigns, and union work. Both positions are defensible inside the tradition. They imply very different week-to-week organising. A second tension, related but not identical, runs between revolutionary spontaneity and organized preparation. The classical anarchist position is that revolutionary moments are unpredictable and the role of the libertarian socialist is to be ready to act when one arrives, not to engineer one through patient party-building. The council-communist tradition, represented by Anton Pannekoek and (later, in different form) by Cornelius Castoriadis, has pushed back. Spontaneity without prior organization has tended to lose. 1917, 1936, and 1968 all show movements that had built durable structures over decades outperforming those that arrived to the moment unprepared. The argument has not been settled inside the tradition and continues to shape how active libertarian-socialist organizations divide their time between visible mobilisation and long-horizon institution-building. A third tension is class reductionism versus intersectional analysis. Classical libertarian socialism was almost entirely a worker-centric tradition. The working class was the universal subject, and other oppressions (gender, race, colonial) were assumed to be either downstream of class or destined to dissolve along with it. The new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, building on libertarian-socialist premises but applying them to feminism, anti-racism, gay liberation, and ecology, broke this assumption decisively. Most contemporary libertarian socialists accept the intersectional turn. A minority, often citing Murray Bookchin's later writings, argues that without a clear primary axis (class, in the traditional account), the tradition loses the capacity to identify a strategically central site of struggle, and ends up as a federation of single-issue campaigns rather than a coherent political project. A fourth tension is reform versus revolution. Robin Hahnel has argued, from inside the tradition, that twentieth-century libertarian socialists were "by far the worst underachievers among 20th-century anti-capitalists," largely because their anti-reformism cost them traction in periods when reform was possible. His prescription, that libertarian socialists should work alongside reform movements without abandoning their long-run anti-capitalism, has been accepted by some (the Boric coalition, the municipalist tendency) and rejected by others (the still-active classical anarchist organizations) as a betrayal of what made the tradition distinctive in the first place. Finally there is the defense question, which the Spanish Revolution surfaced and the tradition has not closed. A federation of self-managing communes, organized on libertarian-socialist lines, is vulnerable to organized military attack from a centralized adversary willing to bear the cost. The CNT's military performance against Franco was uneven. Rojava's against ISIS was extraordinary. The underlying question of how a non-state federation defends itself without becoming the thing it opposes remains live, and the contemporary literature engages it more honestly than any prior period of the tradition has.
Reading List
The biological-anthropological case for cooperation as the long-run adaptive strategy. The book you give someone who thinks libertarian socialism is utopian; it makes the case from natural history rather than political theory.
The clearest account of the union-federation strand of the tradition. Written in 1938 as the world was about to extinguish most of its institutional expressions; reads now as both manifesto and historical document.
A novel about a moon-based anarcho-syndicalist society in extended contrast with the capitalist planet it orbits. Le Guin grew up around the libertarian-socialist tradition; the novel is the most honest fictional treatment of what living inside one of these societies might actually be like, including the parts that are hard.
Edited collection of essays and interviews from across Chomsky's career. The most accessible recent statement of the tradition in English. Read this first if you have not read any of the others.
The standard one-volume history of anarchism and libertarian socialism. Long, sympathetic but not credulous, with extended sections on the figures the contemporary tradition has rediscovered.
Bookchin's synthesis of social ecology and libertarian socialism. The intellectual basis for the Rojava experiment and the most theoretically ambitious recent book in the tradition.
Not a libertarian-socialist text per se, but written by one. Zinn's account of US history from the bottom up is what most English-speaking libertarian socialists cut their political teeth on, and reading it explains a lot about what the contemporary American left assumes about its own history.
Related Ideologies
Democratic socialists want public housing produced and managed by the state; you want cooperative housing produced and managed by its residents. The coalition runs through expanding the supply of non-market housing and protecting tenants from eviction in the meantime, while bracketing the question of ultimate ownership form. In US and European cities where housing politics is live, this coalition has produced rent-stabilisation laws and public-housing expansion that the libertarian-socialist wing supports as transitional, the democratic-socialist wing supports as endpoint.
A surprise coalition that nonetheless works on specific issues: opposition to mass surveillance, opposition to expansive police authority, opposition to no-warrant searches and asset forfeiture. The two traditions disagree on almost everything else, but both treat the state's coercive apparatus as something to be constrained rather than expanded, and both can usually be counted on to oppose the next expansion of executive surveillance authority. The coalition is most visible inside opposition to specific legislative expansions of state power, less so in any positive program.
Distributism wants widely distributed ownership of productive property as a matter of natural-law and traditional-society principle; libertarian socialism wants the same thing as a matter of class analysis and anti-hierarchical principle. The coalition is most useful around policy that supports worker-owned cooperatives (Italian-style cooperative law, employee-ownership tax incentives, conversion of closing private firms to worker ownership). Mondragón in the Basque country is the canonical example; both traditions can claim it.
Social liberals want climate action through institutions that already exist; libertarian socialists want it through institutions that should. The coalition is most operational around city- and bioregion-level adaptation projects, urban heat resilience, distributed renewable buildout, public-transit expansion, where the federal-state political menu is too slow and the local political menu has room for both reformist and movement actors. Cities like Barcelona and Portland have hosted this coalition under different labels.
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