Anarchist anti-parliamentary program

The Anarchist anti-parliamentary program in Berlin argues that workers cannot gain freedom through elections, constitutional promises, or a change of government: the state itself protects property and class power. It calls for rejecting parliamentary participation and replacing reformist politics with direct action, especially the withdrawal of labor. The program’s encounter with Franz Biberkopf exposes a tension at its heart: collective resistance depends on workers acting together, while Franz refuses both wage labor and the organization the anarchists advocate.

Political and Economic Premises

The program begins from the claim that working people are subordinated economically, politically, and socially. It identifies property rights and concentrated ownership as forms of domination, and describes the state’s concentration of power as their political counterpart. In this account, production is organized around profit rather than the satisfaction of human needs. Technological progress may increase wealth, but its benefits accrue disproportionately to property owners while broad sections of society remain in misery.

The state, as the program describes it, is not a neutral referee between social groups. It protects the privileges of property-owning classes and preserves monopoly and class division through both deception and force. The program presents the individual under this arrangement as reduced to a tool within a larger mechanism. Its call to abolish political power, rather than capture it, follows from this diagnosis: changing who governs would leave the coercive structure intact.

Rejection of Elections and Parliamentary Reform

The program rejects voting because participation, in its view, binds the voter to the state’s legality. It portrays elections as a recurring promise that conditions will improve if workers make another effort, while the underlying distribution of power remains unchanged. Parliamentary participation thus sustains a cycle: workers cast ballots in expectation of change, but the program argues that parliamentarism prolongs their misery rather than ending it.

Its criticism extends beyond elections to constitutional rights and proposed institutional reforms. Freedoms written into a constitution, the program argues, do not guarantee freedom in practice when police power can override them. Nor does replacing existing judges with a more republican judiciary answer its demand: the program rejects the judiciary as an institution rather than calling for a different personnel or a revised version of the same system. It treats the law’s formal assurances as insufficient against the force that enforces rules on the ground.

The speech also attacks the Socialists and Communists for accepting the state as the source of political change. It accuses parliamentary representatives of substituting office-seeking and institutional participation for effective action on behalf of workers. These are the program’s polemical charges, not a neutral account of every socialist or communist position. Their function in the argument is to distinguish the anarchist rejection of state power from parties that seek influence through the existing political order.

Direct Action and Collective Power

Against electoral politics, the program proposes direct action. Its central practical instrument is the withdrawal of labor: if workers stop work together, the mechanisms that depend on their labor can be brought to a halt. The program’s emphasis is therefore not simply on protest or the circulation of political ideas. It presents collective interruption of production as a means of confronting the economic and political arrangements that ordinary parliamentary procedures leave in place.

This account makes solidarity essential. A general or mass strike requires workers to act in concert; it cannot be reduced to the private refusal of an individual worker. The program rejects national unity and political borders as well, arguing that appeals to a unified nation conceal class domination. It identifies nationalism as a state-serving ideology, not as a route to working-class emancipation. Its alternative is a social order in which people make their own laws, rather than submitting to authority imposed from above.

Franz Biberkopf’s Challenge

Franz Biberkopf first approaches the political meetings with curiosity. Willi gives him pamphlets and explanations, and Franz listens, at first absorbing the arguments and then becoming less engaged. The material touches him, but the encounter does not turn him into a steady participant in the movement. His presence alongside Willi leads instead to an argument about what the program requires and who may claim its language.

When an Anarchist points out that Franz is neither a comrade, a fellow worker, nor an unemployed worker, Franz responds by invoking the program’s own criticism of wage labor and restrictions on movement. He argues that the political materials condemn the very kind of work they now require of him. The Anarchist answers that withdrawal of labor presupposes that a person is working: the demand concerns a strike, and ultimately mass action, not an isolated refusal to take a job.

Franz rejects that distinction. He says he will do no work, disclaims interest in strikes and organized action, and presents himself as self-supporting. The worker in the discussion counters that a person cannot manage alone and that organized struggle requires raising collective awareness of state power and monopoly capitalism. Their disagreement gives the program a concrete test. Franz shares its hostility to what he calls improper work, but he refuses the collective discipline through which the program means to challenge the system. His refusal is not the mass withdrawal of labor the anarchists propose.

Law, Enforcement, and the Program’s Stakes

The narrative places this debate beside ordinary encounters with administrative and police authority. After Franz returns to Berlin, a police order declares him a threat to public safety and morals because of his prison sentence and orders him to leave an extensive expulsion area within fourteen days. The order covers Berlin and surrounding districts; it warns that a return could bring a fine of 100 marks or, if he cannot pay, ten days in custody. The episode gives concrete form to the program’s distinction between written protections and enforcement: law governs where Franz may live, and the order backs that command with punishment.

Instead of leaving the area, Franz places himself under the supervision of an ex-prisoners’ welfare service. He is told that his employment will be investigated and that he must report monthly. This arrangement does not abolish the police order; it places his conduct under continuing oversight. The program’s critique of state power thus has a material counterpart in the regulation of Franz’s movement and work, though the narrative does not present the welfare arrangement as an anarchist initiative or as a direct result of the meetings.

A police raid elsewhere makes the machinery of enforcement visible in another register. At the Rückerdiele pub, officers occupy the entrances, order those inside to come to the station, and transport the detained people in a truck. At police headquarters, officials search and question them, examine their papers, and record identifying and arrest information. These scenes do not establish that the raid is aimed at anarchists; they show, more broadly, the procedural force exercised by police and courts. Read alongside the program’s demands, they sharpen its central dispute: whether freedom can be secured within institutions that command movement and enforce compliance, or whether those institutions must be resisted and ultimately abolished.