Anarchists and Labor Unions: Applying New Social Movmenent Theory to the Characteristics of Contemporary Anarchists

This paper studies the characteristics and union membership of North American anarchists. Traditionally, anarchism has been a working-class based movement that rejects authority and domination. New social movement (NSM) theory suggests that movements have changed in recent decades to focus less on the working class and economic issues, and more upon social and political concerns. A survey by a prominent anarchist website was analyzed to study if the NSM framework assists in characterizing the contemporary anarchist movement in North America. Union membership was positively correlated with four primary explanatory variables: economic ideology, working class, and age. Union membership was negatively correlated with those who do not want work. Then, survey respondent’s union membership was regressed on those explanatory variables. With multivariate logistic regression equation, these variables all remain significant, except for working class, which was no longer significant. North Americans were also significantly less likely to be unions than those not from North America. Given these findings, it is questionable how well anarchists are described by NSM. The association of unions to ideology, class, work, and age suggest that anarchists do participate in economic class and labor-related issues. The paper ends by making suggestions on how to improve upon this research and explore other questions regarding anarchists themselves and the anarchist movement.