anarcho-syndicalism and the ikea flatpack

let us begin with the allen key, that small hexagonal piece of metal that arrives in a plastic bag and departs into the unknown recesses of your carpet within minutes of opening the box. it is an unremarkable object, easily lost, easily forgotten, and yet it stands as the sceptre of the modern domestic subject, the instrument by which we are granted the peculiar dignity of constructing our own environment.^*1 anarcho syndicalism has long concerned itself with the question of prefiguration, the awkward doctrine that the means must resemble the ends, that a revolution cannot simply burn everything down and then present the population with a manual for a society no one has ever experienced. but prefiguration has a problem, a very flatpack problem, which is that it assumes people can follow diagrams and that they will not, at the decisive moment of historical transformation, drop a vital component into the carpet and abandon the whole enterprise for the comfort of takeaway and silence.

consider the scene as it unfolds in a thousand living rooms every weekend. you have purchased a billy bookcase, that most democratic of objects, cheap enough for a student and sturdy enough for a pensioner, a monument to the swedish conviction that good design and reasonable cost can coexist in a marriage of particleboard and optimism. every five seconds, somewhere in the world, a billy bookcase is sold. you have carried its long cardboard coffin home on the bus, sweating under the gaze of fellow passengers who recognise the signs of impending domestic disaster, who have walked this path themselves and carry the scars to prove it. you open the box with the solemnity of an archaeologist opening a tomb. inside lies the promise of order, of books arranged by height and colour, of a life made tidy and legible. there are planks of particleboard whose veneer is thin as a politician's apology. there are dowels and screws and that infernal key. there is the instruction manual, a mute testament to the belief that pictures can substitute for language.

the anarcho syndicalist looks upon this arrangement and sees a parable. the flatpack is capitalism's clever answer to the question of worker control. it does away with the worker altogether, or rather it turns the consumer into the final worker, the one who performs the last act of production without the inconvenience of demanding a wage or joining a union. you are the proletarian of the living room, the final link in a chain that stretches from the forests of poland to the warehouses of the netherlands to your own uncertain hands, and you are unpaid, unorganised, abandoned to your fate with nothing but a set of pictures and a dwindling supply of patience. the prefigurative promise of the flatpack is the promise of autonomy, the seductive whisper that you do not need a carpenter or a craftsman or a guild, that you need only the key and the diagram and the fortitude of a saint, which you possess in quantities notably insufficient for the task. this is what scholars call presumption, the shifting of labour from paid employees onto the end user.

but here we encounter the deeper joke, the one that unfolds at your expense as you kneel on the floor with a screwdriver and a growing sense of futility. the assembly of the billy bookcase is a ritual of self deception so elaborate that it deserves study. you tell yourself that you are empowered, that you are a maker, that you have snatched from the impersonal machinery of global production a small but meaningful piece of control. this is the drug that keeps the whole system running.^*2 psychologists have identified this as the ikea effect, a measurable cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they have partially created. ingvar kamprad understood something fundamental about human nature: that we would rather be tricked into labour than admit we are labourers, that we would rather believe ourselves sovereign artisans than acknowledge our place as the final exploited link in a chain of extraction and distribution. he gave us the tools, the pictures, the illusion of agency, and we fell for it with the enthusiasm of ducks waddling toward bread.

the history of the billy bookcase itself offers a useful correction to any romanticism about the flatpack. it was dreamt up in 1978 by an ikea designer called gillis lundgren, who sketched it on the back of a napkin, worried that he would forget it. today there are over sixty million billy bookcases in the world, nearly one for every hundred people. the gyllensvaans mobler factory in the swedish village of kattilstorp produces one every three seconds, with two hundred and forty employees tending to machines imported from germany and japan that run twenty four hours a day. six hundred tons of particle board arrive daily by truck, and the same quantity of finished bookcases departs. the workers at gyllensvaans never touch a bookshelf; their job is to maintain the machinery that cuts, drills, foils, and packages the components. this is not a scene of artisanal craftsmanship but of advanced automation, and it is a far cry from any syndicalist vision of workers controlling the means of production. the machines control the workers, or rather the machines have rendered the workers almost superfluous, reduced to tending a system that requires only their vigilance and not their skill.

prefiguration demands that we practice the future in the present, that we build the structures of solidarity and mutual aid here and now, within the cracks of the existing order. the flatpack, by this measure, is a prefiguration of our isolation, a material symbol of the atomised individual, the neoliberal person who imagines themselves sovereign while fumbling with a cam lock and a cross dowel and a growing suspicion that the universe does not care. the manual is the law, and the law is written in pictures, and the pictures are ambiguous enough to permit several interpretations, none of which result in a stable bookcase. this is the political condition of our time. we are offered the ceremony of participation, the chance to choose the colour of the knobs, while the structure itself remains firmly beyond our reach. the syndicalist dreams of seizing the factory. the consumer is content to grasp the allen key, to hold it with the desperate grip of a drowning person clutching a piece of driftwood.

the swedish context adds another layer of complication. sweden has a rich history of anarcho syndicalism, embodied in the central organisation of swedish workers, the sac, founded in 1910 in the aftermath of the defeat of the great general strike of 1909. at its peak in the 1920s, the sac had over thirty thousand members, largely drawn from the construction, timber, and metalworking industries. the sac was sceptical of bolshevism, considering it centralist and authoritarian, and refused to affiliate with the red international of labor unions. but the sac also underwent a significant transformation in the post war period, moving away from the pure revolutionary doctrine and toward a reformist strategy of gradually democratising the economy from within the existing state structures. by the 1950s, the sac had renounced what its own newspaper called the magic wand of revolution. today the sac has fewer than four thousand members. it is a ghost of its former self, a reminder that even the most militant movements can be absorbed into the welfare state and rendered harmless.

this history casts the flatpack in a different light. ikea's own corporate structure is a peculiar hybrid that might, on a superficial reading, resemble something syndicalists could admire. the ingka group, which operates about ninety percent of ikea stores globally, is owned by a dutch foundation, the stichting ingka foundation, which has no shareholders or beneficial owners. profits can be used in only two ways: reinvested in the business or donated to the ikea foundation. this structure was designed by ingvar kamprad to secure the long term independence of the company. it is, in its way, a rejection of the short term profit maximisation that characterises much of global capitalism. but for the syndicalist, this is not liberation but a different form of servitude, one that replaces the tyranny of shareholders with the tyranny of a foundation whose purposes are set by a dead swedish man.^*3

and yet the flatpack retains a stubborn potential for subversion. consider the ikea hacker, that obsessive and inventive figure of the internet, who takes the billy and the kallax and the lack and transforms them into things the designers never imagined. the hacker is a syndicalist of the living room, a saboteur of the product, a worker who has refused the finality of the manual and asserted their own creativity. the hacker does not ask permission. the hacker does not submit to the authority of the diagram. the hacker seizes the flatpack and bends it to their will, making a coffee table from a bookcase, a bed from a shelving unit, a small city from a set of drawers. this is direct action in its most playful form. this is prefiguration in the truest sense, the practice of a different relationship to making and using. the hacker knows that the flatpack is not an object but a vocabulary, a set of parts that can be rearranged into new sentences, new meanings, new possibilities.

but we must not be naive about this. the same company that enables the hacker through its open approach to modification is also the company that has been implicated in child labour scandals, environmental destruction, and the relentless promotion of a throwaway culture. in 1994, a swedish documentary revealed that child labour was common in the rug industry in pakistan, where ikea had production, with many children working as debt slaves alongside their families. ikea terminated contracts with pakistani suppliers and added clauses prohibiting child labour, but a year later german television showed children working at an indian rug supplier that had signed the new agreement. the underlying structure remained: a global supply chain in which the final link is the consumer, assembling the product in their living room while the real production happens in factories far away, where labour standards are difficult to enforce.

the tragedy of the flatpack is that it is a collective project disguised as an individual ordeal. every billy bookcase in the world is the same bookcase, made by the same supply chain, assembled by the same frustrated hands in the same rented rooms. we are united in our struggle with the cam lock. we are brothers and sisters in the fellowship of the missing screw, the stripped thread, the extra dowel that makes no sense. we have all, at some point, taken a deep breath and said the words, i think we put the back panel on too early, and now we have to start again. this is solidarity of a kind, a solidarity born of shared suffering rather than shared struggle. the syndicalist asks the obvious question: why not organise them? why not a union of the allen key, a syndicate of the particleboard, a collective agreement for the assembling masses? the answer is that the labour is scattered, hidden in the privacy of the home. the flatpack is the purest expression of the gig economy, a piecework arrangement where the worker pays for the chance to work, supplies their own tools, and receives nothing for their effort.

the prefigurative promise of the syndicalist project is the promise of a society that does not need bosses, that organises itself from below, that trusts workers to manage their own affairs. the flatpack, as it exists, is the opposite of this promise: a society that has got rid of bosses only to replace them with manuals. the worker is the final boss, and the boss is a folded piece of paper with pictures on it. this is what the syndicalist calls false consciousness, the belief that you are free because you have been given a small plastic bag of screws.^*4

and yet there is hope in the flatpack, a hope the syndicalist cannot entirely suppress. the flatpack is modular, standardised, made of parts that fit together according to a logic that is clear and repeatable. this is the language of the workshop, the grammar of the cooperative, the syntax of mutual aid. if we can assemble a billy, we can assemble anything. if we can read a diagram, we can make our own. if we can organise a shelf, we can organise a factory. the skills are transferable, the habits of hand and eye, the patience, the frustration, the eventual triumph of a level bookcase and a restored sense of competence. the flatpack teaches us that we are capable of making things, that we are not just consumers but creators, however modest.

so let us laugh at the flatpack, let us laugh until we cannot breathe. let us laugh at ourselves, bent over the particleboard with a screwdriver and a growing sense of cosmic absurdity. let us laugh at the manual, that oracle of false clarity. let us laugh at the allen key, that tiny tyrant, that hexagonal despot whose disappearance causes a domestic crisis of the first order. but let us also learn. the flatpack is a prefiguration of a world without masters, a world where we must rely on our own hands and our own wits, a world of small victories and larger frustrations. the task is to take this inheritance and make something new, to hack the flatpack and the factory and the whole system. the allen key is not a weapon, and that is its significance. it is a tool, a humble and unglamorous tool, and the revolution, when it comes, will not be the work of heroes or prophets. it will be the work of tired people on a saturday afternoon, with cold coffee and a bruised thumb, assembling the future one screw at a time, one dowel at a time, one wobbly shelf at a time, until the whole improbable structure stands, crooked perhaps but standing, a monument to the stubborn refusal to submit to the diagram.