Anarchism and direct action

Anarchism and direct action form one of the novel’s sharpest tests of the distance between political doctrine and lived position. A meeting speaker condemns elections, parliamentary politics, and state law as instruments that bind workers to the order they hope to change. Yet when Franz Biberkopf confronts an Anarchist about what resistance requires, the debate turns on a harder question: whether refusing work is itself direct action, or whether action depends on workers acting together. Franz’s answer is self-assertion; the worker’s is solidarity, and the two leave without reconciling them.

The Anarchist critique of the state

At a meeting in Köpenicker Strasse near Michaelkirchstrasse, a long, narrow hall holds workers, young men, women, and pamphlet sellers. A speaker on the platform ridicules the Reichstag as a place of empty talk and rejects the claim that elections can deliver meaningful change. In his account, repeated campaigns promise improvement but leave working people in the same position. Voting does not loosen their dependence; it persuades them to treat participation in the system as a substitute for challenging it.

The speaker’s argument makes legality itself a form of coercion. Constitutional freedoms, he says, exist on paper, while police power operates through rules and the truncheon. The law does not stand outside class conflict as a neutral protector: it is part of the state’s practical authority over those who must obey it. This view leads beyond reform. The speech rejects the prospect of replacing existing judges with a new judiciary and instead calls for the state’s apparatus to be toppled through direct action.

That action is described as withdrawal of labor. If workers stop, the wheels of production halt; a general strike offers a means of confronting power outside elections and parliamentary procedure. The speech presents this not as a bid to capture political office but as an effort to abolish political power and the divisions protected by the state. It also rejects nationalism, which the speaker treats as a form of allegiance that conceals the interests of property owners. The doctrine thus joins anti-parliamentarianism to an attack on state authority, ownership, and the organization of production for profit.

Willi’s introduction and Franz’s response

Willi brings Franz through the meeting and supplies a running explanation of what is being said. Franz buys pamphlets and listens with curiosity; the ideas initially catch his attention, then cease to hold it, but he stays with Willi. This is not a conversion scene. The narrative records a movement from interest to detachment before the argument shifts from public doctrine to Franz’s own circumstances.

After the meeting, Willi and Franz remain in a pub where a grey-haired workman, who is an Anarchist and a precision engineer, challenges them. The worker initially takes Willi for a fellow employee and assumes that he is trying to recruit him for canvassing. Willi disclaims factory work and mocks the gap between radical writing and the routine of earning wages. He turns the worker’s own criticism of industrial labor back on him: workers may condemn the private fortunes built through their work, yet continue to operate the machinery that produces them.

When the worker asks what kind of work Franz does, Franz first resists answering, saying that politics does not interest him. He then declares that he is not a comrade, does no work, and lets other people work for him. The worker presses him to explain his presence among people whose argument depends on working-class organization. Franz points to his missing arm as the price he paid for working and refuses the idea of returning to a proper job. The exchange makes his bodily condition and economic position central to the political dispute without turning them into a simple claim of shared class identity.

Improper work, direct action, and solidarity

Franz seizes on the worker’s distinction between proper and improper work. If wage labor is slavery, he argues, then his own refusal of it is not a failure to understand the critique but its consequence. He accuses the Anarchist of speaking about direct action while distributing pamphlets and making speeches, and argues that workers who continue to produce goods for capitalists strengthen the power they oppose. His position is not the organized withdrawal of labor proposed at the meeting: Franz refuses work altogether and insists that he will provide for himself.

The worker identifies the contradiction. A strike requires people who work to stop working, and collective action cannot be replaced by an individual’s refusal. He tells Franz that people cannot manage alone and that organized struggle depends on raising shared awareness of state power and monopoly capitalism. The dispute therefore turns on different meanings of independence. For Franz, self-sufficiency means not making an employer stronger and not submitting to a job; for the worker, emancipation requires people to act together rather than retreat into private survival.

Franz answers the worker’s question about his livelihood by calling himself a pimp. The admission places him outside the worker’s categories: he is neither a comrade nor a fellow worker, and he does not describe himself as unemployed. The Anarchist therefore regards him as an outsider to the movement, while Franz treats that exclusion as an occasion to challenge the movement’s own claims. Before leaving, he pays for the drinks and calls the payment direct action. The gesture is deliberately small beside the general strike discussed at the meeting, but it gives the argument a pointed comic ending: Franz applies the political term to an act of personal settlement, not collective resistance. The worker dismisses him and Willi as people who should not return to the meetings.

Law in lived experience and narrative contrast

The novel gives the argument about legality a concrete setting in Franz’s earlier dealings with the authorities. After his release, an official expulsion order identifies his criminal conviction as grounds for considering him a danger to public safety and morals. It requires him to leave a broad area around Berlin within fourteen days and threatens a fine of 100 marks, or ten days in custody if he cannot pay, if he returns. The order also warns that residence in nearby places, including Potsdam and Wannsee, would lead to further expulsion. Its bureaucratic wording turns freedom of movement into a conditional privilege administered by police power.

Franz responds to this threat by placing himself under the supervision of an ex-prisoners’ welfare centre at 1 Grünerstrasse. The centre undertakes to investigate whether he is working and requires him to report each month. This arrangement differs from the anarchist speaker’s account of law as naked force, but it also shows how official authority and welfare supervision reach into the practical business of living. Franz’s later argument against proper work occurs against that earlier experience of being classified, monitored, and directed by institutions.

Elsewhere, a police raid at the Rückerdiele pub shows another face of legal administration: people are taken to police headquarters, questioned, checked against papers, and processed through forms and searches. That episode is not presented as a consequence of the anarchist meeting. Its juxtaposition with the political debate instead gives the novel’s critique of legality material scale: state power appears not only in speeches about constitutions and class, but in orders, police operations, and routine procedures.

The unresolved political question

The encounter refuses an easy resolution. The meeting’s program identifies collective action as the way to stop production and oppose state and property power; Franz exposes how easily political language can coexist with ordinary work and how little a pamphlet alone changes. But his own alternative is individual refusal, not an organized movement capable of acting in concert. The worker is right to see the absence of solidarity, while Franz is right to press the gap between a theory of liberation and the conditions imposed on an injured, criminalized man.

By letting the argument move from the hall to a table in the pub, the narrative tests doctrine against an actual social encounter. The Anarchist’s account of direct action is measured not only by its denunciation of parliament and law, but by whether it can recognize someone who has been excluded from wage labor and does not fit its image of the worker. Franz, in turn, reveals the limit of a politics reduced to personal self-sufficiency. The disagreement leaves both claims exposed: political speech risks becoming another performance, but refusal without solidarity cannot achieve the collective transformation the speech demands.