Introduction to the Second Edition

The anarchist movement grows in times of popular self-activity, feeds it and feeds off it, and declines when that self-activity declines... The anarchists in England have paid for the gap between their day-to-day activities and their utopian aspirations. This gap consists basically of a lack of strategy, a lack of ability to assess the general situation and initiate a general project which is consistent with the anarchists utopia, and which is not only consistent with anarchist tactics but inspires them.

John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse:

The Lost History of the British Anarchists (Paladin 1978)

Anarchism as a political and social ideology has two separate origins. It can be seen as an ultimate derivative of liberalism or as a final end for socialism. In either case, the problems that face the anarchist propagandist are the same. The ideas he is putting forward are so much at variance with ordinary political assumptions, and the solutions he offers are so remote, there is such a gap between what is, and what, according to the anarchist, might be, that his audience cannot take him seriously.

One elementary principle of attempting to teach anyone anything is that you attempt to build on the common foundation of common experience and common knowledge. That is the intention of the present volume.

This book was commissioned by the publishers Allen and Unwin and originally appeared from them in 1973, and was subsequently published in America and, in translation, in Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. It was not intended for people who had spent a life-time pondering the problems of anarchism, but for those who either had no idea of what the word implied, or who knew exactly what it implied, and had rejected it, considering that it had no relevance for the modern world.

My original preference as a title was the more cumbersome but more accurate “Anarchism as a theory of organisation”, because as I urge in my preface, that is what the book is about. It is not about strategies for revolution and it is not involved with speculation on the way an anarchist society would function. It is about the ways in which people organise themselves in any kind of human society, whether we care to categorise those societies as primitive, traditional, capitalist or communist.

In this sense the book is simply an extended, updating footnote to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. Since it was written I have edited for a modern readership two other works of his, and I am bound to say that the experience has enhanced my agreement with George Orwell’s conclusion that Peter Kropotkin was “one of the most persuasive of anarchist writers” because of his “inventive and pragmatic outlook”.

In particular, as an amplification of some of the ideas expressed in the present volume, I would like readers to be aware of the edition I prepared of his Fields, Factories and Workshops (London: 1974, reprinted with additional material by Freedom Press, 1985) New York: Harper & Widstrand 1980). Anyone who wants to understand the real nature of the crisis of the British economy in the nineteen-eighties would gain more enlightenment from Kropotkin’s analysis from the eighteen- nineties than from the current spokesmen of any of the political parties.

But if this book is just a footnote to Kropotkin, and if it is open to the same criticism as his book (that it is a selective gathering of anecdotal evidence to support the points that the author wants to make) it does attempt to look at a variety of aspects of daily life in the light of traditional anarchist contentions about the nature of authority and the propensity for self-organisation.

Many years of attempting to be an anarchist propagandist have convinced me that we win over our fellow citizen to anarchist ideas, precisely through drawing upon the common experience of the informal, transient, self-organising networks of relationships that in fact make the human community possible, rather than through the rejection of existing society as a whole in favour of some future society where some different kind of humanity will live in perfect harmony.

Since this edition is a reproduction of the original text, my purpose here is to add a few comments and further references, both to update it and to take note of critical comments.

Anarchy and the State

This is a restatement of the classical anarchist criticism of government and the state, emphasising the historical division between anarchism and Marxism. In 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, Proudhon gave vent to an utterance of marvellous invective, which I had meant to include in this chapter:

“To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonised, listed and checked-off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about, by creatures without knowledge and without virtues. To be ruled is, at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. It is, on the pretext of public utility and in the name of the common good, to be put under contribution, pressured, mystified, robbed; then, at the least resistance and at the first hint of complaint, repressed, fined, vilified, vexed, hunted, exasperated, knocked-down, disarmed, garroted, imprisoned, shot, grape-shot, judged, condemned, deported, sacrificed, sold, tricked; and to finish off with, hoaxed, calumniated, dishonoured. Such is government! And to think that there are democrats among us who claim there’s some good in government!”

That must have seemed a ludicrous over-statement in 19th-century France. But wouldn’t it be perfectly comprehensible to any citizen who steps out of line in any of the totalitarian regimes of the Right or Left that today govern the greater part of the world? Among the attributes of government which Proudhon did not include in his list of horrors, is systematic torture, a unique prerogative of governments in the 20th century.

When this chapter was previously published in a symposium on Participatory Democracy the editors made comments which I found both gratifying and suggestive of ways in which its thesis could be extended. They wrote:

“The anarchist critique of the state, which has often seemed simplistic, is here presented in one of its most sophisticated forms. Here the state is conceived of as the formalisation — and rigidification — of the unused power that the social order has abdicated. In American society it takes the form of a coalition of political, military, and industrial elites, preempting space that is simply not occupied by the rest of society.

“Ward believes that the state represents a kind of relationship between people which becomes formalised into a set of vested interests that operates contrary to the interests of the people — even to the point where it evaluates its means in terms of megadeaths. One could take the number of people employed directly by the state as a function of total populations, the amount of state spending as a function of total spending (in socialist states this would require careful functional definition of what constituted the domain of the state as opposed to the social order) and in general compare the resource use of the two areas. One could then analyse the social order in terms of degree of participation, key decisions involving utilisation of social resources and who makes them. Studies of the correlations between state power and social participation in various countries would verify Ward’s thesis: those countries that are top-heavy with state power are the countries in which social participation is weak. A more devastating critique of statism could probably not be imagined.”

The Theory of Spontaneous Order

This chapter drew largely on popular experience of revolutionary situations, actual or potential, before a New Order had filled the gap occupied by the old order. In addition to the works cited on p. 146, several more studies of the Spanish revolution of 1936 have become available since, notably the English translation of Gaston Leval’s Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (Freedom Press 1975).

To the experience of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 must be added that of Poland in 1980. However the story ends, the achievements of Solidarity in forcing concessions, without loss of life, on a ruling bureaucracy which had not hesitated a decade earlier to order its forces to shoot down striking workers, is a remarkable triumph of working-class self organization.

The Dissolution of Leadership

Harmony Through Complexity

Topless Federations

These three chapters, using non-anarchist sources, try to set out three key principles of an anarchist theory of organisation: the concept of leaderless groups, the notion that a healthy society needs diversity rather than unity, and the idea of federalist organisations without a central authority. A number of more recent books reinforce the evidence for these chapters. Proudhon’s Du Principe Federatif has at last been published in English. (Translated by Richard Vernon, University of Toronto Press 1979) The inferences drawn from the history of Swiss federalism are enhanced by Jonathan Steinberg’s Why Switzerland? (Cambridge University Press 1976), and the anthropological material on stateless societies is added to in part five of Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale (Secker & Warburg 1980).

Who Is to Plan?

We House, You Are Housed, They Are Homeless

The arguments of these two chapters are set out at much greater length in my books Tenants Take Over (Architectural Press 1974) and Talking Houses (Freedom Press 1990) as well as in John Turner’s Housing by People (Marion Boyars 1976).

Open and Closed Families

One reviewer criticised this chapter for its claim that the revolution in sexual behaviour in our own day is an essentially anarchist revolution, because in his view it was simply a result of a chemico-technical breakthrough, the contraceptive pill. My own Dutch translator felt that it was marred by an absence of appreciation of the feminist point of view. I don’t think so myself, but I do think that this chapter just skates over the surface of the dilemmas of personal freedom and parental responsibility. As Sheila Rowbotham wrote recently, “A campaign for child care which demands the liberation of women and the liberation of children not only reveals the immediate tensions between the two; it also requires a society based on cooperation and free association.”

Schools No Longer

This chapter needs no updating, but is extended to some degree by a lecture of mine called “Towards a Poor School”, published in Talking Schools, (Freedom Press, 1995) as well as by Chapter 16 of my book The Child in the City. Of the various occupations in which I worked for forty years, teaching is the only one which I have a government licence to perform. I am the author of several school books, and the former director of a Schools Council project. I am even a former branch secretary of one of the teaching unions. Yet on every significant issue I have found myself totally opposed to the views of the teaching profession. It sought, and won, the raising of the minimum age limit for compulsory schooling. I favoured its abolition. It wants to eliminate the “private sector” in education, while I see it as the one guarantee that genuine radical experiment can happen. It opposes the abandonment of the legal right to hit children.

I am well aware that the organised opinion of the profession is not the same as that of individual teachers. I revere education. I just can’t stomach the dreadful pretensions of the education industry, especially when compared with the results. And I know that my misgivings about education are paralleled by a consideration of any other aspect of the contemporary West-European corporate state, like, for example, the health service or the public provision of housing.

None of my own writings, alas, can be said to propound an anarchist theory of education, but they do raise some of the ironies and paradoxes of attempts to achieve economic equality or social change through the manipulation of the education system. A brave effort to draw together the various streams of anarchist ideas on education is made in Joel H. Spring’s A Primer of Libertarian Education (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975).

Play as an Anarchist Parable

Play is a parable of anarchy, since it is an area of human activity which is self-chosen and self-directed, but this very fact leads to a comparison with work.

Work is Leisure is Hated Enjoyed Long Brief For someone else For yourself Essential for livelihood Inessential for livelihood Concentrated At your own pace For fixed hours In your own time

I quote this polarisation from my school book on Work (Penguin Education 1972), because any discussion of play and of leisure (Britain’s fastest-growing industry’) leads to a consideration of what is wrong with people’s working lives.

A Self-Employed Society

This is the chapter which is most in need of bringing up to date, but which has an enormously relevant title. Readers do need reminding that for several decades, until the 1960s, the anarchists (apart from a few faithful stalwarts of the producer co-operative movement) were virtually the only people publishing propaganda for worker self-management in industry. Since this book was first published there have been a variety of new experiences and new ventures, and an absolute mountain of new literature.

In left-wing political circles in Britain, for sixty years, the demand for workers’ self-management was regarded as a marginal and diversionary issue compared with the demand for nationalisation, the universal cure-all. The atmosphere changed only in the 1970s, when, as an alternative to quiet extinction, workers in a number of enterprises threatened by closure, sought, through protracted “sit-ins” to demand that they should be helped to keep the plant open under workers’ control. Readers will remember the particular local epics at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders at Govan, at the former Fisher-Bendix factory outside Liverpool, at the Scottish Daily Express, at Fakenham Enterprises in Norfolk and at the Meriden motorcycle plant at Coventry.

When Anthony Wedgwood Benn persuaded his fellow members of the Labour government to back these aspirations with public money (a policy which would have been followed automatically when ordinary capitalist industry was concerned), it represented a complete turnaround in his interpretation of socialism as applied to industry. For it was Mr Benn who, in the 1964 Labour government, had been the mastermind, through his Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, of the takeover of half the motor industry by Leylands (a formerly successful bus and lorry firm from Lancashire) and most of the electrical industry by GEC, in the hope of enabling British industry to complete on equal terms for the continental market with the European giants.

These were vain hopes, and one of the glumly hilarious spectacles of the 1980s has been to see a Conservative government, committed to laissez-faire liberalism, continually bailing out British Leyland from tax revenue. The Benn-sponsored co-ops have mostly collapsed, or have had to rely so completely on capitalist investment that their co-operative structure has been submerged. It was only because these firms were dying that the workers’ aspirations were given an airing, and there are even people with a conspiratorial view of history who see the whole episode as having been invented to discredit the co-operative ideal.

But as unemployment continually increases in Britain, people who have lost confidence in the usual political panaceas, have shown an increasing interest in co-operative ventures. The British discovered the Mondragon co-operatives in the Basque country, with pilgrimages of trade union officers and local councillors going to Spain to discover the secret of Mondragon’s success. The significant recent books are Worker-Owners: The Mondragon Achievemnt (Anglo-German Foundation 1977), Robert Oakeshott’s The Case for Workers’ Co-ops (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978), Workers’ Co-operatives: A Handbook (Aberdeen People’s Press 1980) and Jenny Thomley: Workers’ Co-operatives: Jobs and Dreams (Heinemann 1981).

The majority of recent co-operative ventures cannot be regarded as success stories: they have failed. Nor are the apparent pre-conditions for success particularly acceptable to anarchists. Robert Oakeshott, for example, concludes that there are at least four such conditions: “first, the main thrust to get the enterprises off the ground must come from the potential workforce itself; second, the commitment of the workforce needs to be further secured by the requirement of a meaningful capital stake; third, the prospective enterprise must be equipped with a manager or a management team which is at least not inferior to that which a conventional enterprise would enjoy; fourth, these enterprises must work together in materially supportive groupings, for in isolation they are hopelessly vulnerable.”

The Breakdown of Welfare

This chapter does have the merit of raising issues which are unfashionable both among the defenders of the contemporary British welfare state and among its critics. Since it was written we have moved into the era of cuts in welfare expenditure, imposed by both Labour and Conservative governments. It is not at all easy to take part in the arguments surrounding the cuts from an anarchist point of view. On the one hand we have the political left which regards the provision of welfare, subsidised housing or subsidised transport as a “social wage” which mitigates the exploitation which it associates with the capitalist system. On the other hand is the political right which claims that the people who derive most from the public services are people who could perfectly well afford to meet their true cost. (And in fact it is perfectly true that the poor derive the least from welfare provision). The whole argument is complicated by the fact that we have now entered the period of mass unemployment.

Welfare is administered by a top-heavy governmental machine which ensures that when economies in public expenditure are imposed by its political masters, they are made by reducing the service to the public, not by reducing the cost of administration. Thus, as Leslie Chapman remarked in his book Your Disobedient Servant, in this way “the wicked injustice of the cuts, the desirability of replacing them as quickly as possible, the unwisdom of those who imposed them and the long suffering patience of those who received them were all demonstrated in one convenient package.” This was subsequently demonstrated during both Labour and Conservative governments. Writing in 1977, A. H. Halsey observed that “we live today under sentence of death by a thousand cuts, that is, of all things except the body of bureaucracy”. And Peter Townsend noted two years later commenting on “Social Policy in Conditions of Scarcity” that “services to consumers or clients were much more vulnerable than staff establishments.”

This was nowhere better demonstrated than in the evolution of the National Health Service. In the ten years before its reorganisation, health service staff generally increased by 65 per cent. However, during that period medical and nursing staff increased by only 21 per cent and domestic staff by 2 per cent. The rest was administration. The government hired a firm of consultants, McKinsey’s, to advise on reorganisation. The members of McKinsey’s staff who produced the new structure are now convinced that they gave the wrong advice. Similarly the former chief architect to the DHSS is now convinced that the advice he gave for ten years on hospital design was in fact misguided.

We have failed to come to terms with the fact that our publicly-provided services, just like our capitalist industries, also propped up by taxation, are dearly bought. This was less apparent in the past when public services were few and cheap. Old people who recall the marvellous service they used to get from the post office or the railways, never mention that these used to be low wage industries which, in return for relative security, were run with a military-style discipline, to which not even the army, let alone you or I, would submit today.

Any public service nowadays has to pay the going rate, and there is every reason why this should be so. The question at issue is whether government provision is the best way of meeting social needs. We are always offering superior advice to those third world countries where “aid” is dissipated in the cost of administering it, but we are in just the same situation ourselves. “Added to the traditional burdens of the poor,” remark the authors of The Wincroft Youth Project, “there is now the weight of a bureaucracy that, ironically, is employed to serve them.”

How Deviant Dare You Get?

This chapter deals, however inadequately, with the objection most people raise to anarchist ideas: the anarchist rejection of the law, the legal system and the agencies of law-enforcement. Since this book was first published there have been three new contributions to this debate. One, which, sadly, fails to live up to the promise of its title is Larry Tifft and Dennis Sullivan: The Struggle to be Human: Crime, Criminology and Anarchism (Cienfuegos Press 1980). Another is Alan Ritter’s Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge University Press 1980) whose author concludes on this issue that “Even under anarchy there remains some danger of misconduct, which authority sanctioned by rebuke prevents. Though anarchists do not call this rebuke punishment, it is easy to show that they should.” The third, and most suggestive is the chapter on “A Policy for Crime Control” in Stuart Henry’s The Hidden Economy (Martin Robertson 1978). Henry argues for what he calls normative control of crime, by which he means “group or community control”. He remarks that, “It may be too early to predict, but it would seem that the administration of criminal justice for some types of offence may be about to complete a full circle. Beginning with community control in an underdeveloped society, we have progressed through various stages of formal, professional, bureaucratic justice as industrialisation has gathered momentum. However, recent years have witnessed a new wave of dissatisfaction with centralised, bureaucratic structures through which most aspects of our life are managed. In areas as diverse as government, industry, health and welfare, the emerging trend is toward devolution, decentralisation, democratisation and popular participation. A part of this trend is the de-centralisation of criminal justice to a form of community control which was once commonplace... Many commentators are rapidly reaching the conclusion that only people involved in and aware of the community can act as effective forces in crime prevention and that simply increasing police and court capacity will neither solve the problems presently plaguing criminal justice systems, nor equip these systems to cope with changing trends in crime. It is felt that the only way out of the present situation is for criminal justice and the community to be brought closer together, so that those who judge and those who are judged are part of the same society... I believe that only with this degree of involvement and understanding can we ever hope to liberate ourselves from the hypocrisy of our attitude to “crime”, and only then will we be capable of controlling it.”

Anarchy and a Plausible Future

The muted and tentative conclusions of this chapter still seem to me to be valid. If I were writing it today I would certainly have had more to say about the collapse of employment. When this book was written Britain had 800,000 workers registering as unemployed. This was thought at the time to be a scandalous and totally unacceptable figure. Eight years later the figure has risen to 3 million (October 1981). Belatedly we are groping after alternative forms of work to employment. Nobody really believes that manufacturing industry is going to recover lost markets. Nobody really believes that robots or microprocessors are going to create more than a small proportion of the jobs they displace. Finally we have even lost faith in the idea that the service economy is going to expand to fill the jobs lost in the production economy. Jonathan Gershuny shows in his book After Industrial Society (Macmillan 1979) that service industries themselves are already declining and that what is more likely to emerge is a self-service economy.

It is the inexorable whittling away of employment that is leading to speculation about the potential of other ways of organising work, a theme of several chapters in this book. The pre-industrial economy was a domestic economy, (Elliot Jacques reminds us that the word “employment” has only been used in its present sense since the 1840s), and perhaps a domestic economy of individual or collective self-employment is the pattern for the future of work. Hence the growing interest in what is variously termed the irregular economy, the informal economy, or the black economy. Gershuny and Ray Pahl invite us to consider a future in which more and more people move out of “employment” into working for themselves. “Is it sapping the moral fibre of the nation or is it strengthening kin links and neighbourly relations more than armies of social workers and priests have ever been able to do? What, in a phrase, will it be like to live in a world dominated more and more by household and hidden economies and less by the formal economy?”

One of the possibilities they see is of a dual labour market: a high-pay, high technology, aristocracy of labour and a low-wage, low-skill sector, and beyond both the mafiosi of big bosses and little crooks. Another is of a police state dominated by a vast bureaucracy of law enforcement, where “people would feel much like those caught in the “socialism” of Poland or Czechoslovakia.”

Their third, and more hopeful, alternative depends on “a deeper understanding of the socially desirable aspects of the informal economy and by sympathetic encouragement of them.” But who is going to give sympathetic encouragement to the dismantling of industrialism, one of the bulwarks of social control? Not the captains of industry. Not the manipulators of the machinery of government.

Suppose our future in fact lies, not with a handful of technocrats pushing buttons to support the rest of us, but with a multitude of small activities, whether by individuals or groups, doing their own thing? Suppose the only plausible economic recovery consists in people picking themselves up off the industrial scrapheap, or rejecting their slot in the micro-technology system, and making their own niche in the world of ordinary needs and their satisfaction. Wouldn’t that be something to do with anarchism?

C. W.

Preface

“Nothing to declare?” “Nothing.” Very well. Then political questions. He asks: “Are you an anarchist?” I answer. “... First, what do we understand under ‘Anarchism’? Anarchism practical, metaphysical, theoretical, mystical, abstractional, individual, social? When I was young”, I say, “all these had for me signification.” So we had a very interesting discussion, in consequence of which I passed two whole weeks on Ellis Island.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

How would you feel if you discovered that the society in which you would really like to live was already here, apart from a few little, local difficulties like exploitation, war, dictatorship and starvation? The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.

Of the many possible interpretations of anarchism the one presented here suggests that, far from being a speculative vision of a future society, it is a description of a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, an in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society. This is not a new version of anarchism. Gustav Landauer saw it, not as the founding of something new, “but as the actualisation and reconstruction of something that has always been present, which exists alongside the state, albeit buried and laid waste”. And a modern anarchist, Paul Goodman, dedared that: “A free society cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of spehers of free action until they make up most of social life.”

You may think that in describing anarchy as organisation, I am being deliberately paradoxical. Anarchy you may consider to be, by definition, the opposite of organisation. But the word really means something quite different; it means the absence of government, the absence of authority. It is, after all, governments which make and enforce the laws that enable the “haves” to retain control of social assets to the exclusion of the “have-nots”. It is, after all, the principle of authority which ensures that people will work for someone else for the greater part of their lives, not because they enjoy it or have any control over their work, but because to do so is their only means of livelihood. It is, after all, governments which prepare for and wage war, even though you are obliged to suffer the consequences of their going to war.

But is it only governments? The power of a government, even the most absolute dictatorship, depends on the agreement of the governed. Why do people consent to be ruled? It isn’t only fear; what have millions of people to fear from a small group of professional politicians and their paid strong-arm men? It is because they subscribe to the same values as their governors. Rulers and ruled alike believe in the principle of authority, of hierarchy, of power. They even feel themselves privileged when, as happens in a small part of the globe, they can choose between alternative labels on the ruling elites. And yet, in their ordinary lives they keep society going by voluntary association and mutual aid.

Anarchists are people who make a social and political philosophy out of the natural and spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit. Anarchism is in fact the name given to the idea that it is possible and desirable for society to organise itself without government. The word comes from the Greek, meaning without authority, and ever since the time of the Greeks there have been advocates of anarchy under one name or another. The first person in modern times to evolve a systematic theory of anarchism was William Godwin, soon after the French revolution. A Frenchman, Proudhon, in the mid-nineteenth century developed an anarchist theory of social organisation, of small units federated together but with no central power. He was followed by the Russian revolutionary, Michael Bakunin, the contemporary and adversary of Karl Marx. Marx represented one wing of the socialist movement, concentrated on siezing the power of the state, Bakunin represented the other, seeking the destruction of state power.

Another Russian, Peter Kropotkin, sought to give a scientific foundation to anarchist ideas by demonstrating that mutual aid — voluntary cooperation — is just as strong a tendency in human life as aggression and the urge to dominate. These famous names of anarchism recur in this book, simply because what they wrote speaks, as the Quakers say, to our condition. But there were thousands of other obscure revolutionaries, propagandists and teachers who never wrote books for me to quote but who tried to spread the idea of society without government in almost every country in the world, and especially in the revolutions in Mexico, Russia and Spain. Everywhere they were defeated, and the historians wrote that anarchism finally died when Franco’s troops entered Barcelona in 1939.

But in Paris in 1968 anarchist flags flew over the Sorbonne, and in the same year they were seen in Brussels, Rome, Mexico City, New York, and even in Canterbury. All of a sudden people were talking about the need for the kind of politics in which ordinary men, women and children decide their own fate and make their own future, about the need for social and political decentralisation, about workers’ control of industry, about pupil power in school, about community control of the social services. Anarchism, instead of being a romantic historical by-way, becomes an attitude to human organisation which is more relevant today than it ever seemed in the past.

Organisation and its problems have developed a vast and expanding literature because of the importance of the subject for the hierarchy of government administration and industrial management. Very little of this vast literature provides anything of value for the anarchist except in his role as destructive critic or saboteur of the organisations that dominate our lives. The fact is that while there are thousands of students and teachers of government, there are hardly any of non-government. There is an immense amount of research into methods of administration, but hardly any into self-regulation. There are whole libraries on, and expensive courses in, industrial management, and very large fees for consultants in management, but there is scarcely any literature, no course of study and certainly no fees for those who want to do away with management and substitute workers’ autonomy. The brains are sold to the big battalions, and we have to build up a theory of non-government, of non-management, from the kind of history and experience which has hardly been written about because nobody thought it all that important.

“History”, said W. R. Lethaby, “is written by those who survive, philosophy by the well-to-do; those who go under have the experience.” But once you begin to look at human society from an anarchist point of view you discover that the alternatives are already there, in the interstices of the dominant power structure. If you want to build a free society, the parts are all at hand.

Chapter I. Anarchy and the State

As long as today’s problems are stated in terms of mass politics and ‘mass organisation’, it is clear that only States and mass parties can deal with them. But if the solutions that can be offered by the existing States and parties are acknowledged to be either futile or wicked, or both, then we must look not only for different ‘solutions’ but especially for a different way of stating the problems themselves.

Andrea Caffi

If you look at the history of socialism, reflecting on the melancholy difference between promise and performance, both in those countries where socialist parties have triumphed in the struggle for political power, and in those where they have never attained it, you are bound to ask yourself what went wrong, when and why. Some would see the Russian revolution of 1917 as the fatal turning point in socialist history. Others would look as far back as the February revolution of 1848 in Paris as “the starting point of the two-fold development of European socialism, anarchistic and Marxist”, while many would locate the critical point of divergence as the congress of the International at The Hague in 1872, when the exclusion of Bakunin and the anarchists signified the victory of Marxism. In one of his prophetic criticisms of Marx that year Bakunin previsaged the whole subsequent history of Communist society:

Marx is an authoritarian and centralising communist. He wants what we want, the complete triumph of economic and social equality, but he wants it in the State and through the State power, through the dictatorship of a very strong and, so to say, despotic provisional government, that is by the negation of liberty. His economic ideal is the State as sole owner of the land and of all kinds of capital, cultivating the land under the management of State engineers, and controlling all industrial and commercial associations with State capital. We want the same triumph of economic and social equality through the abolition of the State and of all that passes by the name of law (which, in our view, is the permanent negation of human rights). We want the reconstruction of society and the unification of mankind to be achieved, not from above downwards by any sort of authority, nor by socialist officials, engineers, and other accredited men of learning — but from below upwards, by the free federation of all kinds of workers’ associations liberated from the yoke of the State.

The home-grown English variety of socialism reached the point of divergence later. It was possible for one of the earliest Fabian Tracts to declare in 1886 that “English Socialism is not yet Anarchist or Collectivist, not yet defined enough in point of policy to be classified. There is a mass of Socialistic feeling not yet conscious of itself as Socialism. But when the unconscious Socialists of England discover their position, they also will probably fall into two parties: a Collectivist party supporting a strong central administration and a counterbalancing Anarchist party defending individual initiative against that administration.” The Fabians rapidly found which side of the watershed was theirs and when a Labour Party was founded they exercised a decisive influence on its policies. At its annual conference in 1918 the Labour Party finally committed itself to that interpretation of socialism which identified it with the unlimited increase of the State’s power and activity through its chosen form: the giant managerially-controlled public corporation.

And when socialism has achieved power what has it created? Monopoly capitalism with a veneer of social welfare as a substitute for social justice. The large hopes of the nineteenth century have not been fulfilled; only the gloomy prophecies have come true. The criticism of the state and of the structure of its power and authority made by the classical anarchist thinkers has increased in validity and urgency in the century of total war and the total state, while the faith that the conquest of state power would bring the advent of socialism has been destroyed in every country where socialist parties have won a parliamentary majority, or have ridden to power on the wave of a popular revolution, or have been installed by Soviet tanks. What has happened is exactly what the anarchist Proudhon, over a hundred years ago, said would happen. All that has been achieved is “a compact democracy having the appearance of being founded on the dictatorship of the masses, but in which the masses have no more power than is necessary to ensure a general serfdom in accordance with the following precepts and principles borrowed from the old absolutism: indivisibility of public power, all-consuming centralisation, systematic destruction of all individual, corporative and regional thought (regarded as disruptive), inquisitorial police.”

Kropotkin, too, warned us that “The State organisation, having been the force to which the minorities resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges,” and he declared that “the economic and political liberation of man will have to create new forms for its expression in life, instead of those established by the State.” He thought it self-evident that “this new form will have to be more popular, more decentralised, and nearer to the folk-mote self-government than representative government can ever be,” reiterating that we will be compelled to find new forms of organisation for the social functions that the state fulfils through the bureaucracy, and that “as long as this is not done, nothing will be done”.

When we look at the powerlessness of the individual and the small face-to-face group in the world today and ask ourselves why they are powerless, we have to answer not merely that they are weak because of the vast central agglomerations of power in the modern, military-industrial state, but that they are weak because they have surrendered their power to the state. It is as though every individual possessed a certain quantity of power, but that by default, negligence, or thoughtless and unimaginative habit or conditioning, he has allowed someone else to pick it up, rather than use it himself for his own purposes. (“According to Kenneth Boulding, there is only so much human energy around. When large organisations utilise these energy resources, they are drained away from the other spheres.”)

Gustav Landauer, the German anarchist, made a profound and simple contribution to the analysis of the state and society in one sentence: “The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” It is we and not an abstract outside identity, Landauer implies, who behave in one way or the other, politically or socially. Landauer’s friend and executor, Martin Buber, begins his essay Society and the State with an observation of the sociologist, Robert MacIver, that “to identify the social with the political is to be guilty of the grossest of all confusions, which completely bars any understanding of either society or the state.” The political principle, for Buber, is characterised by power, authority, hierarchy, dominion. He sees the social principle wherever men link themselves in an association based on a common need or common interest.

What is it, Buber asks, that gives the political principle it ascendancy? And he answers, “the fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state its definite unifying power; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises ... All forms of government have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the given conditions; in fact, this excess in the capacity for making dispositions is actually what we understand by political power. The measure of this excess which cannot, of course, be computed precisely, represents the exact difference between administration and government.” He calls this excess the “political surplus” and observes that “its justification derives from the external and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis between nations and within every nation. The political principle is always stronger in relation to the social principle than the given conditions require. The result is a continuous diminution in social spontaneity.”

The conflict between these two principles is a permanent aspect of the human condition. Or as Kropotkin put it: “Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies, have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition.” There is an inverse correlation between the two: the strength of one is the weakness of the other. If we want to strengthen society we must weaken the state. Totalitarians of all kinds realise this, which is why they invariably seek to destroy those social institutions which they cannot dominate. So do the dominant interest groups in the state, like the alliance of big business and the military establishment for the “permanent war economy” suggested by Secretary of Defence Charles E. Wilson in the United States, which has since become so dominant that even Eisenhower, in his last address as President, felt obliged to warn us of its menace.

Shorn of the metaphysics with which politicians and philosophers have enveloped it, the state can be defined as a political mechanism using force, and to the sociologist it is one among many forms of social organisation. It is however, “distinguished from all other associations by its exclusive investment with the final power of coercion”. And against whom is this final power directed? It is directed at the enemy without, but it is aimed at the subject society within.

This is why Buber declared that it is the maintenance of the latent external crisis that enables the state to get the upper hand in internal crises. Is this a conscious procedure? Is it simply that “wicked” men control the state, so that we could put things right by voting for “good” men? Or is it a fundamental characteristic of the state as an institution? It was because she drew this final conclusion that Simone Weil declared that “The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics, when it is especially an act of interior politics, and the most atrocious act of all: For just as Marx found that in the era of unrestrained capitalism, competition between employers, knowing no other weapon than the exploitation of their workers, was transformed into a struggle of each employer against his own workmen, and ultimately of the entire employing class against their employees, so the state uses war and the threat of war as a weapon against its own population. “Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death — the war of one State against another State resolves itself into a war of the State and the military apparatus against its own people.

It doesn’t look like this, of course, if you are a part of the directing apparatus, calculating what proportion of the population you can afford to lose in a nuclear war — just as the governments of all the great powers, capitalist and communist, have calculated. But it does look like this if you are part of the expendable population — unless you identify your own unimportant carcase with the state apparatus — as millions do. The expendability factor has increased by being transfered from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century’s major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, in the Korean War 84 per cent, while in a Third World War 90–95 per cent would be civilians. States, great and small, now have a stockpile of nuclear weapons equivalent to ten tons of TNT for every person alive today.

In the nineteenth century T. H. Green remarked that war is the expression of the “imperfect” state, but he was quite wrong. War is the expression of the state in its most perfect form: it is its finest hour. War is the health of the state — the phrase was invented during the First World War by Randolph Bourne, who explained:

The State is the organisation of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organised. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defence, and the State becomes what in peacetime it has vainly struggled to become ... The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, towards that peacefulness of being at war ...

This is why the weakening of the state, the progressive development of its imperfections, is a social necessity. The strengthening of other loyalties, of alternative foci of power, of different modes of human behaviour, is an essential for survival. But where do we begin? It ought to be obvious that we do not begin by supporting, joining, or hoping to change from within, the existing political parties, nor by starting new ones as rival contenders for political power. Our task is not to gain power, but to erode it, to drain it away from the state. “The State bureaucracy and centralisation are as irreconcilable with socialism as was autocracy with capitalist rule. One way or another, socialism must become more popular, more communalistic, and less dependent upon indirect government through elected representatives. It must become more self-governing.” Putting it differently, we have to build networks instead of pyramids. All authoritarian institutions are organised as pyramids: the state, the private or public corporation, the army, the police, the church, the university, the hospital: they are all pyramidal structures with a small group of decision-makers at the top and a broad base of people whose decisions are made for them at the bottom. Anarchism does not demand the changing of the labels on the layers, it doesn’t want different people on top, it wants us to climber out from underneath. It advocates an extended network of individuals and groups, making their own decisions, controlling their own destiny.

The classical anarchist thinkers envisaged the whole social organisation woven from such local groups: the commune or council as the territorial nucleus (being “not a branch of the state, but the free association of the members concerned, which may be either a co-operative or a corporative body, or simply a provisional union of several people united by a common need,” ) and the syndicate or worker’s council as the industrial or occupational unit. These units would federate together not like the stones of a pyramid where the biggest burden is borne by the lowest layer, but like the links of a network, the network of autonomous groups. Several strands of thought are linked together in anarchist social theory: the ideas of direct action, autonomy and workers’ control, decenralisation and federalism.

The phrase “direct action” was first given currency by the French revolutionary syndicalists of the turn of the century, and was associated with the various forms of militant industrial resistance — the strike, go-slow, working-to-rule, sabotage and the general strike. Its meaning has widened since then to take in the experience of, for example, Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign and the civil rights struggle in the United States, and the many other forms of do-it-yourself politics that are spreading round the world. Direct action has been defined by David Wieck as that “action which, in respect to a situation, realises the end desired, so far as this lies within one’s power or the power of one’s group’ and he distinguishes this from indirect action which realises an irrelevant or even contradictory end, presumably as a means to the “good” end. He gives this as a homely example: “If the butcher weighs one’s meat with his thumb on the scale, one may complain about it and tell him he is a bandit who robs the poor, and if he persists and one does nothing else, this is mere talk; one may call the Department of Weights and Measures, and this is indirect action; or one may, talk failing, insist on weighing one’s own meat, bring along a scale to check the butcher’s weight, take one’s business somewhere else, help open a co-operative store, and these are direct actions.” Wieck observes that: “Proceeding with the belief that in every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of some direct action on some level of generality, we may discover much that has been unrecognised, and the importance of much that has been underrated. So politicalised is our thinking, so focused to the motions of governmental institutions, that the effects of direct efforts to modify one’s environment are unexplored. The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being a free man, prepared to live responsibly in a free society.”

The ideas of autonomy and workers’ control and of decentralisation are inseparable from that of direct action. In the modern state, everywhere and in every field, one group of people makes decisions, exercises control, limits choices, while the great majority have to accept these decisions, submit to this control and act within the limits of these externally imposed choices. The habit of direct action is the habit of wresting back the power to make decisions affecting us from them. The autonomy of the worker at work is the most important field in which this expropriation of decision-making can apply. When workers’ control is mentioned, people smile sadly and murmur regretfully that it is a pity that the scale and complexity of modern industry make it a utopian dream which could never be put into practice in a developed economy. They are wrong. There are no technical grounds for regarding workers’ control as impossible. The obstacles to self-management in industry are the same obstacles that stand in the way of any kind of equitable share-out of society’s assets: the vested interest of the privileged in the existing distribution of power and property.

Similarly, decentralisation is not so much a technical problem as an approach to problems of human organisation. A convincing case can be made for decentralisation on economic grounds, but for the anarchist there just isn’t any other solution consistent with his advocacy of direct action and autonomy. It doesn’t occur to him to seek centralist solutions just as it doesn’t occur to the person with an authoritarian and centralising frame of thought to seek decentralist ones. A contemporary anarchist advocate of decentralisation, Paul Goodman, remarks that:

In fact there have always been two strands to decentralist thinking. Some authors, e.g. Lao-tse or Tolstoy, make a conservative peasant critique of centralised court and town as inorganic, verbal and ritualistic. But other authors, e.g. Proudhon or Kropotkin, make a democratic urban critique of centralised bureaucracy and power, including feudal industrial power, as exploiting, inefficient, and discouraging initiative. In our present era of State-socialism, corporate feudalism, regimented schooling, brainwashing mass-communications and urban anomie, both kinds of critique make sense. We need to revive both peasant self-reliance and the democratic power of professional and technical guilds. Any decentralisation that could occur at present would inevitably be post-urban and post-centralist: it could not be provincial...

His conclusion is that decentralisation is “a kind of social organisation; it does not involve geographical isolation, but a particular sociological use of geography”.

Precisely because we are not concerned with recommending geographical isolation, anarchist thinkers have devoted a great deal of thought to the principle of federalism. Proudhon regarded it as the alpha and omega of his political and economic ideas. He was not thinking of a confederation of states or of a world federal government, but of a basic principle of human organisation.

Bakunin’s philosophy of federalism echoed Proudhon’s but insisted that only socialism could give it a genuinely revolutionary content, and Kropotkin, too, drew on the history of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and, at the very end of his life, the experience of the Russian Revolution, to illustrate the importance of the federal principle if a revolution is to retain its revolutionary content.

Autonomous direct action, decentralised decision-making, and free federation have been the characteristics of all genuinely popular uprisings. Staughton Lynd remarked that “no real revolution has ever taken place — whether in America in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949 — without ad hoc popular institutions improvised from below, simply beginning to administer power in place of the institutions previously recognised as legitimate.” They were seen too in the German uprisings of 1919 like the Munich “council-republic”, in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or in the Spring days in Prague in 1968 — only to be destroyed by the very party which rode to power on the essentially anarchist slogan “All Power to the Soviets” in 1917. In March 1920, by which time the Bolsheviks had transformed the local soviets into organs of the central administration, Lenin said to Emma Goldman, “Why, even your great comrade Errico Malatesta has declared himself for the soviets.” “Yes,” she replied, “For the free soviets.” Malatesta himself, defining the anarchist interpretation of revolution, wrote:

Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of groups, of communes, of regions, revolution is the free federation brought about by a desire for brotherhood, by individual and collective interests, by the needs of production and defense; revolution is the constitution of innumerable free groupings based on ideas, wishes and tastes of all kinds that exist among the people; revolution is the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative, district, communal, regional, national bodies which, without having any legislative power serve to make known and to co-ordinate the desires and interests of people near and far and which act through information, advice and example. Revolution is freedom proved in the crucible of facts — and lasts so long as freedom lasts, that is until others, taking advantage of the weariness that overtakes the masses, of the inevitable disappointments that follow exaggerated hopes, of the probable errors and human faults, succeed in constituting a power which, supported by an army of mercenaries or conscripts, lays down the law, arrests the movement at the point it has reached, and then begins the reaction.

His last sentence indicates that he thought reaction inevitable, and so it is, if people are willing to surrender the power they have wrested from a former ruling elite into the hands of a new one. But a reaction to every revolution is inevitable in another sense. This is what the ebb and flow of history implies. The lutte finale exists only in the words of a song. As Landauer says, every time after the revolution is a time before the revolution for all those whose lives have not got bogged down in some great moment of the past. There is no final struggle, only a series of partisan struggles on a variety of fronts.

And after over a century of experience of the theory, and over half a century of experience of the practice of the Marxist and social democratic varieties of socialism, after the historians have dismissed anarchism as one of the nineteenth-century also-rans of history, it is emerging again as a coherent social philosophy in the guerilla warfare for a society of participants, which is occurring sporadically all over the world. Thus, commenting on the events of May 1968 in France, Theodore Draper declared that “The lineage of the new revolutionaries goes back to Bakunin rather than to Marx, and it is just as well that the term ‘anarchism’ is coming back into vogue. For what we have been witnessing is a revival of anarchism in modern dress or masquerading as latter-day Marxism. Just as nineteenth-century Marxism matured in a struggle against anarchism, so twentieth-century Marxism may have to recreate itself in another struggle against anarchism in its latest guise.” He went on to comment that the anarchists did not have much staying-power in the nineteenth century and that it is unlikely that they will have much more in this century. Whether or not he is right about the new anarchists depends on a number of factors. Firstly, on whether or not people have learned anything from the history of the last hundred years; secondly, on whether the large number of people in both east and west — the dissatisfied and dissident young of the Soviet empire as well as of the United States who seek an alternative theory of social organisation — will grasp the relevance of those ideas which we define as anarchism; and thirdly, on whether the anarchists themselves are sufficiently imaginative and inventive to find ways of applying their ideas today to the society we live in in ways that combine immediate aims with ultimate ends.

Chapter II. The Theory of Spontaneous Order

In every block of houses, in every street, in every town ward, groups of volunteers will have been organised, and these commissariat volunteers will find it easy to work in unison and keep in touch with each other ... if only the self-styled “scientific” theorists do not thrust themselves in ... Or rather let them expound their muddle-headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organisation inherent in the people ... but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate, even in so huge a city as Paris, and in the midst of a revolution, an immense guild of free workers, ready to furnish to each and all the necessary food. Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among documents, can doubt it. Speak of the organising genius of the “Great Misunderstood”, the people, to those who have seen it in Paris in the days of the barricades, or in London during the great dock strike, when half a million of starving folk had to be fed, and they will tell you how superior it is to the official ineptness of Bumbledom.

Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

An important component of the anarchist approach to organisation is what we might call the theory of spontaneous order: the theory that, given a common need, a collection of people will, by trial and error, by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of the situation — this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of externally imposed authority could provide. Kropotkin derived his version of this theory from his observations of the history of human society as well as from the study of the events of the French Revolution in its early stages and from the Paris Commune of 1871, and it has been witnessed in most revolutionary situations, in the ad hoc organisations that spring up after natural disasters, or in any activity where there are no existing organisational forms or hierarchical authority. The principle of authority is so built in to every aspect of our society that it is only in revolutions, emergencies and “happenings” that the principle of spontaneous order emerges. But it does provide a glimpse of the kind of human behaviour that the anarchist regards as “normal” and the authoritarian sees as unusual.

You could have seen it in, for example, the first Aldermaston March or in the widespread occupation of army camps by squatters in the summer of 1946, described in Chapter VII. Between June and October of that year 40,000 homeless people in England and Wales, acting on their own initiative, occupied over 1,000 army camps. They organised every kind of communal service in the attempt to make these bleak huts more like home — communal cooking, laundering and nursery facilities, for instance. They also federated into a Squatters’ Protection Society. One feature of these squatter communities was that they were formed from people who had very little in common beyond their homelessness — they included tinkers and university dons. It could be seen in spite of commercial exploitation in the pop festivals of the late 1960s, in a way which is not apparent to the reader of newspaper headlines. From “A cross-section of informed opinion” in an appendix to a report to the government, a local authority representative mentions “an atmosphere of peace and contentment which seems to be dominant amongst the participants” and a church representative mentions “a general atmosphere of considerable relaxation, friendliness and a great willingness to share”. The same kind of comments were made about the instant city of the Woodstock Festival in the United States: “Woodstock, if permanent, would have become one of America’s major cities in size alone, and certainly a unique one in the principles by which its citizens conducted themselves.”

An interesting and deliberate example of the theory of spontaneous organisation in operation was provided by the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham in South London. This was started in the decade before the Second World War by a group of physicians and biologists who wanted to study the nature of health and of healthy behaviour instead of studying ill-health like the rest of the medical profession. They decided that the way to do this was to start a social club whose members joined as families and could use a variety of facilities in return for a family membership subscription and for agreeing to periodic medical examinations. In order to be able to draw valid conclusions the Peckham biologists thought it necessary that they should be able to observe human beings who were free — free to act as they wished and to give expression to their desires. There were consequently no rules, no regulations, no leaders. “I was the only person with authority,” said Dr Scott Williamson, the founder, “and I used it to stop anyone exerting any authority.” For the first eight months there was chaos. “With the first member-families”, says one observer, “there arrived a horde of undisciplined children who used the whole building as they might have used one vast London street. Screaming and running like hooligans through all the rooms, breaking equipment and furniture,” they made life intolerable for everyone. Scott Williamson, however, “insisted that peace should be restored only by the response of the children to the variety of stimulus that was placed in their way”. This faith was rewarded: “In less than a year the chaos was reduced to an order in which groups of children could daily be seen swimming, skating, riding bicycles, using the gymnasium or playing some game, occasionally reading a book in the library ... the running and screaming were things of the past.”

In one of the several valuable reports on the Peckham experiment, John Comerford draws the conclusion that “A society, therefore, if left to itself in suitable circumstances to express itself spontaneously works out its own salvation and achieves a harmony of actions which superimposed leadership cannot emulate.” This is the same inference as was drawn by Edward Allsworth Ross from his study of the true (as opposed to the legendary) evolution of “frontier” societies in nineteenth-century America.

Equally dramatic examples of the same kind of phenomenon are reported by those people who have been brave enough, or self-confident enough, to institute self-governing, non-punitive communities of “delinquent” youngsters — August Aichhorn, Homer Lane and David Wills are examples. Homer Lane was the man who, years in advance of his time, started a community of boys and girls, sent to him by the courts, called the Little Commonwealth. He used to declare that “Freedom cannot be given. It is taken by the child in discovery and invention.” True to this principle, says Howard Jones, “he refused to impose upon the children a system of government copied from the institutions of the adult world. The self-governing structure of the Little Commonwealth was evolved by the children themselves, slowly and painfully, to satisfy their own needs.” Aichhorn was an equally bold man of the same generation who ran a home for maladjusted children in Vienna. He gives this description of one particularly aggressive group: “Their aggressive acts became more frequent and more violent until practically all the furniture in the building was destroyed, the window panes broken, the doors nearly kicked to pieces. It happened once that a boy sprang through a double window ignoring his injuries from the broken glass. The dinner table was finally deserted because each one sought out a corner in the playroom where he crouched to devour his food. Screams and howls could be heard from afar!”

Aichhorn and his colleagues maintained what one can only call a superhuman restraint and faith in their method, protecting their charges from the wrath of the neighbours, the police and the city authorities, and “Eventually patience brought its reward. Not only did the children settle down, but they developed a strong attachment to those who were working with them ... This attachment was now to be used as the foundation of a process of re-education. The children were at last to be brought up against the limitations imposed upon them by the real world.”

Time and again those rare people who have themselves been free enough and have had the moral strength and the endless patience and forbearance that this method demands, have been similarly rewarded. In ordinary life the fact that one is not dealing (theoretically at least,) with such deeply disturbed characters should make the experience less drastic, but in ordinary life, outside the deliberately protected environment, we interact with others with the aim of getting some common task done, and the apparent aimlessness and time-consuming tedium of the period of waiting for spontaneous order to appear brings the danger of some lover of order intervening with an attempt to impose authority and method, just to get something accomplished. But you have only to watch parents with their children to see that the threshold of tolerance for disorder in this context varies enormously from one individual to another. We usually conclude that the punitive, interfering lover of order is usually so because of his own unfreedom and insecurity. The tolerant condoner of disorder is a recognisably different kind of character, and the reader will have no doubt which of the two is easier to live with.

On an altogether different plane is the spontaneous order that emerges in those rare moments in human society when a popular revolution has withdrawn support, and consequently power, from the forces of “law-and-order”. I once spoke to a Scandinavian journalist back from a visit to South Africa, whose strongest impression of that country was that the White South Africans barked at each other. They were, he thought, so much in the habit of shouting orders or admonitions to their servants that it affected their manner of speech to each other as well. “Nobody there is gentle any more.” he said. What brought his remark back to my mind was its reverse. In a broadcast on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia a speaker looked back to the summer of 1968 in Prague as one in which, as she put it, “Everyone had become more gentle, more considerate. Crime and violence diminished. We all seemed to be making a special effort to make life tolerable, just because it had been so intolerable before.”

Now that the Prague Spring and the Czechoslovak long hot summer have retreated into history, we tend to forget — though the Czechs will not forget — the change in the quality of ordinary life, while the historians, busy with the politicians floating on the surface of events, or this or that memorandum from a Central Committee or a Praesidium, tell us nothing about what it felt like for people in the streets. At the time John Berger wrote of the immense impression made on him by the transformation of values: “Workers in many places spontaneously offered to work for nothing on Saturdays in order to contribute to the national fund. Those for whom, a few months before, the highest ideal was a consumer society, offered money and gold to help save the national economy. (Economically a naive gesture but ideologically a significant one.) I saw crowds of workers in the streets of Prague, their faces lit by an evident sense of opportunity and achievement. Such an atmosphere was bound to be temporary. But it was an unforgettable indication of the previously unused potential of a people: of the speed with which demoralisation may be overcome.” And Harry Schwartz of the New York Times reminds us that “Gay, spontaneous, informal and relaxed were the words foreign correspondents used to describe the vast outpouring of merry Prague citizens.” What was Dubcek doing at the time? “He was trying to set limits on the spontaneous revolution that had been set in motion and to curb it. No doubt he hoped to honour the promises he had given at Dresden that he would impose order on what more and more conservative Communists were calling ‘anarchy’”. When the Soviet tanks rolled in to impose their order, the spontaneous revolution gave way to a spontaneous resistance. Of Prague, Kamil Winter declared, “I must confess to you that nothing was organised at all. Everything went on spontaneously ...” And of the second day of the invasion in Bratislava, Ladislav Mňačko wrote: “Nobody had given any order. Nobody was giving any orders at all. People knew of their own accord what ought to be done. Each and every one of them was his own government, with its orders and regulations, while the government itself was somewhere very far away, probably in Moscow. Everything the occupation forces tried to paralyse went on working and even worked better than in normal times; by the evening the people had even managed to deal with the bread situation”.

In November, when the students staged a sit-in in the universities, “the sympathy of the population with the students was shown by the dozens of trucks sent from the factories to bring them food free of charge,” and “Prague’s railway workers threatened to strike if the government took reprisal measures against the students. Workers of various state organisations supplied them with food. The buses of the urban transport workers were placed at the strikers’ disposal ... Postal workers established certain free telephone communications between university towns.”

The same brief honeymoon with anarchy was observed twelve years earlier in Poland and Hungary. The economist Peter Wiles (who was in Poznan at the time of the bread riots and who went to Hungary in the period when the Austrian frontier was open) noted what he called an “astonishing moral purity” and he explained:

Poland had less chance to show this than Hungary, where for weeks there was no authority. In a frenzy of anarchist self-discipline the people, including the criminals, stole nothing, beat no Jews, and never got drunk. They went so far as to lynch only security policemen (AVH) leaving other Communists untouched ... The moral achievement is perhaps unparalleled in revolutionary history ... It was indeed intellectuals of some sort that began both movements, with the industrial workers following them. The peasants had of course never ceased to resist since 1945, but from the nature of things, in a dispersed and passive manner. Peasants stop things, they don’t start them. Their sole initiative was the astonishing and deeply moving despatch of free food to Budapest after the first Soviet attack had been beaten.

A Hungarian eyewitness of the same events declared:

May I tell you one thing about this common sense of the street, during these first days of the revolution? Just, for example, many hours standing in queues for bread and even under such circumstances not a single fight. One day we were standing in a queue and then a truck came with two young boys with machine guns and they were asking us to give them any money we could spare to buy bread for the fighters. All the queue was collecting half a truck-full of bread. It is just an example. Afterwards somebody beside me asked us to hold his place for him because he gave all his money and he had to go home to get some. In this case the whole queue gave him all the money he wanted. Another example: naturally all the shop windows broke in the first day, but not a single thing inside was touched by anybody. You could have seen broken-in shop windows and candy stores, and even the little children didn’t touch anything in it. Not even camera shops, opticians or jewellers. Not a single thing was touched for two or three days. And in the streets on the third and fourth day, shop windows were empty, but it was written there that, “The caretaker has taken it away”, or “Everything from here is in this or that fiat.” And in these first days it was a custom to put big boxes on street corners or on crossings where more streets met, and just a script over them “This is for the wounded, for the casualties or for the families of the dead,” and they were set out in the morning and by noon they were full of money...

In Havana, when the general strike brought down the Batista regime and before Castro’s army entered the city, a despatch from Robert Lyon, Executive Secretary of the New England office of the American Friends Service Committee reported that “There are no police anywhere in the country, but the crime rate is lower than it has been in years, and the BBC’s correspondent reported that “The city for days had been without police of any sort, an experience delightful to everyone. Motorists — and considering that they were Cubans this was miraculous — behaved in an orderly manner. Industrial workers, with points to make, demonstrated in small groups, dispersed and went home; bars closed when the customers had had enough and no one seemed more than normally merry. Havana, heaving up after years under a vicious and corrupt police control, smiled in the hot sunshine.”

In all these instances, the new regime has built up its machinery of repression, announcing the necessity of maintaining order and avoiding counter-revolution: “The Praesidium of the Central Committee of the CPC, the Government and the National Front unequivocally rejected the appeals of the statement of Two Thousand Words, which induce to anarchist acts, to violating the constitutional character of our political reform.” And so on, in a variety of languages. No doubt people will cherish the interregnum of elation and spontaneity merely as a memory of a time when, as George Orwell said of revolutionary Barcelona, there was “a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom when human beings were trying to behave like human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine,” or when, as Andy Anderson wrote of Hungary in 1956, “In the society they were glimpsing through the dust and smoke of the battle in the streets, there would be no Prime Minister, no government of professional politicians, and no officials or bosses ordering them about.”

Now you might think that in the study of human behaviour and social relations these moments when society is held together by the cement of human solidarity alone, without the dead weight of power and authority, would have been studied and analysed with the aim of discovering what kind of preconditions exist for an increase in social spontaneity, “participation” and freedom. The moments when there aren’t even any police would surely be of immense interest, if only for criminologists. Yet you don’t find them discussed in the texts of social psychology and you don’t find them written about by the historians. You have to dig around for them among the personal impressions of people who just happened to be there.

If you want to know why the historians neglect or traduce these moments of revolutionary spontaneity, you should read Noam Chomsky’s essay “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” The example he uses is one of the greatest importance for anarchists, the Spanish revolution of 1936, whose history, he remarks, is yet to be written. In looking at the work in this field of the professional historians, he writes: “It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence to show that a deep bias against social revolution and a commitment to the values and social order of liberal bourgeois democracy has led the author to misrepresent crucial events and to overlook major historical currents.” But this is not his main point. “At least this much is plain,” he says, “there are dangerous tendencies in the ideology of the welfare state intelligentsia who claim to possess the technique and understanding required to manage our ‘post-industrial society” and to organise an international society dominated by American superpower. Many of these dangers are revealed, at a purely ideological level, in the study of the counter-revolutionary subordination of scholarship. The dangers exist both insofar as the claim to knowledge is real and insofar as it is fraudulent. Insofar as the technique of management and control exists, it can be used to diminish spontaneous and free experimentation with new social forms, as it can limit the possibilities for reconstruction of society in the interests of those who are now, to a greater or lesser extent dispossessed. Where the techniques fail, they will be supplemented by all of the methods of coercion that modern technology provides, to preserve order and stability.”

As a final example of what he calls spontaneous and free experimentation with new social forms, let me quote from the account he cites of the revolution in the Spanish village of Membrilla:

“In its miserable huts live the poor inhabitants of a poor province; eight thousand people, but the streets are not paved, the town has no newspaper, no cinema, neither a cafe nor a library. On the other hand, it has many churches that have been burned.” Immediately after the Franco insurrection, the land was expropriated and village life collectivised. “Food, clothing, and tools were distributed equitably to the whole population. Money was abolished, work collectivised, all goods passed to the community, consumption was socialised. It was, however, not a socialisation of wealth but of poverty.” Work continued as before. An elected council appointed committees to organise the life of the commune and its relations to the outside world. The necessities of life were distributed freely, insofar as they were available. A large number of refugees were accommodated. A small library was established, and a small school of design. The document closes with these words: “The whole population lived as in a large family; functionaries, delegates, the secretary of the syndicates, the members of the municipal council, all elected, acted as heads of a family. But they were controlled, because special privilege or corruption would not be tolerated. Membrilla, is perhaps the poorest village of Spain, but it is the most just”.

And Chomsky comments: “An account such as this, with its concern for human relations and the ideal of a just society, must appear very strange to the consciousness of the sophisticated intellectual, and it is therefore treated with scorn, or taken to be naive or primitive or otherwise irrational. Only when such prejudice is abandoned will it be possible for historians to undertake a serious study of the popular movement that transformed Republican Spain in one of the most remarkable social revolutions that history records.” There is an order imposed by terror, there is an order enforced by bureaucracy (with the policeman in the corridor) and there is an order which evolves spontaneously from the fact that we are gregarious animals capable of shaping our own destiny. When the first two are absent, the third, as infinitely more human and humane form of order has an opportunity to emerge. Liberty, as Proudhon said, is the mother, not the daughter of order.

Chapter III. The Dissolution of Leadership

Accustomed as is this age to artificial leadership ... it is difficult for it to realise the truth that leaders require no training or appointing, but emerge spontaneously when conditions require them. Studying their members in the free-for-all of the Peckham Centre, the observing scientists saw over and over again how one member instinctively became, and was instinctively but not officially recognised as, leader to meet the needs of one particular moment. Such leaders appeared and disappeared as the flux of the Centre required. Because they were not consciously appointed, neither (when they had fulfilled their purpose) where they consciously overthrown. Nor was any particular gratitude shown by members to a leader either at the time of his services or after for services rendered. They followed his guidance just as long as his guidance was helpful and what they wanted. They melted away from him without regrets when some widening of experience beckoned them on to some fresh adventure, which would in turn throw up its spontaneous leader, or when their self-confidence was such that any form of constrained leadership would have been a restraint to them.

John Comerford, Health the Unknown:

The Story of the Peckham Experiment

Take me to your leader! This is the first demand made by Martians to Earthlings, policemen to demonstrators, journalists to revolutionaries. “Some journalists”, said one of them to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “have described you as the leader of the revolution ...” He replied, “Let them write their rubbish. These people will never be able to understand that the student movement doesn’t need any chiefs. I am neither a leader nor a professional revolutionary. I am simply a mouthpiece, a megaphone.” Anarchists believe in leaderless groups, and if this phrase is familiar it is because of the paradox that what was known as the leaderless group technique was adopted in the British and Australian armies during the war — and in industrial management since then — as a means of selecting leaders. The military psychologists learned that what they considered to be leader or follower traits are not exhibited in isolation. They are, as one of them wrote, “relative to a specific social situation — leadership varied from situation to situation and from group to group.” Or as the anarchist, Michael Bakunin, put it over a hundred years ago: “I receive and I give — such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.”

Don’t be deceived by the sweet reasonableness of all this. The anarchist concept of leadership is completely revolutionary in its implications — as you can see if you look around, for you will see everywhere in operation the opposite concept: that of hierarchical, authoritarian, privileged and permanent leadership. There are very few comparative studies available of the effects of these two opposite approaches to the organisation of work. Two of them are mentioned in Chapter XI. Another comes from the architectural profession. The Royal Institute of British Architects sponsored a report on the methods of organisation in architects’ offices. The survey team felt able to distinguish two opposite approaches to the process of design, which gave rise to very different ways of working and methods of organisation. “One was characterised by a procedure which began by the invention of a building shape and was followed by a moulding of the client’s needs to fit inside this three-dimensional preconception. The other began with an attempt to understand fully the needs of the people who were to use the building around which, when they were clarified, the building would be fitted.”

For the first type, once the basic act of invention and imagination is over, the rest is easy and the architect makes decisions quickly, produces work to time and quickly enough to make a reasonable profit. “The evidence suggests that this attitude is the predominant one in the group of offices which we found to be using a centralised type of work organisation, and it clearly goes with rather autocratic forms of control.” But “the other philosophy — from user’s needs to building form — makes decision making more difficult ... The work takes longer and is often unprofitable to the architect, although the client may end up with a much cheaper building put up more quickly than he had expected. Many offices working in this way had found themselves better suited by a dispersed type of work organisation which can promote an informal atmosphere of free-flowing ideas ...” The team found that (apart from a small “hybrid” group of large public offices with a very rigid and hierarchical structure, a poor quality of design, poor technical and managerial efficiency) the offices surveyed could be classed as either centralised or dispersed types. Staff turnover, which bore no relation at all to earnings, was high in the centralised offices and low or very low in the dispersed ones, where there was considerable delegation of responsibility to assistants, and where we found a lively working atmosphere”.

This is a very live issue among architects and it was not a young revolutionary architect but Sir William Pile, when he was head of the Architects and Buildings Branch of the Ministry of Education, who specified among the things he looked for in a member of the building team that “He must have a belief in what I call the non-hierarchical organisation of the work. The work has got to be organised not on the star system but on the repertory system. The team leader may often be junior to a team member. That will only be accepted if it is commonly accepted that primacy lies with the best idea and not with the senior man.” Again from the architectural world, Walter Gropius proclaimed what he called the technique of “collaboration among men, which would release the creative instincts of the individual instead of smothering them. The essence of such technique should be to emphasise individual freedom of initiative, instead of authoritarian direction by a boss ... synchronising individual effort by a continuous give and take of its members...”

Similar findings to those of the RIBA survey come from comparative studies of the organisation of scientific research. Some remarks of Wilhelm Reich on his concept of “work democracy” are relevant here. I am bound to say that I doubt if he really practised the philosophy he describes, but it certainly corresponds to my experience of working in anarchist groups. He asks, “... On what principle, then, was our organisation based, if there were no votes, no directives and commands, no secretaries, presidents, vice-presidents, etc.?” And he answers:

What kept us together was our work, our mutual interdependencies in this work, our factual interest in one gigantic problem with its many specialist ramifications. I had not solicited co-workers. They had come of themselves. They remained, or they left when the work no longer held them. We had not formed a political group or worked out a programme of action ... Each one made his contribution according to his interest in the work ... There are, then, objective biological work interests and work functions capable of regulating human co-operation. Exemplary work organises its forms of functioning organically and spontaneously, even though only gradually, gropingly and often making mistakes. In contra-distinction, the political organisations, with their “campaigns” and “platforms” proceed without any connection with the tasks and problems of daily life.

Elsewhere in his paper on “work democracy” he notes that: “If personal enmities, intrigues and political manoeuvres make their appearance in an organisation, one can be sure that its members no longer have a factual meeting ground in common, that they are no longer held together by a common work interest ... Just as organisational ties result from common work interests, so they dissolve when the work interests dissolve or begin to conflict with each other.”

This fluid, changing leadership derives from authority, but this authority derives from each person’s self-chosen function in performing the task in hand. You can be in authority, or you can be an authority, or you can have authority. The first derives from your rank in some chain of command, the second derives from special knowledge, and the third from special wisdom. But knowledge and wisdom are not distributed in order of rank, and they are no one person’s monopoly in any undertaking. The fantastic inefficiency of any hierarchical organisation — any factory, office, university, warehouse or hospital — is the outcome of two almost invariable characteristics. One is that the knowledge and wisdom of the people at the bottom of the pyramid finds no place in the decision-making leadership hierarchy of the institution. Frequently it is devoted to making the institution work in spite of the formal leadership structure, or alternatively to sabotaging the ostensible function of the institution, because it is none of their choosing. The other is that they would rather not be there anyway: they are there through economic necessity rather than through identification with a common task which throws up its own shifting and functional leadership.

Perhaps the greatest crime of the industrial system is the way in which it systematically thwarts the inventive genius of the majority of its workers. As Kropotkin asked, “What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot?”

At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers have invented; now they cease to do so. As to the inventions of the engineers, specially trained for devising machines, they are either devoid of genius or not practical enough ... None but he who knows the machine — not in its drawings and models only, but in its breathing and throbbings — who unconsciously thinks of it while standing by it, can really improve it. Smeaton and Newcomen surely were excellent engineers; but in their engines a boy had to open the steam valve at each stroke of the piston; and it was one of those boys who once managed to connect the valve with the remainder of the machine, so as to make it open automatically, while he ran away to play with the other boys. But in the modern machinery there is no room left for naive improvements of that kind. Scientific education on a wide scale has become necessary for further inventions, and that education is refused to the workers. So that there is no issue out of the difficulty, unless scientific education and handicraft are combined together — unless integration of knowledge takes the place of the present divisions.

The situation today is actually worse than Kropotkin envisaged. The divorce between design and execution, between “manager” and worker, is more complete. Most people in fact are “educated” beyond their level in the industrial pyramid. Their capacity for invention and innovation is not wanted by the system. “You’re not paid to think, just get on with it,” says the foreman. “We are happy that we have re-established the most fundamental principle — management’s right to manage,” said Sir Alick Dick when he took over as chairman of the Standard Motor Company (only to be “resigned” himself when Leylands decided to manage instead).

The remark I value most among the things that were said about the anarchist journal I used to edit, was that of a reviewer who remarked that it was concerned with “the way in which individual human beings are prevented from developing” and that “at the same time there is a vision of the unfulfilled potentialities of every human being”. However much this described the intention rather than the result, the sentiment is true. People do go from womb to tomb without ever realising their human potential, precisely because the power to initiate, to participate in innovating, choosing, judging, and deciding is reserved for the top men. It is no accident that the examples I have given of leadership revolving around functional activities come from “creative” occupations like architecture or scientific research. If ideas are your business, you cannot afford to condemn most of the people in the organisation to being merely machines programmed by somebody else.

But why are there these privileged enclaves where different rules apply?

Creativity is for the gifted few: the rest of us are compelled to live in the environments constructed by the gifted few, listen to the gifted few’s music, use the gifted few’s inventions and art, and read the poems, fantasies and plays by the gifted few. This is what our education and culture condition us to believe, and this is a culturally induced and perpetuated lie.

The system makes its morons, then despises them for their ineptitude, and rewards its “gifted few” for their rarity.

Chapter IV. Harmony through Complexity

People like simple ideas and are right to like them. Unfortunately, the simplicity they seek is only to be found in elementary things; and the world, society, and man are made up of insoluble problems, contrary principles, and conflicting forces. Organism means complication, and multiplicity means contradiction, opposition, independence.

P.-J. Proudhon, The Theory of Taxation (1861)

One of the most frequently met reasons for dismissing anarchism as a social theory is the argument that while one can imagine it existing in a small, isolated, primitive community it cannot possibly be conceived in the context of large, complex, industrial societies. This view misunderstands both the nature of anarchism and the nature of tribal societies. Certainly the knowledge that human societies exist, or have existed, without government, without institutionalised authority, and with social and sexual codes quite different from those of our own society, is bound to interest the advocates of anarchy if only to rebut the suggestion that their ideas run contrary to “human nature”, and you will often find quoted in the anarchist press some attractive description of a tribal anarchy, some pocket of the Golden Age (seen from the outside) among the Eskimo, innocent of property, or the sex-happy Trobrianders.

An impressive anthology could be made of such items, as the travel books and works of popular anthropology roll off the presses — from Aku-Aku to Wai-Wai. Several anarchist writers of the past did just this: Kropotkin in his chapter on “Mutual Aid Among Savages”, Élisée Reclus in his Primitive Folk and Edward Carpenter in his essay on “Non-governmental Society”, but anthropology has developed its techniques and methods of analysis greatly since the days of the anecdotal approach with its accumulation of travellers” tales. Today, when we view the “simpler” societies we realise that they are not simple at all. When early Western travellers first came back from African journeys they wrote of the cacophonous sound of the savage jungle drums, or of the primitive mud and straw huts, in patronising or pitying tones because they were blinkered by assumptions about their own society’s superiority which blinded them to the subtlety and wonder of other people’s culture. Nowadays you can spend a lifetime exploring the structure of African music or the ingenuity and variety of African architecture. In the same way early observers described as sexual promiscuity or group marriage what was simply a different kind of family organisation, or labelled certain societies as anarchistic when a more searching examination might show that they had as effective methods of social control and its enforcement as any authoritarian society, or that certain patterns of behaviour are so rigidly enforced by custom as to make alternatives unthinkable.

The anarchist, in making use of anthropological data today, has to ask more sophisticated questions than his predecessors about the role of law in such societies. But wh