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\title{Anarchy in Action}
\date{1996}
\author{Colin Ward}
\subtitle{}




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\chapter{Introduction to the Second Edition}



\begin{quote}


The anarchist movement grows in times of popular self-activity, feeds it and feeds
off it, and declines when that self-activity declines\dots{} 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.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

John Quail, \emph{The Slow Burning Fuse:}\forcelinebreak 
\emph{The Lost History of the British Anarchists} (Paladin 1978)


\end{flushright}


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 \emph{is}, and what, according to the
anarchist, \emph{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
\emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{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.


\hairline


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.

\section{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 19\textsuperscript{th}-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 20\textsuperscript{th}
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.”

\section{The Theory of Spontaneous Order}

% FIXME there is no p. 146, even in the scan

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
\emph{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.

\section{The Dissolution of Leadership}

\section{Harmony Through Complexity}

\section{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 \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{Why Switzerland?} (Cambridge
University Press 1976), and the anthropological material on stateless
societies is added to in part five of Kirkpatrick Sale’s \emph{Human Scale} (Secker
\& Warburg 1980).

\section{Who Is to Plan?}

\section{We House, You Are Housed, They Are Homeless}


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

\section{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.”

\section{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 \emph{Talking
Schools}, (Freedom Press, 1995) as well as by Chapter 16 of my book \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{A Primer of Libertarian Education} (New York: Free Life Editions,
1975).

\section{Play as an Anarchist Parable}


Play \emph{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.

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|}
\hline
\relax  Work is  &  Leisure is  \\
\hline
\relax  Hated  &  Enjoyed  \\
\relax  Long  &  Brief  \\
\relax  For someone else  &  For yourself  \\
\relax  Essential for livelihood  &  Inessential for livelihood  \\
\relax  Concentrated  &  At your own pace  \\
\relax  For fixed hours  &  In your own time  \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


I quote this polarisation from my school book on \emph{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.

\section{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 \emph{Worker-Owners:
The Mondragon Achievemnt} (Anglo-German Foundation 1977),
Robert Oakeshott’s \emph{The Case for Workers’ Co-ops} (Routledge \& Kegan
Paul 1978), Workers’ Co-operatives: A Handbook (Aberdeen People’s Press
1980) and Jenny Thomley: \emph{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.”

\section{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 \emph{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 \emph{The Wincroft Youth Project}, “there is now the weight
of a bureaucracy that, ironically, is employed to serve them.”

\section{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: \emph{The Struggle to be Human: Crime, Criminology and
Anarchism} (Cienfuegos Press 1980). Another is Alan Ritter’s \emph{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 \emph{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\dots{} 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\dots{} 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.”

\section{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 \emph{After Industrial Society} (Macmillan 1979) that
service industries themselves are already declining and that what is more
likely to emerge is a \emph{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?



\begin{flushright}

\textbf{C. W.}


\end{flushright}

\chapter{Preface}



\begin{quote}


“Nothing to declare?” “Nothing.” Very well. Then political questions. He asks:
“Are you an anarchist?” I answer. “\dots{} 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.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Vladimir Nabokov, \emph{Pnin}


\end{flushright}


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 \emph{organisation}, I am being
deliberately paradoxical. Anarchy you may consider to be, by definition,
the \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{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{Chapter I. Anarchy and the State}



\begin{quote}


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.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Andrea Caffi


\end{flushright}


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”,\footnote{Vaclav Cerny, “The Socialistic Year 1848 and its Heritage”, \emph{The Critical Monthly}, Nos.~1 and 2 (Prague, 1948).} 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:



\begin{quote}


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.\footnote{Michael Bakunin, “Letter to the Internationalists of the Romagna” 28 January 1872}



\end{quote}


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.”\footnote{Fabian Tract No~4, \emph{What Socialism Is} (London, 1886).}
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.”\footnote{Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, \emph{The Political Capacity of the Working Class} (Paris, 1864).}


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.”\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Modern Science and Anarchism} (London, 1912).} 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”.\footnote{The same, French edition (Paris, 1913)}


When we look at the \emph{powerlessness} of the individual and the small
face-to-face group in the world today and ask ourselves \emph{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 \emph{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.”)\footnote{George Benello, “Wasteland Culture”, \emph{Our Generation}, Vol.~5, No.~2, (Montreal, 1967)}


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 \emph{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
\emph{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 \dots{} 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.”\footnote{Martin Buber, “Society and the State”, \emph{World Review}, (London, 1951).}


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.\footnote{Fred J Cook, \emph{The Warfare State} (London, 1963).}


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 \emph{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”.\footnote{MacIver and Page, \emph{Society} (London, 1948).} And against
whom is this final power directed? It is \emph{directed} at the enemy without, but
it is \emph{aimed} at the subject society \emph{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 \emph{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.\footnote{Simone Weil, “Reflections on War”, \emph{Left Review}, (London, 1938).}


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 — \emph{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:



\begin{quote}


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 \dots{} 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 \emph{peacefulness of being at war} \dots{}\footnote{Randolph Bourne, \emph{The State}, Resistance Press, (New York, 1945). (first published 1919).}



\end{quote}


This is why the weakening of the state, the progressive development of
its imperfections, is a social necessity. The strengthening of \emph{other} loyalties,
of \emph{alternative} foci of power, of \emph{different} modes of human behaviour, is an
essential for survival. But where do we begin? It ought to be obvious
that we do \emph{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.”\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{op.~cit.}}
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 \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{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,”\footnote{Camillo Bernen, \emph{Kropotkin, His Federalist Ideas} (London, 1943).}) and the \emph{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, \emph{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 \emph{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 \emph{mere talk}; one may call the Department of Weights and Measures,
and this is \emph{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
\emph{direct actions}.” Wieck observes that: “Proceeding with the belief that in
every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of \emph{some}
direct action on \emph{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.”\footnote{David Wieck, “The Habit of Direct Action”, \emph{Anarchy} 13 (London, 1962), reprinted in Colin Ward (ed.), \emph{A Decade of Anarchy}, (London, Freedom Press, 1987).}


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 \emph{us} from \emph{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 \emph{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:



\begin{quote}


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\dots{}\footnote{Paul Goodman, \emph{Like a Conquered Province} (New York, 1967).}



\end{quote}


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 \emph{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
\emph{free} soviets.” Malatesta himself, defining the anarchist interpretation of
revolution, wrote:



\begin{quote}


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.\footnote{Vernon Richards (ed.), \emph{Malatesta: His Life and Ideas} (London, Freedom Press, 1965).}



\end{quote}


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 \emph{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.”\footnote{Theodore Draper in \emph{Encounter}, August 1968.} 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 \emph{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{Chapter II. The Theory of Spontaneous Order}



\begin{quote}


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 \dots{} if only the self-styled “scientific”
theorists do not thrust themselves in \dots{} 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 \dots{} 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.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Peter Kropotkin, \emph{The Conquest of Bread}


\end{flushright}


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 \emph{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”.\footnote{\emph{Fifty Million Volunteers}, Report on the Role of Voluntary Organisations and Youth in the Environment (London, 1972).}
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.”\footnote{Graham Whiteman, “Festival Moment”, \emph{Anarchy} 116, October 1970.}


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 \dots{} 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.”\footnote{John Comerford, \emph{Health the Unknown: The Story of the Peckham Experiment} (London, 1947). See also Innes Pearse and Lucy Crocker, \emph{The Peckham Experiment} (London, 1943); \emph{Biologists in Search of Material} by G. Scott Williamson and I. H. Pearse (London, 1938).} 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.\footnote{Edward Allsworth Ross, \emph{Social Control} (New York, 1901).}


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.”\footnote{See Homer Lane, \emph{Talks to Parents and Teachers} (London, 1928); W. David Wills, \emph{Homer Lane: a Biography} (London, 1964); Howard Jones, \emph{Reluctant Rebels} (London, 1963).} 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!”\footnote{August Aichhorn, \emph{Wayward Youth} (London, 1925).}


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 \dots{} 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.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


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 \emph{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 \emph{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.”\footnote{John Berger, “Freedom and the Czechs” (\emph{New Society}, 29 August 1968).} And Harry Schwartz of the \emph{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.”\footnote{Harry Schwartz, \emph{Prague’s 200 Days} (London, 1969).} 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’”.\footnote{\emph{ibid.}} When the
Soviet tanks rolled in to impose \emph{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 \dots{}”\footnote{\emph{The Listener}, 5 September 1958.} 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”.\footnote{Ladislav Mnacko, \emph{The Seventh Night} (London, 1969).}


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,”\footnote{Schwartz, \emph{op. cit.}} 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 \dots{} Postal
workers established certain free telephone communications between
university towns.”\footnote{Daniel Guérin, “The Czechoslovak Working Class and the Resistance Movement” in \emph{Czechoslovakia and Socialism} (London, 1969).}


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:



\begin{quote}


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 \dots{} The moral achievement is
perhaps unparalleled in revolutionary history \dots{} 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.\footnote{\emph{Encounter}, January 1957.}



\end{quote}


A Hungarian eyewitness of the same events declared:



\begin{quote}


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\dots{}\footnote{Tape-recording in the BBC Sound Archives.}



\end{quote}


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,\footnote{Robert Lyon in \emph{Peace News}, 20 February 1959} 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.”\footnote{Alan Burgess in the \emph{Radio Times}, 13 February 1959.}


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 \emph{Two Thousand Words}, which induce to
anarchist acts, to violating the constitutional character of our political
reform.”\footnote{Appendix III of Philip Windsor and Adam Roberts, \emph{Czechoslovakia 1968} (London, 1969).} 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,”\footnote{George Orwell, \emph{Homage to Catalonia} (London, 1938).} 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.”\footnote{Andy Anderson, \emph{Hungary 1956} (London, 1964).}


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”\footnote{In Noam Chomsky, \emph{American Power and the New Mandarins} (London, 1969).} 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:



\begin{quote}


“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”.\footnote{\emph{ibid.} The best available accounts in English of the collectivisation of industry and agriculture in the Spanish revolution are in Vernon Richards, \emph{Lessons of the Spanish Revolution} (London, Freedom Press, 2\textsuperscript{nd} ed. 1983) and Burnett Bolloten, \emph{The Grand Camouflage} (London, 1961).}



\end{quote}


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{Chapter III. The Dissolution of Leadership}



\begin{quote}


Accustomed as is this age to artificial leadership \dots{} 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.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

John Comerford, \emph{Health the Unknown:\forcelinebreak 
The Story of the Peckham Experiment}


\end{flushright}


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 \dots{}” 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.\footnote{RIBA, \emph{The Architect and His Office} (London, 1962).} 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 \dots{} 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 \emph{dispersed} type of work organisation which can promote an informal
atmosphere of free-flowing ideas \dots{}” 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
\dots{} synchronising individual effort by a continuous give and take of its
members\dots{}”\footnote{Walter Gropius, an address given at the RIBA, April 1956.}


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, “\dots{} 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:



\begin{quote}


What kept us together was our \emph{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 \dots{} Each one made his contribution according
to his interest in the work \dots{} 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.\footnote{Wilhelm Reich, Work Democracy in Action, \emph{Annals of the Orgone Institute}, Vol.~1, 1944.}



\end{quote}


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 \dots{} Just as organisational ties result from common
work interests, so they dissolve when the work interests dissolve or begin
to conflict with each other.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


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 \emph{in} authority, or you can be \emph{an} authority, or
you can \emph{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?”



\begin{quote}


At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers \emph{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 \dots{} 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.\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow}, edited by Colin Ward, (London, Freedom Press, 1985).}



\end{quote}


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”.\footnote{Richard Boston in \emph{Peace News}, 23 February 1962.} 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?



\begin{quote}


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.\footnote{Simon Nicholson, “The Theory of Loose Parts”, \emph{Bulletin of Environmental Education}, April, 1972.}



\end{quote}


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

\chapter{Chapter IV. Harmony through Complexity}



\begin{quote}


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.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

P.-J. Proudhon, \emph{The Theory of Taxation} (1861)


\end{flushright}


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
\emph{Aku-Aku} to \emph{Wai-Wai}. Several anarchist writers of the past did just this:
Kropotkin in his chapter on “Mutual Aid Among Savages”, Élisée Reclus
in his \emph{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 what constitutes “the law”? Raymond Firth writes:
“When we turn to the sphere of primitive law, we are confronted by
difficulties of definition. There is usually no specific code of legislation,
issued by a central authority, and no formal judicial body of the nature of
a court. Nevertheless there are rules which are expected to be obeyed
and which, in fact, are normally kept, and there are means for ensuring
some degree of obedience.\footnote{Raymond Pirth, \emph{Human Types} (London, 1970).}


On the classification of these rules and the definition of law anthropologists
are divided. By the test of the jurist, who equates the law with
what is decided by the courts, “primitive people have no \emph{law}, but simply
a body of customs”; to the sociologists what is important is the whole
body of rules of all sorts that exist in a society and the problem of their
functioning. Malinowski included in primitive law “all types of binding
obligation and any customary action to prevent breaches in the pattern
of social conformity”. Godfrey Wilson takes as the criterion of legal
action “the entry into an issue of one or more members of a social group
who are not themselves personally concerned”, though others would call
the kind of adjudication of a dispute by a senior kinsman or respected
neighbour, which Wilson described among the Nyakysua, not law but
private arbitration. Indeed Kropotkin in his essay \emph{Law and Authority}
singles this out as the antithesis of law: “Many travellers have depicted the
manners of absolutely independent tribes, where laws and chiefs are
unknown, but where the members of the tribe have given up stabbing
one another in every dispute, because the habit of living in society has
ended by developing certain feelings of fraternity and oneness of
interest, and they prefer appealing to a third person to settle their differences.”\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Law and Authority}, reprinted in Baldwin (ed.), \emph{Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets} (New York, 1927, 1968).}


Wilson, however, sees “law” as the concomitant of this habit of living
in society, defining it as “that customary force which is kept in being by
the inherent necessities of systematic co-operation among its members”.
Finally, the school of thought represented by Radcliffe-Brown restricts
the sphere of law to “social control through the systematic application of
the force of politically organised society”. But what kind of political
organisation? Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes distinguished three
types of political system in traditional African societies. Firstly, those like
that of the Bushmen where the largest political units embrace people
who are all related by kinship so that “political relations are co-terminous
with kinship relations”, secondly, those with “specialised political
authority that is institutionalised and vested in roles attached to a state
administration”, and thirdly, those where political authority is uncentralised.
In them “the political system is based upon a balance of power
between many small groups which, with their lack of classes or
specialised political offices, have been called \emph{ordered anarchies}”. Several
African societies which are law-less in this sense — in that there are no
patterns for formal legislation nor for juridical decisions, and which have
no law-enforcement officers of any kind — are described in the symposium
\emph{Tribes Without Rulers}.\footnote{John Middleton and David Tait (eds), \emph{Tribes without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems} (London, 1958).}


The Tiv, a society of 800,000 people who live on either side of the
Benue River in Northern Nigeria were studied by Laura Bohannan.
The political attitudes of the Tiv are conveyed in two expressions, to
“repair the country” and to “spoil the country”. Dr Bohannan explains
that “any act which disturbs the smooth course of social life — war, theft,
witchcraft, quarrels — spoils the country; peace, restitution, successful
arbitration repairs it”. And she warns that if we try “to isolate certain
attributes of the roles of elders or men of influence as political, we falsify
their true social and cultural position \dots{} I mean this in a positive and
not a negative way: a segmentary system of this sort functions not despite
but through the absence of an indigenous concept of ‘the political’.
Only the intricate interrelations of interests and loyalties through the
interconnection of cultural ideology, systems of social grouping, and
organisation of institutions and the consequent moral enforcement of
each by the other, enables the society to work.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


The Dinka are a people numbering some 900,000 living on the fringe
of the central Nile basin in the Southern Sudan. (A correspondent of
The Sunday Times remarked of them that “touchiness, pride and reckless
disobedience are their characteristic reaction towards authority”.)
Godfrey Lienhardt’s contribution to \emph{Tribes Without Rulers} describes their
intricately subdivided society and the very complicated inter-relationships
resulting from the fusion and fission of segments in different
combinations for different economic and functional purposes.



\begin{quote}


It is a part of Dinka political theory that when a subtribe for some reason
prospers and grows large, it tends to draw apart politically from the tribe
of which it was a part and behave like a distinct tribe. The sections of a
large subtribe similarly are thought to grow politically more distant from
each other as they grow larger, so that a large and prosperous section of a
subtribe may break away from other sections \dots{} In the Dinka view, the
tendency is always for their political segments, as for their agnatic
genealogical segments, to grow apart from each other in the course of
time and through the increase in population which they suppose time to
bring.\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}



\end{quote}


The Dinka explain their cellular sub-division with such phrases as “It
became too big, so it separated” and “They were together long ago but
now they have separated.” They value the unity of their tribes and
descent groups but at the same time they value the feeling for autonomy
in the component segments which lead to fragmentation, and Dr
Lienhardt observes that “these values of personal autonomy and of its
several sub-segments are from time to time in conflict”.


From a totally different African setting comes Ernest Gellner’s
description of the system of trial by collective oath which operated
until recently among the Berber tribes of the Atlas mountains:



\begin{quote}


This system originally functioned against a background of anarchy; there
was no law-enforcing agency. But whilst there was nothing resembling a
state, there was a society, for everyone recognised, more or less, the
same code, and recognised, more or less the universal desirability of
pacific settlements of disputes \dots{} Suppose a man is accused of an offence
by another: the man can clear himself of the charge by bringing a set of
men, co-jurors so to speak, to testify in a fixed order, according to
family proximity in the male line to the man on trial \dots{} The rule, the
decision procedure, so to speak is that if some of the co-jurors fail to
turn up, or fail to testify, or make a slip while testifying, the whole oath
is invalid and the case is lost. The losing party is then obliged to pay the
appropriate fine determined by custom. In some regions, the rule is
even stranger: those co-jurors who failed to turn up, or failed when
testifying are liable for the fine, rather than the testifying group
as a whole.\footnote{Ernest Gellner, “How to Live in Anarchy”, \emph{The Listener}, 3 April 1958.}



\end{quote}


How strange, Mr Gellner remarks, that this system should work at all.
Not only by contrast with the legal procedures we are familiar with, but
in view of the possible motives of the participants. One would expect
the co-jurors always to testify for their clansman, whether they thought
him to be innocent or guilty. Yet the system did work, not merely
because the tribesmen believed perjury a sin, punishable by supernatural
forces, but because other social forces are at work. “We must remember
that each of the two groups is just as anarchic internally as the two
are in their external relations with each other: neither internally nor externally
is there a law-and-order-enforcement machinery, though there is a
recognised law and a recognised obligation to respect law and order. In
fact this distinction between internal and external politics does not
apply.” And the system was applied in disputes at any level, between two
families or between tribal confederacies numbered in tens of thousands.



\begin{quote}


Given this anarchy, this lack of enforcement within as well as without
the group, one way short of violence or expulsion which a clan or
family have of disciplining one of their own number is by letting him
down at the collective oath. Far from never having a motive for letting
down a clansman, or only a transcendental one, they may in fact
frequently have such a motive: a habitual offender within their own
number may be a positive danger to the group. If he repeats his offences
he may well provoke surrounding groups into forming a coalition
against it — if, that is, his own group habitually stands by him at the
collective oath.



\end{quote}


They may do it the first time but the second time they may, even at
their own expense, decide to teach him a lesson though it imposes a
legal defeat on themselves. Thus trial by collective oath can be a
“genuine and sensitive decision procedure whose verdict is a function of
a number of things, amongst which justice is one but not the only one”.
Mr Gellner develops his account of this extraordinarily subtle system at
great length. The threat of the collective oath is often enough to settle
the issue out of court, and the oath itself” does indeed give any determined,
cohesive clan the veto on any decision that would, in virtue of
that cohesion, unenforceable anyway; on the other hand, however, it
gives groups the possibility of half-throwing culprits to the wolves, of
giving in gracefully, or disciplining the unruly member without actually
having to expel him or kill him.” The strange system of social control he
describes provides, not a series of totally unenforceable judgments, but
at least a half-loaf of justice. One common misconception, he
concludes, is that “the situation in anarchic contexts would be improved
if only the participants could overcome their clan or bloc loyalty, if only,
instead of “my clan or bloc, right or wrong”, they would think and act as
individuals \dots{} It seems to me, on the contrary, that unless and until
there is genuine enforcement, only blocs or clans can make an anarchic
system work.”


Now my purpose in describing the handling of social conflict in non-governmental
societies is not to suggest that we should adopt collective
oaths as a means of enforcing social norms, but to emphasise that it is not
anarchy but government which is a crude simplification of social organisation,
and that the very complexity of these tribal societies is the condition
of their successful functioning. The editors of \emph{Tribes Without Rulers}
summarise the implications in these terms:



\begin{quote}


In societies lacking ranked and specialised holders of political authority
the relations of local groups to one another are seen as a balance of
power, maintained by competition between them. Corporate groups
may be arranged hierarchically in a series of levels; each group is significant
in different circumstances and in connection with different social
activities — economic, ritual and governmental. Relations at one level
are competitive in one situation, but in another the formerly competitive
groups merge in mutual alliance against an outside group. A group
at any level has competitive relations with others to ensure the maintenance
of its own identity and the rights that belong to it as a corporation,
and it may have internal administrative relations that ensure
coherence of its constituent elements. The aggregates that emerge as
units in one context are merged into larger aggregates in others \dots{}\footnote{Middleton and Tait, \emph{op.cit.}}



\end{quote}


The “balance of power” is in fact the method by which social equilibrium
is maintained in such societies. Not the balance of power as
conceived in nineteenth-century international diplomacy, but in terms
of the resolution of forces, exemplified by the physical sciences.
Harmony results not from unity but from complexity. It appears, as
Kropotkin put it:



\begin{quote}


as a temporary adjustment established among all forces acting upon a
given spot — a provisory adaption. And that adjustment will only last
under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing
every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions \dots{}


Under the name of anarchism, a new interpretation of the past and
present life of society arises \dots{} It comprises in its midst an infinite variety
of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It
even calls for struggles and contentions; because we know that periods
of contests, so long as they were freely fought out without the weight of
constituted authority being thrown on one side of the balance, were
periods when human genius took its mightiest flights \dots{}


It seeks the most complete development of individuality combined
with the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects,
in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever
modified associations which carry in themselves the elements of their
durability and constantly assume new forms which answer best to the
multiple aspirations of all. A society to which pre-established forms,
crystallised by law, are repugnant; which looks for harmony in an ever-changing
and fugitive equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces
and influences of every kind, following their own course \dots{}\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal}, reprinted in Baldwin, op.cit.}



\end{quote}


Anarchy is a function, not of a society’s simplicity and lack of social
organisation, but of its complexity and multiplicity of social organisations.
Cybernetics, the science of control and communication systems,
throws valuable light on the anarchist conception of complex self-organising
systems. If we must identify biological and political systems, wrote
the neurologist Grey Walter, our own brains would seem to illustrate the
capacity and limitations of an anarchosyndicalist community: “We find
no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big Brother.
Within our heads our very lives depend on equality of opportunity, on
specialisation with versatility, on free communication and just restraint,
a freedom without interference. Here too, local minorities can and do
control their own means of production and expression in free and equal
intercourse with their neighbours.”\footnote{W. Grey Walter, “The Development and Significance of Cybernetics”, \emph{Anarchy} 25, March 1963.} His observations led John D.
McEwan to pursue the cybernetic model further. Pointing to the relevance
of the Principle of Requisite Variety (“if stability is to be attained
the variety of the controlling system must be at least as great as the
variety of the system to be controlled”) he cites Stafford Beer’s illustration
of the way in which conventional managerial ideas of organisation
fail to satisfy this principle. Beer imagines a visitor from Mars who
examines the activities at the lower levels of some large undertaking, the
brains of the workers concerned, and the organisational chart which
purports to show how the undertaking is controlled. He deduces that
the creatures at the top of the hierarchy must have heads yards wide.
McEwan contrasts two models of decision-making and control:



\begin{quote}


First we have the model current among management theorists in
industry, with its counterpart in conventional thinking about government
in society as a whole. This is the model of a rigid pyramidical hierarchy,
with lines of “communication and command” running from the
top to the bottom of the pyramid. There is fixed delineation of responsibility,
each element has a specified role, and the procedures to be
followed at any level are determined within fairly narrow limits, and
may only be changed by decisions of elements higher in the hierarchy.
The role of the top group of the hierarchy is sometimes supposed to be
comparable to the “brain” of the system.


The other model is from the cybernetics of evolving self-organising
systems. Here we have a system of large variety, sufficient to cope with a
complex, unpredictable environment. Its characteristics are changing
structure, modifying itself under continual feedback from the environment,
exhibiting “redundancy of potential command”, and involving
complex interlocking control structures. Learning and decision-making
are distributed throughout the system, denser perhaps in some areas than
in others.\footnote{John D. McEwin, “Anarchism and the Cybernetics of Self-organising Systems, Anarchy 31, September 1963, reprinted in Colin Ward (ed.), \emph{A Decade of Anarchy}, (London, Freedom Press, 1987).}



\end{quote}


The same cybernetic criticism of the hierarchical, centralised, governmental
concept of organisation has come more recently (and in rather
more opaque language) from Donald Schon in his 1970 Reith Lectures.
He writes that “the centre-periphery model has been the dominant
model in our society for the growth and diffusion of organisations
defined at high levels of specificity. For such a system, the uniform,
simple message is essential. The system’s ability to handle complex situations
depends upon a simple message and upon growth through uniform
replication.” Like the anarchists, he sees as an alternative, \emph{networks} “of
elements connecting through one another rather than to each other
through a centre”, characterised “by their scope, complexity, stability,
homogeneity and flexibility” in which “nuclei of leadership emerge and
shift” with “the infrastructure powerful enough for the system to hold
itself together\dots{} without any central facilitator or supporter \dots{}”\footnote{Donald Schon, \emph{Beyond the Stable State} (London, 1971).}


Alone among the reviewers of Donald Schon’s lectures Mary Douglas
perceived the connection with non-governmental tribal societies:



\begin{quote}


Once anthropologists thought that if a tribe has no central authority it
had no political unity. We were thoroughly dominated by centre theory
and missed what was under our noses. Then in 1940 Professor Evans-Pritchard
described the Nuer political system and Professor Fortes the
Tallensi. They analysed something uncannily close to Schon’s
Movement or network system: a political structure with no centre and
no head, loosely held together by the opposition of its parts. Authority
was diffused through the entire population. In each case politics were
conducted in an idiom of high generality, the idiom of kinship, which
sat very loosely to the political facts. In different contexts, different
versions of their governing principles had only a family resemblance.
The system was invincible and flexible.\footnote{Mary Douglas in \emph{The Listener}, 1971.}



\end{quote}


Thus both anthropology and cybernetic theory support Kropotkin’s
contention that in a society without government, harmony would result
from ‘an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium
between the multitudes of forces and influences’ expressed in “an
interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations
of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international —
temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes:
production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary
arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory,
and so on; and on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing
number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs.”\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, article on \emph{Anarchism} written in 1905 for \emph{Encyclopaedia Britannica}, 11\textsuperscript{th} edition. (Reprinted in \emph{Anarchism \& Anarchist Communism}, London, Freedom Press, 1987).}


How crude the governmental model seems by comparison, whether
in social administration, industry, education or economic planning. No
wonder it is so unresponsive to actual needs. No wonder, as it attempts
to solve its problems by fusion, amalgamation, rationalisation and coordination,
they only become worse because of the clogging of the lines
of communication. The anarchist alternative is that of fragmentation,
fission rather than fusion, diversity rather than unity, a mass of societies
rather than a mass society.

\chapter{Chapter V. Topless Federations}



\begin{quote}


The fascinating secret of a well-functioning social organism seems thus to lie not in
its overall unity but in its structure, maintained in health by the life-preserving
mechanism of division operating through myriads of cell-splittings and rejuvenations
taking place under the smooth skin of an apparently unchanging body.
Wherever, because of age or bad design, this rejuvenating process of subdivision
gives way to the calcifying process of cell unification, the cells, now growing behind
the protection of their hardened frames beyond their divinely allotted limits, begin,
as in cancer, to develop those hostile, arrogant great-power complexes which cannot
be brought to an end until the infested organism is either devoured, or a forceful
operation succeeds in restoring the small-cell pattern.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Leopold Kohr, \emph{The Breakdown of Nations}
<\Slash{}irght>


People used to smile at Kropotkin when he instanced the lifeboat institution
as an example of the kind of organisation envisaged by anarchists,
but he did so simply to illustrate that voluntary and completely non-coercive
organisations could provide a complex network of services
without the principle of authority intervening. Two other examples
which we often use to help people to conceive the federal principle
which anarchists see as the way in which local groups and associations
could combine for complex functions without any central authority are
the postal service and the railways. You can post a letter from here to
China or Chile, confident that it will arrive, as a result of freely arrived-at
agreements between different national post offices, without there
being any central world postal authority at all. Or you can travel across
Europe over the lines of a dozen railway systems — capitalist and
communist — co-ordinated by agreement between different railway
undertakings, without \emph{any kind} of central railway authority. The same is
true of broadcasting organisations and several other kinds of internationally
co-ordinated activities. Nor is there any reason to suppose that
the constituent parts of complex federations could not run efficiently
on the basis of voluntary association. (When we have in Britain more
than one railway line running scheduled services on time, co-ordinating
with British Rail, and operated by a bunch of amateurs, who dare say
that the railwaymen could not operate their services without the aid of
the bureaucratic hierarchy?) Even within the structure of capitalist
industry there are interesting experiments in organising work on the
basis of small autonomous groups. Industrial militants regard such
ventures with suspicion, as well they might, for they are undertaken not
with the idea of stimulating workers’ autonomy but with that of
increasing productivity. But they are valuable in illustrating our
contention that the whole pyramid of hierarchical authority, which has
been built up in industry as in every other sphere of life, is a giant
confidence trick by which generations of workers have been coerced in the
first instance, hoodwinked in the second, and finally brainwashed into
accepting.


In territorial terms, the great anarchist advocate of federalism was
Proudhon who was thinking not of customs unions like the European
Common Market nor of a confederation of states or a world federal
government but of a basic principle of human organisation:



\begin{quote}


In his view the federal principle should operate from the simplest level
of society. The organisation of administration should begin locally and as
near the direct control of the people as possible; individuals should start
the process by federating into communes and associations. Above that
primary level the confederal organisation would become less an organ of
administration than of coordination between local units. Thus the
nation would be replaced by a geographical confederation of regions,
and Europe would become a confederation of confederations, in which
the interest of the smallest province would have as much expression as
that of the largest, and in which all affairs would be settled by mutual
agreement, contract, and arbitration. In terms of the evolution of anarchist
ideas, \emph{Du Principe Federatif} (1863) is one of the most important of
Proudhon’s books, since it presents the first intensive libertarian development
of the idea of federal organisation as a practical alternative to
political nationalism.\footnote{George Woodcock, \emph{Anarchism: A History if Libertarian Ideas and Movements} (Cleveland 1962; London 1963).}



\end{quote}


Now without wishing to sing a song of praise for the Swiss political
system we can see that, in territorial terms, the twenty-two sovereign
cantons of Switzerland are an outstanding example of a successful federation.
It is a federation of like units, of small cells, and the cantonal
boundaries cut across the linguistic and ethnic boundaries, so that unlike
the many examples of unsuccessful political federation, the confederation
is not dominated by a single powerful unit, so different in size and
scale from the rest that it unbalances the union. The problem of federalism,
as Leopold Kohr puts it in his book \emph{The Breakdown of Nations}, is
one of division, not of union. Proudhon foresaw this:



\begin{quote}


Europe would be too large to form a single confederation; it would have
to be a confederation of confederations. This is why I pointed out in my
most recent publication (\emph{Federation and Unity in Italy}) that the first
measure of reform to be made in public law is the re-establishment of
the Italian, Greek, Batavian (Netherlands), Scandinavian and Danubian
confederations as a prelude to the decentralisation of the large States,
followed by a general disarmament. In these conditions all nations
would recover their freedom, and the notion of the balance of power in
Europe would become a reality. This has been envisaged by all political
writers and statesmen but has remained impossible so long as the great
powers are centralised States. It is not surprising that the notion of federation
should have been lost amid the splendours of the great States, since
it is by nature peaceful and mild and plays a self-effacing role on the
political scene.\footnote{P.-J. Proudhon, \emph{Du Principe Federatif} quoted in Stewart Edwards (ed.) \emph{Selected Writings of Pierre Joseph Proudhon} (London, 1970).}



\end{quote}


Peaceful, mild and self-effacing the Swiss may be and we may consider
them a rather stodgy and provincial lot, but they have something in their
national life which we in the nations which are neither mild nor self-effacing
have lost. I was talking to a Swiss citizen (or rather a citizen of
Zurich, for strictly speaking that is what he was) about the cutting-back
to profitable inter-city routes of the British railway system, and he
remarked that it would be inconceivable in a Swiss setting that a
chairman in London could decide, as Dr Beeching did in the 1960s, to
“write off the railway system of the north of Scotland. He cited Herbert
Luethy’s study of his country’s political system in which he explained
that:



\begin{quote}


Every Sunday the inhabitants of scores of communes go to the polling
booths to elect their civil servants, ratify such and such an item of
expenditure, or decide whether a road or a school should be built; after
settling the business of the commune, they deal with cantonal elections
and voting on cantonal issues; lastly \dots{} come the decisions on federal
issues. In some cantons the sovereign people still meet in Rousseau-like
fashion to discuss questions of common interest. It may be thought that
this ancient form of assembly is no more than a pious tradition with a
certain value as a tourist attraction. If so, it is worth looking at the results
of local democracy.


The simplest example is the Swiss railway system, which is the
densest network in the world. At great cost and with great trouble it has
been made to serve the needs of the smallest localities and most remote
valleys, not as a paying proposition but because such was the will of the
people. It is the outcome of fierce political struggles. In the nineteenth
century the “democratic railway movement” brought the small Swiss
communities into conflict with the big towns, which had plans for
centralisation \dots{}


And if we compare the Swiss system with the French which, with
admirable geometrical regularity, is entirely centred on Paris so that the
prosperity or the the life or death, of whole regions has
depended on the quality of the link with the capital we see the difference
between a centralised state and a federal alliance, The railway map
is the easiest to read at a glance, but let us now superimpose on it
another showing economic activity and the movement of population.
The distribution of industrial activity all over Switzerland, even in the
outlying areas, accounts for the strength and stability of the social structure
of the country and prevented those horrible nineteenth-century
concentrations of industry, with their slums and rootless proletariat.\footnote{Herbert Luethy, “Has Switzerland a Future?”, \emph{Encounter}, December 1962.}



\end{quote}


I suspect that times have changed, even in Switzerland, and quote Dr
Luethy, not to praise Swiss democracy, but to indicate that the federal
principle which is at the centre of anarchist theory is worth very much
more attention than it is given in the textbooks on political science.
Even in the context of ordinary political and economic institutions, its
adoptation has a far-reaching effect. If you doubt this, consult an up-to-date
map of British Rail.


The federal principle applies to every kind of human organisation.
You can readily see its application to communications of all kinds: a
network of local papers sharing stories, a network of local radio and
television stations supported by local listeners (as already happen with a
handful of stations in the United States) sharing programmes,\footnote{See Theodore Roszak, “The Case for Listener-supported Radio”, \emph{Anarchy} 93, November 1968.} a network
of local telephone services (it already happens in Hull which through
some historical anomaly runs its own telephone system and gives its
citizens a rather better service than the Post Office gives the rest of us).


It already applies in the world of voluntary associations, unions, and
pressure groups, and you will not disagree that the lively and active ones
are those where activity and decision-making is initiated at local level,
while those that are centrally controlled are ossified and out of touch
with their apathetic membership, Those readers who remember the days
of CND and the Committee of 100 may recall the episode of the Spies
for Peace. A group of people unearthed details of the RSGs or Regional
Seats of Government, underground hide-outs to ensure the survival of
the ruling elite in the case of nuclear war. It was of course illegal to
publish this information, yet all over the country it appeared in little
anonymous duplicated pamphlets within a few days, providing an enormously
interesting example of \emph{ad hoc} federal activity through loose
networks of active individuals. We later published in \emph{Anarchy} some
reflections on the implications of this:


One lesson to be drawn from “Spies for Peace” is the advantage of \emph{ad hoc}
organisation, coming rapidly into being and if necessary disappearing
with the same speed, but leaving behind innumerable centres of activity,
like ripples and eddies on a pond, after a stone has been thrown into it.


Traditional politics (both “revolutionary” and “reformist”) are based on
a central dynamo, with a transmission belt leading outwards. Capture of
the dynamo, or its conversion to other purposes, may break the transmission
entirely. “Spies for Peace” seems to have operated on an entirely
different basis. Messages were passed from mouth to mouth along the
route, documents from hand to hand. One group passed a secret to a
second, which then set about reprinting it. A caravan became the source
of a leaflet, a shopping basket a distribution centre. A hundred copies of
a pamphlet are distributed in the streets: some are sure to reach the
people who will distribute them.


Contacts are built on a face to face basis. One knows the personal
limitations of one’s comrades. X is an expert at steering a meeting
through procedural shoals, but cannot work as a duplicator. Y can use a
small printing press, but is unable to write a leaflet. Z can express himself
in public, but cannot sell pamphlets. Every task elects its own workers,
and there is no need for an elaborate show of hands. Seekers of personal
power and glory get little thrill from the anonymously and skilfully
illegal. The prospect of prison breeds out the leader complex. Every
member of a group may be called upon to undertake key tasks. And all-round
talent is developed in all. The development of small groups for
mutual aid could form a basis for an effective resistance movement.


There are important conclusions. Revolution does not need
conveyor belt organisation. It needs hundreds, thousands, and finally
millions of people meeting in groups with informal contacts with each
other. It needs mass consciousness. If one group takes an initiative that is
valuable, others will take it up. The methods must be tailored to the
society we live in. The FLN could use armed warfare, for it had hills and
thickets to retreat into. We are faced by the overwhelming physical
force of a State better organised and better armed than at any time in its
history. We must react accordingly. The many internal contradictions of
the State must be skilfully exploited. The Dusseldorf authorities were
caught in their own regulations when the disarmers refused to fasten
their safety belts. MI5 cannot conceive of subversion that is not master-minded
by a sinister Communist agent. It is incapable of dealing with a
movement where nobody takes orders from anyone else. Through
action, autonomy and revolutionary initiative will be developed still
further. To cope with our activities the apparatus of repression will
become even more centralised and even more bureaucratic. This will
enhance our opportunities rather than lessen them.\footnote{“The Spies for Peace Story”, \emph{Anarchy} 29, July 1963.}


This was a federation whose members did not even know each other,
but whose constituent cells had an intimate personal understanding. The
passport to membership was simply a common involvement in a
common task. Innumerable voluntary organisations from the Scouts to
the Automobile Association started in the same impromptu way. Their
ossification began from the centre. Their mistake was a faith in
centralism. The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity
should begin from what is local and immediate, should link in a network
with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the
original ones grow. If there is any human activity that does not appear to
fit this pattern our first question should be “Why not?” and our second
should be “How can we re-arrange it so as to provide for local autonomy,
local responsibility, and the fulfilment of local needs?”


\end{flushright}

\chapter{Chapter VI. Who Is To Plan?}



\begin{quote}


Urban development is the capitalist definition of space. It is one particular realisation
of the technically possible, and it excludes all alternatives. Urban studies
should be seen — like aesthetics, whose path to complete confusion they are about to
follow — as a rather neglected type of penal reform: an epidemiology of the social
disease called revolt.


The “theory” of urban development seeks to enlist the support of its victims,
to persuade them that they have really chosen the bureaucratic form of conditioning
expressed by modem architecture. To this end, all the emphasis is placed on
utility, the better to hide the fact that this architecture’s real utility is to control
men and reify the relations between them. People need a roof over their heads:
superblocks provide it. People need informing and entertaining: telly does just
that. But of course the kind of information, entertainment and place to live which
such arguments help sell are not created for people at all, but rather without them
and against them.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Kotanyi and Vaneigem, \emph{Theses on Unitary Urbanism}


\end{flushright}


Contemporary town planning had its origins in the sanitary reform and
public health movements of the nineteenth century, overlaid by architectural
notions about civic design, economic notions about the
location of industry, and above all by engineering notions about
highway planning. Today, when there are close links between official
planners and speculative developers, to the corruption of the former
and the enrichment of the latter, we forget that there was also, in the
early ideologists of town planning like Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer
Howard, the hope of a great popular movement for town improvement
and city development, and for a regionalist and decentralist approach to
physical planning. There was even a link with anarchism through the
persons of anarchist geographers like Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus and
their friendship with Patrick Geddes (whose biographer writes: “an
interesting book could be written about the scientific origins of the
international anarchist movement, and if it were, the name of Geddes
would not be absent”.)\footnote{Philip Mairet, \emph{Patrick Geddes} (London, 1959).}


But, in a society where urban land and its development are in the
hands of speculative entrepreneurs and where the powers of urban initiative
are in the hands of local and national government, it was inevitable
that the processes of change and innovation should be controlled by
bureaucracies and speculators or by an alliance between the two. With
not the slightest provision for popular initiative and choice in the whole
planning process it is scarcely surprising that the citizen mistrusts and
fears the “planner” who for him is just one more municipal functionary
working in secrecy in City Hall.


When the poor working-class districts of our cities were devastated by
bombing in the Second World War it was said that Hitler had
provided the opportunity for massive slum clearance and reconstruction which
could never have been achieved in peace-time. Comprehensive redevelopment
of the bombed areas was undertaken. But so wedded was the
planning profession and its municipal employers to the huge, utilitarian
rehousing project that they proceeded with their own \emph{blitzkrieg}, with the
demolition contractor taking the place of the bomber.


“Raze and rise” was their crude philosophy, a terrible simplification of
the historical process of urban decay and renewal, as though the intention
was to obliterate the fact that our cities had a past. And it was
pursued with the thoroughness of total war, as you can see with surrealist
clarity in a city like Liverpool where hundreds of acres have been devastate
while neither the Corporation nor anyone else has the finance for
rebuilding. They either sow grass on the flattened streets or deposit
rubble to keep out the Gypsies. Another aspect of the war of planning
against the poor has been the universal policy of building inner ring
roads or urban motorways for the benefit of the out-of-town commuter
and the motoring lobby. The highway engineer has staked his professional
reputation on getting the traffic through — at whatever cost — and,
needless to say, it is the poor districts of the city that provide the cheapest
route.


In the United States similar policies of urban renewal have meant the
destruction of the run-down, top-down sector of town to replace low-income
housing by office blocks, parking lots or expensive apartments at
high rents. In practice, “bringing back life to the city” meant “running
the Blacks out of town”. What happened to the inhabitants unable to
afford the new high rents? Obviously they were squeezed into the
remaining run-down districts, thus increasing their housing problems.
The result, apart from the long, hot summers of the late 1960s, was a
revulsion against the idea of “planning”, and the growth of the idea of the
planner, not as the servant of the powerful interests that govern the city
but as the advocate of the inhabitants, to help them formulate their own
plan, or at least their own demands on City Hall.


The same loss of faith in “planning” led to the provisions in current
British legislation for “public participation in planning”.\footnote{Town and Country Planning Act 1968, and \emph{People and Planning: Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning} (Skeffington Report), (London: 1969).} So foreign are
these mildly democratic notions to the way things are actually managed
in a formally democratic society that many of the early attempts at
promoting “advocacy planning” have been seen as yet another subtle
form of manipulation, of gaining a community’s acquiescence in its own
destruction, while in Britain the planning profession’s interpretation of
public participation has simply meant \emph{informing} the public of what is in
store once the basic decisions have already been taken. In urban
rehousing the planners congratulate themselves on abandoning the
inhuman and grossly uneconomic tower block housing policy only to
institute urban rehabilitation policies which in practice have meant that
landlords, aided by government grants, have rehabilitated their property,
“winkled out” the original tenants and either let the improved properties
at middle-class rents or sold them to middle-class purchasers. Their
former tenants are added to the numbers of overcrowded or homeless
city dwellers, compelled by their low incomes to be the superfluous
people, the non-citizens of the city who man its essential services at
incomes that do not allow them to live there above the squalor level.


Planning, the essential grid of an ordered society which, it is said,
makes anarchy “an impossible dream”, turns out to be yet another way in
which the rich and powerful oppress and harass the weak and poor. The
disillusionment with planning as a plausible activity has led to quite
serious suggestions that we would be better off without it, not merely, as
would be predictable, from the free market entrepreneurs, resenting any
limitation on their sacred right to make maximum profits, but from
involved professionals. One such group in Britain flew a kite labelled
“Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom”. Why not have the courage,
they asked, to let people shape their own environment? And they
declared that:



\begin{quote}


The whole concept of planning (the town and country kind at least) has
gone cock-eyed. What we have today represents a whole cumulation of
good intentions. And what those good intentions are worth, we have
almost no way of knowing \dots{} As Melvin Webber has pointed out:
planning is the only branch of knowledge purporting to be a science
which regards a plan as being \emph{fulfilled} when it is merely \emph{completed}; there’s
seldom any sort of check on whether the plan actually does what it was
meant to do, and whether, if it does something different, this is for the
better or for the worse.\footnote{Rayner Banham, Peter Hall, Paul Barker and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom”, \emph{New Society}, 20 March 1969.}



\end{quote}


They illustrate this with examples of the way in which many of the
aspects of the physical environment that we admire today were developed
for absolutely different reasons, which the planner never foresaw. Most
planning, they declare, is aristocratic or oligarchical in its methods. At a
deeper level Richard Sennett has written a book, \emph{The Uses of Disorder},
which led one critic to declare that “with this book the process of
redefining nineteenth-century anarchism for the twentieth century is
begun”. Several different threads of thought are woven together in
Sennett’s study of “personal identity and city life”. The first is a notion
that he derives from the psychologist Erik Erikson that in adolescence
men seek a purified identity to escape from uncertainty and pain and
that true adulthood is found in the acceptance of diversity and disorder.
The second is that modern American society freezes men in the adolescent
posture — a gross simplification of urban life in which, when rich
enough, people escape from the complexity of the city, with its
problems of cultural diversity and income disparity, to private family
circles of security in the suburbs — the purified community. The third
is that city planning as it has been conceived in the past — with techniques
like zoning and the elimination of “non-conforming users” — has abetted
this process, especially by projecting trends into the future as a basis for
present energy and expenditure.



\begin{quote}


This means guessing the future physical and social requirements of a
community or city and then basing present spending and energy so as to
achieve a readiness for the projected future state. In planning schools,
beginning students usually argue that people’s lives in time are
wandering and unpredictable, that societies have a history in the sense
that they do what was not expected of them, so that this device is
misleading. Planning teachers usually reply that of course the projected
need would be altered by practical objections in the course of being
worked out; the projective-need analysis is a pattern of ideal conditions
rather than a fixed prescription.


But the facts of planning in the last few years have shown that this
disclaimer on the part of planners is something that they do not really
mean. Professional planners of highways, of redevelopment housing, of
inner-city renewal projects have treated challenges from displaced
communities or community groups as a threat to the value of their plans
rather than as a natural part of the effort at social reconstruction. Over
and over again one can hear in planning circles a fear expressed when
the human beings affected by planning changes become even slightly
interested in the remedies proposed for their lives. “Interference”,
“blocking”, and “‘interruption of work” — these are the terms by which
social challenges or divergences from the planners’ projections are interpreted.
What has really happened is that the planners have wanted to
take the plan, the projection in advance, as more “true?” than the historical
turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time of human lives.\footnote{Richard Sennett, \emph{The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life} (New York, 1970; London, 1971).}



\end{quote}


His prescription for overcoming the crisis of American cities is a reversal
of these trends, a move for “outgrowing a purified identity”. He wants
cities where people are forced to confront each other: “There would be
no policing, nor any other form of central control, of schooling, zoning,
renewal, or city activities that could be performed through common
community action, or even more importantly, through direct, non-violent
conflict in the city itself’ Non-violent? Yes, because Sennett
claims that the present, modern, affluent city is one in which aggression
and conflict are denied outlets other than violence, precisely because of
the lack of personal confrontation. (Cries for law and order are loudest
when communities — in the American suburb — are most isolated from
other people in the city.) The clearest example, he suggests, of the way
this violence occurs “is found in the pressures on the police in modern
cities. Police are expected to be bureaucrats of hostility resolution” but “a
society that visualises the lawful response to disorder as an impersonal,
passive coercion only invites terrifying outbreaks of police rioting”.
Whereas the anarchist city that he envisages, “pushing men to say what
they think about each other in order to forge some mutual pattern of
compatibility”, is not a compromise between order and violence but a
wholly different way of living in which people wouldn’t have to choose
between the two:



\begin{quote}


Really “decentralised” power, so that the individual has to deal with
those around him, in a milieu of diversity, involves a change in the
essence of communal control, that is, in the refusal to regulate conflict.
For example, police control of much civil disorder ought to be sharply
curbed; the responsibility for making peace in neighbourhood affairs
ought to fall on the people involved. Because men are now so innocent
and unskilled in the expression of conflict, they can only view these
disorders as spiralling into violence. Until they learn through experience
that the handling of conflict is something that cannot be passed on to
policemen, this polarisation and escalation of conflict into violence will
be the only end they can frame for themselves. This is as true of those
who expect police reprisals against themselves, like the small group of
militant students, as those who call in the police “on their side”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}



\end{quote}


The professional’s task is changed too. “Instead of planning for some
abstract urban whole, planners are going to have to work for the
concrete parts of the city, the different classes, ethnic groups and races it
contains. And the work they do for these people cannot be laying out
their future; the people will have no chance to mature unless they do
that for themselves, unless they are actively involved in shaping their
social lives.”


The emphasis shifts from the distant city planning authority to the
local community association and the growth and growing sophistication
of such associations is a hopeful pointer in the direction of Sennett’s
urban anarchy. We already have examples, both in Britain and in the
United States, of community groups (with no “official” status) developing
their own rehousing plans, just as feasible as those of the local
authority, but more in tune with the desires of tenants, and capable,
even under present-day conditions, of financial viability through
housing society finance. The next step is the Neighborhood Council
idea, and the step after that is for neighbourhoods to achieve real
control of neighbourhood facilities. After that comes the federation of
neighbourhoods.


The paradox here is that you can see the usual indifference and low
electoral turn-out for the local authority elections and, at the same time,
widespread support for and interest in an \emph{ad hoc} community action group
which devotes much of its time to fighting the local authority. From an
anarchist point of view this is not surprising. The council, polarised on
political party lines, remote from the neighbourhood, dominated by its
professional officials who, as Chris Holmes said, operate the machinery
in such a way as to make local initiative fruitless, is the descendent of
nineteenth-century squirearchical paternalism. The Community
Association, springing up from real concern over real issues, operates on
the scale of face-to-face groups, and for this very reason is invested with
a kind of popular legitimacy.


Ioan Bowen Rees, in the course of his valuable book \emph{Government by
Community}, compares the timid recommendations of the Skeffington
Report on public participation in planning with current practice in
Switzerland: “It was with the public that the Swiss began, with the Parish
Meeting, as it were, passing its own planning statute and approving its
own development plan.” The person who is intoxicated by large-scale
thinking asks how planning could operate under these conditions. Well,
Mr Bowen Rees emphasises, “No community in Switzerland is insignificant.
This means that a small commune can — and sometimes does —
hold up a motorway. And also that a small commune can — and sometimes
does — save itself from economic stagnation by its own efforts. And
why not? The result is neither poverty nor chaos.”\footnote{Ioan Bowen Rees, \emph{Government by Community} (London, 1971)}


The idea of social planning and social administration through a
decentralised network of autonomous communities is not a new idea,
it is a return to a very old one. Walter Ullman remarks that the towns
of the Middle Ages “represent a rather clear demonstration of entities
governing themselves” and that: “In order to transact business, the
community assembled in its entirety \dots{} the assembly was not ‘representative’
of the whole, but was the whole.” He describes the antipathy
between federations of autonomous communes and the central
authorities:



\begin{quote}


That the communes, the \emph{communitates}, became the target of attack by the
“establishment” is not difficult to understand. In some instances the word
“commune” was even employed as a term of abuse \dots{} From the point of
view of autonomy it is understandable why and how the towns entered
into alliances, also called \emph{conjurationes}, or leagues with other towns. The
populist complexion of the towns perhaps tended to harbor a certain
revolutionary spirit, directed against the wielders of the \emph{Obrigkeit}, against
Authority.\footnote{Walter Ullmann, \emph{Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages} (London, 1961, 1966).}



\end{quote}


The early history of the United States was a period when in local
administration the Town Meeting was supreme. As Tom Paine wrote:
“For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American
War, and for a longer period in several of the American states, there were
no established forms of government. The old governments had been
abolished and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ
its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval
order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country of
Europe.”\footnote{Tom Paine, \emph{The Rights of Man}. Pt~II. Ch.~1.} And Staughton Lynd comments: “In the American tradition,
too, rebellion against inherited authorities was not mere ‘anti-institutionalism’.
Implicit, sometimes explicit, in the American revolutionary
tradition was a dream of the good society as a voluntary federation of
local communal institutions, perpetually recreated from below by what
Paul Goodman calls ‘a continuous series of existential constitutional
acts’.”\footnote{Staughton Lynd, \emph{Intellectual Origins if American Radicalism} (New York, 1968; London, 1969).}


The rediscovery of community power, arising from the enormities of
centralised bureaucratic planning, could b e the beginning of a recreation
of this tradition. And it is precisely because we are in the very
early stages of rediscovering it in a society dominated by bureaucratic
administration that we have to learn through experience the pitfalls and
disappointments of community organisation without community power,
community consultation as a diversion from real community action. In
Barnsbury, in North London, middle-class amenity pressure groups
succeeded in getting traffic shifted into adjoining working-class districts
where community pressure was less vocally organised. Here, of course,
there is an answer, given years ago in another context by the traffic
pundit, Professor Buchanan: “Sandbag a few streets, and see what
happens.”\footnote{Prof. Colin Buchanan, reported in \emph{The Sunday Times}, 25 September 1966.}


An American planner, Sherry Arnstein, devised a “ladder of participation”
as a means of evaluating the genuineness or spuriousness of
schemes for community participation in planning.\footnote{Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation in the USA”, \emph{Journal of the American Institute of Planners}, July 1969 and \emph{Journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute}, April 1971.} The rungs of her
ladder are:


\begin{alltt}
                                                         CITIZEN CONTROL
                                                  DELEGATED POWER
                                          PARTNERSHIP
                                     PLACATION
                           CONSULTATION
                    INFORMING
             THERAPY
  MANIPULATION
\end{alltt}


Arnstein’s ladder is a very useful device for cutting our ideas about
participation down to size. The Skeffington Report, especially as translated
into practice, is only up to rungs three or four of the ladder. Its
emphasis is on \emph{educating} the public to an understanding of the planning
authorities. It says, “we see the process of giving information and opportunities
for participation as one which leads to a greater understanding
and co-operation rather than to a crescendo of dispute”. But a crescendo
of dispute is precisely what we need if we are ever to climb the rungs
of Arnstein’s ladder to full citizen control.

\chapter{Chapter VII. We House, You Are Housed, They Are Homeless}



\begin{quote}


In English, the word “housing” can be used as a noun or as a verb. When used as
a noun, housing describes a commodity or product. The verb “to house” describes
the process or activity of housing \dots{}


Housing problems are defined by material standards, and housing values are
judged by the material quantity of related products, such as profit or equity. From
the viewpoint of a central planner or an official designer or administrator, these are
self-evident truths \dots{}


According to those for whom housing is an activity, these conclusions are
absurd. They fail to distinguish between what things are, materially speaking,
and what they do in people’s lives. This blindness, which pervades all institutions
of modern society explains the stupidity of tearing down “sub-standard” houses or
“slums” when their occupants have no other place to go but the remaining slums,
unless, of course, they are forced to create new slums from previously “standard”
homes. This blindness also explains the monstrous “low-cost” projects (which
almost always turn out to have very high costs for the public as well as for the
unfortunate “beneficiaries”).



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

John Turner, “Housing as a Verb” in \emph{Freedom to Bulid}


\end{flushright}


Ours is a society in which, 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. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the field of housing: one of those basic human needs which
throughout history and all over the world people have satisfied as well as
they could for themselves, using the materials that were at hand and their
own, and their neighbours’ labour. The marvellously resourceful anonymous
vernacular architecture of every part of the globe is a testimony to
their skill, using timber, straw, grass, leaves, hides, stone, clay, bone,
earth, mud and even snow. Consider the igloo: maximum enclosure of
space with minimum of labour. Cost of materials and transportation, nil.
And all made of water. Nowadays, of course, the eskimos live on welfare
handouts in little northern slums. Man, as Habraken says, “no longer
houses himself: he is housed.”\footnote{N. J. Habraken, \emph{Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing} (London, 1972)}


Even today “a third of the world’s people house themselves with their
own hands, sometimes in the absence of government and professional
intervention, sometimes in spite of it.”\footnote{John Turner and Robert Fichter (eds), \emph{Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of Housing Process} (New York, 1972).} In the rich nations the more
advances that are made in building technology and the more complex
the financial provision that is made for housing, the more intractable the
“problem” becomes. In neither Britain nor the United States has huge
public investment in housing programmes met the needs of the poorest
citizens. In the Third World countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America
the enormous movement of population into the big cities during the last
two decades has resulted in the growth of huge peripheral squatter
settlements around the existing cities, inhabited by the “invisible” people
who have no official urban existence. Pat Crooke points out that cities
grow and develop on two levels, the official, theoretical level and the
popular, actual, unofficial level, and that the majority of the population
of many Latin American cities are unofficial citizens with a “popular
economy” outside the institutional financial structure of the city. Here is
Barbara Ward’s description of these unofficial cities, \emph{colonial proletarias} as
they are called in Mexico, \emph{barriadas} in Peru, \emph{gourbivilles} in Tunis, \emph{bustees} in
India, \emph{gecekondu} in Turkey, \emph{ranchos} in Venezuela:



\begin{quote}


Drive from the neo-functional glass and concrete of any big-city airport
in the developing world to the neo-functional glass and concrete of the
latest big-city hotel and somewhere in between you are bound to pass
one or other of the sectors in which half and more of the city-dwellers
are condemned to live.


Sometimes the modern highway passes above them. Looking down,
the traveller catches a glimpse, under a pall of smoke from cooking pots
in back-yards, of mile on mile of little alleys snaking through densely
packed huts of straw, crumbling brick or beaten tin cans. Or the main
road slices through some pre-existent shanty-town and, for a brief span,
the visitor looks down the endless length of rows of huts, sees the holes,
the mud, the rubbish in the alleyways, skinny chickens picking in the
dirt, multitudes of nearly naked children, hair matted, eyes dull, spindly
legs, and, above them, pathetic lines of rags and torn garments strung up
to dry between the stunted trees.\footnote{Barbara Ward, \emph{Poor World Cities} (London, 1970).}



\end{quote}


Well, that is how it looks to the visitor. The local official citizens don’t
even notice the invisible city. But does it feel like that on the ground to
the inhabitant, making a place of his own, as a physical foothold in urban
life and the urban economy? The official view, from city officials,
governments, newspapermen, and international agencies,
is that such settlements are the breeding-grounds for every kind of
crime, vice, disease, social and family disorganisation. How could they
not be since they sprang up without official sanction or finance and as
the result of illegal seizure of land? The reality is different:



\begin{quote}


Ten years of work in Peruvian \emph{barriadas} indicates that such a
view is grossly inaccurate: although it serves some vested political and
bureaucratic interests, it bears little relation to reality , ..
Instead of chaos and disorganisation, the evidence instead points to
highly organised invasions of public land in the face of violent police
opposition, internal political organisation with yearly local elections,
thousands of people living together in an orderly fashion with no police
protection or public services, The original straw houses constructed
during the invasions are converted as rapidly as possible into brick and
cement structures with an investment totalling millions of dollars in
labour and materials, Employment rates, wages, literacy, and educational
levels are all higher than in central city slums (from which most
\emph{barriada} residents have escaped) and higher than the national
average. Crime, juvenile delinquency, prostitution and gambling are
rare, except for petty thievery, the incidence of which is seemingly
smaller than in other parts of the, city.\footnote{William P. Mangin and John C. Turner, “Benavides and the Barriada Movement” in Paul Oliver (ed.) \emph{Shelter and Society} (London, 1969).}



\end{quote}


Such reports could be quoted from the squatter experience of many parts
of the world. These authors, John Turner and William Mangin, ask the
obvious question: can the \emph{barriada} — a self-help, mass
migration community development by the poor, be exported to, for
example, the United States: ‘Some observers, under the impression that
the governments of Peru, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Greece and Nigeria had
adopted the \emph{barriada} movements as a policy for solving these
same problems, have thought the US could do the same, In fact, these
governments’ main role in \emph{barriada} formation has been their
lack of ability to prevent mass invasions of land. They are simply not
powerful enough nor sure enough of their own survival to prevent
invasions by force. In the United States, the government is firmly
entrenched and could prevent such action. Moreover, every piece of land
is owned by someone, usually with a clear title\dots{}’\footnote{\emph{ibid.}} They point too
to the lessons of Oscar Lewis’s \emph{The Culture of Poverty}: that
putting people into government housing projects does little to halt the
economic cycle in which they are entrapped, while ‘when people move on
their own, seize land, and build their own houses and communities, it
has considerable effect’. Lewis’s evidence shows that many social
strengths, as well as ‘precarious but real economic security’ were lost
when people were moved from the self-created communities of San Juan
into public housing projects. ‘The rents and the initial investment for
public housing are high, at the precise time the family can least afford
to pay. Moreover, public housing is created by architects, planners, and
economists who would not be caught dead living in it, so that the
inhabitants feel no psychological or spiritual claim on it.’\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


In the US, Turner and Mangin conclude, the agencies that are
supposedly helping the poor, in the light of Peruvian experience,
actually seem to be \emph{keeping} them poor.


The poor of the Third World shanty-towns, acting anarchically,
because no authority is powerful enough to prevent them from doing so,
have three freedoms which the poor of the rich world have lost. As John
Turner puts it, they have the freedom of community self-selection, the
freedom to budget one’s own resources and the freedom to shape one’s
own environment. In the rich world, every bit of land belongs
to someone, who has the law and the agents of law-enforcement firmly on
his side. Building regulations and planning legislation are rigidly
enforced, unless you happen to be a developer who can hire architects
and negotiators shrewd enough to find a way round them or who can do
a deal with the authorities.


In looking for parallels in British experience, what exactly are we
seeking? If it is for examples of defiance of the sacred rights of property,
there are examples all through our history. If you go back far enough, all
our ancestors must have been squatters and there have continually been
movements to assert people’s rights to their share of the land. In the
seventeenth century a homeless person could apply to the Quarter
Sessions who, with the consent of the township concerned, could grant
him permission to build a house with a small garden on the common
land. The Digger Movement during the Commonwealth asserted this
right at George’s Hill near Weybridge, and Cromwell’s troops burnt
down their houses. Our history must be full of unrecorded examples of
squatters who were prudent enough to let it be assumed that they had
title to the land. It is certainly full of examples of the theft of the
common land by the rich and powerfuL If we are looking for examples
of people building for themselves, self-build housing societies are a
contemporary one. If it is simply the application of popular direct action
in the field of housing, apart from the squatter movement of 1946, mass
rent strikes, like those in Glasgow in 1915 or in East London in 1938,
are the most notable examples, and there are certainly going to be more
in the future.


At the time of the 1946 squatting campaign, I categorised the stages or
phases common to all examples of popular direct action in housing in a
non-revolutionary situation. Firstly, \emph{initiative}, the individual action or
decision that begins the campaign, the spark that starts the blaze.
Secondly, \emph{consolidation}, when the movement spreads sufficiently to constitute
a threat to property rights and becomes big enough to avoid being
snuffed out by the authorities. Thirdly, \emph{success}, when the authorities have
to concede to the movement what it has won. Finally, \emph{official action},
usually undertaken unwillingly to placate the popular demand, or to
incorporate it in the status quo.\footnote{Colin Ward, “The People Act”, \emph{Freedom}, Vol.~7, No.~22, 24 August 1946}


The 1946 campaign was based on the large-scale seizure of army
camps emptied at the end of the war. It started in May of that year when
some homeless families in Lincolnshire occupied an empty camp, and it
spread like wildfire until hundreds of camps were seized in every part of
Britain. By October 1,038 camps had been occupied by 40,000 families
in England and Wales, and another 5,000 families in Scotland. That
month, Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health who was responsible for
the government’s housing programme, accused the squatters of “jumping
their place in the housing queue”. In fact, of course, they were jumping
right out of the queue by moving into buildings which would not
otherwise have been used for housing purposes. Then suddenly the
Ministry of Works, which had previously declared itself not interested,
found it possible to offer the Ministry of Health 850 former service
camps, and squatting became “official”.


Some of the original squatter communities lasted for years. Over a
hundred families, who in 1946 occupied a camp known as Field Farm in
Oxfordshire, stayed together and twelve years later were finally rehoused
in the new village of Berinsfield on the same site.


A very revealing account of the differences between the “official” and
the “unofficial” squatters comes from a newspaper account of a camp in
Lancashire after the first winter:



\begin{quote}


There are two camps within the camp — the official squatters (that is the
people placed in the huts after the first invasion) and the unofficial
squatters (the veterans, who have been allowed to remain on sufferance).
Both pay the same rent of 10s a week — but there the similarity ends.
Although one would have imagined that the acceptance of rent from
both should accord them identical privileges, in fact, it does not.
Workmen have put up partitions in the huts of the official squatters —
and have put in sinks and other numerous conveniences. These are the
sheep; the goats have perforce to fend for themselves.


A commentary on the situation was made by one of the young
welfare officers attached to the housing department. On her visit of
inspection she found that the goats had set to work with a will, improvising
partitions, running up curtains, distempering, painting and using
initiative. The official squatters, on the other hand, sat about glumly
without using initiative or lending a hand to help themselves and
bemoaning their fate, even though might have been removed from
the most appalling slum property. Until the overworked corporation
workmen got around to them they would not attempt to improve affairs
themselves.\footnote{“The Squatters in Winter”, \emph{News Chronicle}, 14 January 1947.}



\end{quote}


This story reveals a great deal about the state of mind that is induced by
free and independent action, and that which is induced by dependence
and inertia: the difference between people who initiate things and act for
themselves and people to whom things just happen.


The more recent squatters’ campaign in Britain had its origins in the
participation of the “libertarian Left” in campaigns in the 1960s over
conditions in official reception centres for homeless people, principally
the year-long campaign to improve conditions at the King Hill hostel in
Kent. “The King Hill campaign began spontaneously among the hostel
inmates, and when outsiders joined it a general principle was that decisions
should be taken by the homeless people themselves and the activities
should confine their part to giving advice, gathering information,
getting publicity and raising support and this pattern has been repeated
in every subsequent campaign.”\footnote{Nicolas Walter, “The New Squatters”, \emph{Anarchy}, Vol~9, No.~102, August 1969, reprinted in Colin Ward (ed.), \emph{A Decade of Anarchy}, (London, Freedom Press, 1987).} From the success of the King Hill
campaign the squatters’ movement passed on to the occupation of
empty property, mostly belonging to local authorities who had
purchased it for eventual demolition for road improvements, car parks,
municipal offices, or in the course of deals with developers. This was at
first resisted by the authorities, and a protracted lawsuit followed the use
of so-called private detectives and security agencies to terrorise and
intimidate the squatters. Councils also deliberately destroyed premises,
(and are continuing to do so) in order to keep the squatters out. The
London Family Squatters Association then applied a kind of Gandhian
moral blackmail before the court of public opinion to enforce the
collaboration of borough councils in handing over short-term accommodation
to squatting families. In some cases, to avoid political embarrassment,
councils have simply turned a blind eye to the existence of the
squatters.


Just one of the many predictable paradoxes of housing in Britain is the
gulf between the owner-occupier and the municipal tenant. Nearly a
third of the population live in municipally-owned houses or flats, but
there is not a single estate controlled by its tenants, apart from a handful
of co-operative housing societies. The owner-occupier cherishes and
improves his home, although its space standards and structural quality
may be lower than that of the prize-winning piece of municipal architecture
whose tenant displays little pride or pleasure in \emph{his} home. The
municipal tenant is trapped in a syndrome of dependence and resentment,
which is an accurate reflection of his housing situation. People
care about what is theirs, what they can modify, alter, adapt to changing
needs and improve for themselves. They must be able to attack their
environment to make it truly their own. They must have a direct responsibility
for it.


As the pressure on municipal tenants grows through the continuous
rent increases which they are powerless to oppose except by collective
resistance, so the demand will grow for a change in the status of the
tenant, and for tenant control. The tenant take-over of the municipal
estate is one of those obviously sensible ideas which is dormant because
our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the grooves of nineteenth-century
paternalism. We have the fully-documented case-history
of Oslo in Norway as a guide here. It began with the problems of one of
their pre-war estates with low standards, an unpleasant appearance and
great resistance to an increase in rents to cover the cost of improvements.
As an experiment the estate was turned over to a tenant co-operative, a
policy which transformed both the estate and the tenants’ attitudes.
Now Oslo’s whole housing policy is based on this principle. This is not
anarchy, but it is one of its ingredients.\footnote{Andrew Gilmour, \emph{The Sale if Council Houses in Oslo} (Edinburgh, 1971) For a fuller presentation of the case for tenant control see Colin Ward, “Tenants Take Over” (\emph{Anarchy} 83, January 1968).}

\chapter{Chapter VIII. Open and Closed Families}



\begin{quote}


In choosing a partner we try both to retain the relationships we have enjoyed in
childhood, and to recoup ourselves for fantasies which have been denied us. Mate-selection
accordingly becomes for many an attempt to cast a particular part in a
fantasy production of their own, and since both parties have the same intention but
rarely quite the same fantasies, the result may well be a duel of rival producers.
There are men, as Stanley Spencer said of himself, who need two complementary
wives, and women who need two complementary husbands, or at least two
complementary love objects. if we insist first that this is immoral or “unfaithful”,
and second that should it occur there is an obligation on each love-object to insist
on exclusive rights, we merely add unnecessary difficulties to a problem which
might have presented none, or at least presented fewer, if anyone were permitted to
solve it in their own way.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Alex Comfort, \emph{Sex in Society}


\end{flushright}


One essentially anarchist revolution that has advanced enormously in
our own day is the sexual revolution. It is anarchist precisely because it
involves denying the authority of the regulations laid down by the state
and by various religious enterprises over the activities of the individual.
And we can claim that it has advanced, not because of the “breakdown”
of the family that moralists (quite erroneously) see all around them, but
because in Western society more and more people have decided to
conduct their sexual lives as they see best. Those who have prophesied
dreadful consequences as a result of the greater sexual freedom which
the young assert — unwanted babies, venereal disease and so on — are
usually the very same people who seek the fulfilment of their prophesies
by opposing the free availability to the young of contraception and the
removal of the stigma and mystification that surround venereal disease.


The official code on sexual matters was bequeathed to the state by the
Christian Church, and has been harder and harder to justify with the
decline of the beliefs on which it was based. Anarchists, from Emma
Goldman to Alex Comfort, have observed the connection between
political and sexual repression and, although those who think sexual
liberation is necessarily going to lead to political and economic liberation
are probably optimistic, it certainly makes people happier. That
there is no immutable basis for sexual codes can be seen from the wide
varieties in accepted behaviour and in legislation on sexual matters at
different periods and in different countries. Male homosexuality became
a “problem” only because it was the subject of legislation. Female homosexuality
was no problem because its existence was ignored by (male)
legislators. The legal anomalies are sometimes hilarious: “Who can
explain just why anal intercourse is legal in Scotland between male and
female, but illegal between male and male? Why is anal intercourse
illegal in England between male and female, yet okay between males if
both are over 21?”\footnote{Ian Dunn, “Gay Liberation in Scotland”, \emph{Scottish International Review}, March 1972.}


The more the law is tinkered with in the effort to make it more
rational the more absurdities are revealed. Does this mean that there are
no rational codes for sexual behaviour? Of course not: they simply get
buried in the irrationalities or devalued through association with irrelevant
prohibitions. Alex Comfort, who sees sex as “the healthiest and
most important human sport” suggests that “the actual content of sexual
behaviour probably changes much less between cultures than the individual’s
capacity to enjoy it without guilt”. He enunciated two moral
injunctions or commandments on sexual behaviour: “Thou shalt not
exploit another person’s feelings,” and “Thou shalt under no circumstances
cause the birth of an unwanted child.”\footnote{John Ellerby, “The Anarchism of Alex Comfort”, \emph{Anarchy} 33, November 1963.} His reference to
“commandments” led Professor Maurice Carstairs to tease him with the
question why, as an anarchist, Comfort was prescribing rules? — to which
he replied that a philosophy of freedom demanded higher standards of
personal responsibility than a belief in authority. The lack of ordinary
prudence and chivalry which could often be observed in adolescent
behaviour today was, he suggested, precisely the result of prescribing a
code of chastity which did not make sense instead of principles which
are “immediately intelligible and acceptable to any sensible youngster”.


You certainly don’t have to be an anarchist to see the modern nuclear
family as a straitjacket answer to the functional needs of home-making
and child-rearing which imposes intolerable strains on many of the
people trapped in it. Edmund Leach remarked that “far from being the
basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry
secrets, is the source of all our discontents”.\footnote{Edmund Leach, \emph{A Runaway World} (BBC Reith Lectures, 1967).} David Cooper called it “the
ultimate and most lethal gas chamber in our society”, and Jacquetta
Hawkes said that “it is a form making fearful demands on the human
beings caught up in it; heavily weighted for loneliness, excessive
demands, strain and failure”.\footnote{Jacquetta Hawkes in \emph{The Human Sum} (ed.) C.H. Rolph (London, 1957).} Obviously it suits some of us as the best
working arrangement but our society makes no provision for the others,
whose numbers you can assess by asking yourself the question: “How
many happy families do I know?”


Consider the case of John Citizen. On the strength of a few happy
evenings in the discotheque, he and Mary make a contract with the state
and\Slash{}or some religious enterprise to live together for life and are given a
licence to copulate. Assuming that they surmount the problems of
finding somewhere to live and raise a family, look at them a few years
later. He, struggling home from work each day, sees himself caught in a
trap. She feels the same, the lonely single-handed housewife, chained to
the sink and the nappy-bucket. And the kids too, increasingly as the
years go by, feel trapped. Why can’t Mum and Dad just leave us alone?
There is no need to go on with the saga because you know it all
backward.


In terms of the happiness and fulfilment of the individuals involved,
the modern family is an improvement on its nineteenth-century predecessor
or on the various institutional alternatives dreamed up by authoritarian
utopians and we might very well argue that today there is nothing
to prevent people from living however they like but, in fact, everything
about our society, from the advertisements on television to the laws of
inheritance is based on the assumption of the tight little consumer unit
of the nuclear family. Housing is an obvious example: municipal housing
makes no provision for non-standard units and in the private sector no
loans or mortgages are available for communes.


The rich can avoid the trap by the simple expedient of paying other
people to run their households and rear their children. But for the
ordinary family the system makes demands which very many people
cannot meet. We accept it because it is universal. Indeed the only
examples that Dr Leach could cite where children “grow up in larger,
more relaxed domestic groups centred on the community rather than on
mother’s kitchen’ were the Israeli kibbutz or the Chinese commune, so
ubiquitous has the pattern become. But changes are coming: the
women’s liberation movement is one reminder that the price of the
nuclear family is the subjugation of women. The communes or joint
households that some young people are setting up are no doubt partly a
reflection of the need to share inflated rents but are much more a
reaction against what they see as the stultifying rigid nature of the small
family unit.


The mystique of biological parenthood results in some couples living
in desperate unhappiness because of their infertility while others have
children who are neglected and unwanted. It also gives rise to the
common situation of parents clinging to their children because they have
sunk so much of their emotional capital in them while the children
desperately want to get away from their possessive love. “A secure home”,
writes John Hartwell, “often means a stifling atmosphere where human
relationships are turned into a parody and where signs of creativity are
crushed as evidence of deviancy.”\footnote{John Hartwell in \emph{Kids} No.~1, September 1972.} We are very far from the kind of
community in which children could choose which of the local parent-figures
they would like to attach themselves to but a number of interesting
suggestions are in the air, all aiming at loosening family ties in the
interests of both parents and children. There is the idea of Paul and Jean
Ritter of a neighbourhood “children’s house” serving twenty-five to
forty families,\footnote{Paul and Jean Ritter, \emph{The Free Family} (London, 1959).} there is Paul Goodman’s notion of a Youth House on the
analogy of this institution in some “primitive” cultures, and there is
Teddy Gold’s suggested Multiple Family Housing Unit.\footnote{Teddy Gold, “The Multiple Family Housing Unit”, \emph{Anarchy} 35, January 1964.} These ideas are
not based on any rejection of our responsibility towards the young; they
involve sharing this responsibility throughout the community and
accepting the principle that, as Kropotkin put it, \emph{all} children are \emph{our}
children. They also imply giving children themselves responsibilities not
only for themselves but to the community, which is exactly what our
family structure fails to do.


Personal needs and aspirations vary so greatly that it is as fatuous to
suggest stereotyped alternatives as it is to recommend universal conformity
to the existing pattern. At one end of the scale is the warping of the
child by the accident of parenthood, either by possessiveness or by the
perpetuation of a family syndrome of inadequacy and incompetence. At
the other end is the emotional stultification of the child through a lack
of personal attachments in institutional child care. We all know conventional
households permeated with casual affection where domestic
chores and responsibilities are shared, while we can readily imagine a
communal household in which the women were drudges collectively
instead of individually and in which a child who was not very attractive
or assertive was not so much left alone as neglected. More important
than the structure of the family are the expectations that people have of
their roles in it. The domestic tyrant of the Victorian family was able to
exercise his tyranny only because the others were prepared to put up with it.


There is an old slogan among progressive educators, \emph{Have’em, Love’em
and Leave’ em Alone}. This again is not urging neglect, but it does emphasise
that half the personal miseries and frustrations of adolescents and of
the adults they become are due to the insidious pressures on the individual
to do what other people think is appropriate for him. At the same
time the continual extension of the processes of formal education delays
even further the granting of real responsibility to the young. Any teacher
in further education will tell you of the difference between sixteen-year-olds
who are at work and attend part-time vocational courses and those
of the same age who are still in full-time education. In those benighted
countries where young children are still allowed to work you notice not
only the element of exploitation but also the maturity that goes with
undertaking functional responsibilities in the real world.


The young are caught in a tender trap: the age of puberty and the age
of marriage (since our society does not readily permit experimental
alternatives yet) go down while, at the same time, acceptance into the
adult world is continually deferred — despite the lowering of the formal
age of majority. No wonder many adults appear to be cast in a mould of
immaturity. In family life we have not yet developed a genuinely permissive
society but simply one in which it is difficult to grow up. On the
other hand, the fact that for a minority of young people — a minority
which is increasing the stereotypes of sexual behaviour and sexual roles
which confined and oppressed their elders for centuries have simply
become irrelevant, will certainly be seen in the future as one of the
positive achievements of our age.

\chapter{Chapter IX. Schools No Longer}



\begin{quote}


From William Godwin’s \emph{An Account of the Seminary That Will Be
Opened on Monday the Fourth Day of August at Epsom in Surrey}
(1783) to Paul Goodman’s \emph{Compulsory Mis-education} (1964), anarchism
has persistently regarded itself as having distinctive and revolutionary implications
for education. Indeed, no other movement whatever has assigned to educational
principles, concepts, experiments, and practices a more significant place in its
writings and activities.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Krimerman and Perry, \emph{Patterns of Anarchy} (1966)


\end{flushright}


Ultimately the social function of education is to perpetuate society: it is
\emph{the} socialising function. Society guarantees its future by rearing its
children in its own image. In traditional societies the peasant rears his
sons to cultivate the soil, the man of power rears his to wield power, and
the priest instructs them all in the necessity of a priesthood. In modern
governmental society, as Frank MacKinnon puts it, “The educational
system is the largest instrument in the modern state for telling people
what to do. It enrols five-year-olds and tries to direct their mental, and
much of their social, physical and moral development for twelve or more
of the most formative years of their lives.”\footnote{Frank MacKinnon, \emph{The Politics of Education} (London, 1961).}


To find a historical parallel to this you would have to go back to
ancient Sparta, the principal difference being that the only education we
hear of in the ancient world is that of ruling classes. Spartan education
was simply training for infantry warfare and for instructing the citizens in
the techniques for subduing the slave class, the helots who did the daily
work of the state and greatly outnumbered the citizens. In the modern
world the helots have to be educated too, and the equivalent of Spartan
warfare is the industrial and technical competition between nations
which is sometimes the product of war and sometimes its prelude. The
year in which Britain’s initial advantage in the world’s industrial markets
began to wane was the year in which, after generations of bickering
about its religious content, universal compulsory elementary education
was introduced, and every significant development since the Act of 1870
had a close relationship to the experience, not merely of commercial
rivalry but of war itself. The English Education Acts of 1902, 1918 and
1944 were all born of war, and every new international conflict, whether
in rivalry for markets or in military techniques, has been the signal for a
new burst of concern among the rival powers over the scale and scope of
their systems of education.


The notion that primary education should be free, compulsory and
universal is very much older than the British legislation of the nineteenth
century. Martin Luther appealed “To the Councilmen of all Cities
in Germany that they establish and maintain Christian schools,” compulsory
education was founded in Calvinist Geneva in 1536, and Calvin’s
Scottish disciple John Knox “planted a school as well as a kirk in every
parish”. In Puritan Massachusetts free compulsory education was introduced
in 1647. The common school, Lewis Mumford notes, “contrary
to popular belief, is no belated product of nineteenth-century democracy:
it played a necessary part in the absolutist-mechanical formula \dots{}
centralised authority was now belatedly taking up the work that had
been neglected with the wiping out of municipal freedom in the greater
part of Europe.\footnote{Lewis Mumford, \emph{The Condition of Man} (London, 1944).} In other words, having destroyed local initiative, the
state was acting in its own interest. Compulsory education is bound up
historically, not only with the printing press, the rise of protestantism
and capitalism, but with the growth of the idea of the nation state itself.


All the great rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth century
pondered on the problems of popular education, and the two acutest
educational thinkers among them ranged themselves on opposite sides
on the question of the \emph{organisation} of education: Rousseau for the state,
William Godwin against it. Rousseau, whose \emph{Emile} postulates a
completely individual education (human society is ignored, the tutor’s
entire life is devoted to poor Emile) did, nevertheless, in his \emph{Discourse on
Political Economy} (1758) argue for public education “under regulations
prescribed by the government \dots{}, if children are brought up in common
in the bosom of equality; if they are imbued with the laws of the State
and the precepts of the General Will \dots{} we cannot doubt that they will
cherish one another mutually as brothers \dots{} to become in time
defenders and fathers of the country of which they will have been for so
long the children.”


Godwin, in his \emph{Enquiry Concerning Political Justice} (1793) criticises the
whole idea of a \emph{national} education. He summarises the arguments in
favour, which are those used by Rousseau, adding to them the question,
“If the education of our youth be entirely confined to the prudence of
their parents, or the accidental benevolence of private individuals, will it
not be a necessary consequence that some will be educated to virtue,
others to vice, and others again entirely neglected?” Godwin’s answer is
worth quoting at length because his lone voice from the end of the eighteenth
century speaks to us in the accents of the de-schoolers of our own day:



\begin{quote}


The injuries that result from a system of national education are, in the
first place, that all public establishments include in them the idea of
permanence \dots{} public education has always expended its energies in the
support of prejudice; it teaches its pupils not the fortitude that shall bring
every proposition to the test of examination, but the art of vindicating
such tenets as may chance to be previously established \dots{} Even in the
petty institution of Sunday schools, the chief lessons that are taught are a
superstitious veneration for the Church of England, and to bow to every
man in a handsome coat \dots{}


Secondly, the idea of national education is founded in an inattention
to the nature of mind. Whatever each man does for himself is done well;
whatever his neighbours or his country undertake to do for him is done
ill \dots{} He that learns because he desires to learn will listen to the instructions
he receives and apprehend their meaning. He that teaches because
he desires to teach will discharge his occupation with enthusiasm and
energy. But the moment political institution undertakes to assign to
every man his place, the functions of all will be discharged with supineness
and indifference \dots{}


Thirdly, the project of a national education ought uniformly to be
discouraged on account of its obvious alliance with national government
\dots{} Government will not fail to employ it to strengthen its hand and
perpetuate its institutions \dots{} Their view as instigator of a system of
education will not fail to be analogous to their views in their political
capacity.\footnote{William Godwin, \emph{An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice} (London, 1793).}



\end{quote}


Contemporary critics of the alliance between national government and
national education would agree, and would argue that it is in the \emph{nature}
of public authorities to run coercive and hierarchical institutions
whose ultimate function is to perpetuate social inequality and to brainwash the
young into the acceptance of their particular slot in the organised
system. A hundred years ago, in a book called \emph{God and the State}, Michael
Bakunin characterised “the people” as “the eternal minor, the pupil
confessedly forever incompetent to pass his examinations, rise to the
knowledge of his teachers, and dispense with their discipline”.



\begin{quote}


One day I asked Mazzini what measures would be taken for the emancipation
of the people, once his triumphant unitary republic had been
definitely established. “The first measure”, he answered, “will be the
foundation of schools for the people.” “And what will the people be
taught in these schools?” “The duties of man — sacrifice and devotion.”\footnote{Michael Bakunin, \emph{God and the State} (New York 1916, 1970).}



\end{quote}


Bakunin made the same comparison as is made today by Everett Reimer
and Ivan Illich between the teaching profession and a priestly caste, and
he declared that “Like conditions, like causes, always produce like effects.
It will, then, be the same with the professors of the modern school,
divinely inspired and licensed by the State. They will necessarily
become, some without knowing it, others with full knowledge of the
cause, teachers of the doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the
State and to the profit of the privileged classes.” Must we then, he asked,
eliminate from society all instruction and abolish all schools? Far from it,
he replied, but he demanded schools from which the \emph{principle of authority}
will be eliminated: “They will be schools no longer; they will be popular
academies in which neither pupils nor masters will be known, where the
people will come freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in
which, rich in their own expertise, they will teach in their turn many
things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


This entirely different conception of the school had already been
envisaged by Godwin in 1797 as a plan “calculated entirely to change the
face of education. The whole formidable apparatus, which has hitherto
attended it, is swept away. Strictly speaking, no such characters are left
upon the scene as either preceptor or pupil. The boy, like the man,
studies because he desires it. He proceeds upon a plan of his own invention,
or which, by adopting, he has made his own.”\footnote{William Godwin, The Enquirer (London, 1797).} Perhaps the nearest
thing to a school of this kind within the official system was Prestolee
School (an elementary school in Lancashire revolutionised after the First
World War by its headmaster Edward O’ Neil) , where “time-tables and
programmes play an insignificant part, for the older children come back
when school hours are over, and with them, their parents and elder
brothers and sisters”.\footnote{“A School the Children Won’t Leave”, \emph{Picture Post}, 4 November 1944. The Story of Prestolee School is told in Gerard Holmes, \emph{The Idiot Teacher} (London, 1952).}


In spite of the talk of “community schools” there are a thousand
bureaucratic reasons why O’Neil’s version of Bakunin’s “popular
academy” could not be put into practice today, and remains only a vision
of the future transformation of the school. However, Professor Harry
Ree told a conference of young teachers that: “I think we are going to
see in your lifetime the end of schools as we know them. Instead there
will be a community centre with the doors open twelve hours a day,
seven days a week, where anybody can wander in and out of the library,
workshops, sports centre, self-service store and bar. In a hundred years’
time the compulsory attendance laws for children to go to school may
have gone the same way as the compulsory laws for attendance at
church.”\footnote{\emph{The Teacher}, 8 April 1972.}


Today, as the educational budgets of both rich and poor nations get
more and more gigantic, we would add a further criticism of the role of
the state as educator throughout the world: the affront to the idea of
social justice. An immense effort by well-intentioned reformers has gone
into the attempt to manipulate the education system to provide equality
of opportunity, but this has simply resulted in a theoretical and illusory
equal start in a competition to become more and more unequal. The
greater the sums of money that are poured into the education industries
of the world, the smaller the benefit to the people at the bottom of the
educational, occupational and social hierarchy. The universal education
system turns out to be yet another way in which the poor subsidise the
rich. Everett Reimer, for instance, remarking that schools are an almost
perfectly regressive form of taxation, notes that the children of the
poorest one-tenth of the population of the United States cost the public
in schooling \$2,500 each over a lifetime, while the children of the
richest one-tenth cost about \$35,000. “Assuming that one-third of this is
private expenditure, the richest one-tenth still gets ten times as much of
public funds for education as the poorest one-tenth.” In his suppressed
Unesco report of 1970 Michael Huberman reached the same conclusion
for the majority of countries in the world. In Britain, ignoring
completely the university aspect, we spend twice as much on the
secondary school life of a grammar-school sixth former as on a
secondary modern school-Ieaver, while, if we do include university
expenditure, we spend as much on an undergraduate in one year as on a
normal schoolchild throughout his life. “While the highest social group
benefit \emph{seventeen} times as much as the lowest group from the expenditure
on universities, they only contribute five times as much revenue.” We
may thus conclude that one significant role of the state in the education
systems of the world is to perpetuate social and economic injustice.


You can see why one contemporary anarchist educator, Paul
Goodman, suggests that it would be simpler, cheaper and fairer to
dismantle the system and give each kid his or her share of the education
money. Goodman’s programme is devastatingly simple. For the young
child provide a “protective and life-nourishing environment, by decentralising
the school into small units of twenty to fifty in available shopfronts
or clubhouses, with class attendances not compulsory. Link the
school with economically marginal farms where city kids can go for a
couple of months a year. For older children:



\begin{quote}


Probably an even better model would be the Athenian pedagogue
touring the city with his charges; but for this the streets and working-places
of the city must be made safer and more available than is likely.
(The prerequisite of city-planning is for the children to be able to use
the city, for no city is governable if it does not grow citizens who feel it
is theirs.) The goal of elementary pedagogy is a very modest one: it is for
a small child, under his own steam, to poke interestingly into whatever
goes on and be able, by observation, questions and practical imitation, to
get something out of it in his own terms. In our society this happens
pretty well at home up to age four, but after that it becomes forbiddingly
difficult.\footnote{Paul Goodman, \emph{Compulsory Miseducation} (New York, 1964; London 1971).}



\end{quote}


Technical education, he believes, is best undertaken on the job for,
provided that “the young have options and can organise and criticise, on
the job education is the quickest way to workers’ management”.
University education “is for \emph{adults} who already know something”.


Goodman peddled his ideas of incidental education in and out of
season for most of his writing life, but only very recently have people
begun to take them seriously. What has changed the climate has been
the experience of the students’ revolt, and the educational crisis of the
American cities — with more and more expenditure providing less and
less effective education, and the impact of educational thinkers from the
Third World like Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire who have shown how
totally inappropriate to real social needs the standard pattern of school
and university are. Everywhere experiments are being made to break
away from the straitjacket of Illich’s definition of school as the “age-specific,
teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an
obligatory curriculum”. What inhibits such experiments is precisely the
existence of the official system which pre-empts the options of the
citizens who are obliged to finance it, so that alternatives are dependent
on the marginal income of potential users. When the Scotland Road
Free School in Liverpool asked the education authority for some very
modest assistance in the form of equipment, one member of the
Education Committee declared that “we are being asked to weaken
the fabric of what we ourselves are supposed to be supporting \dots{} We might
finish up with the fact that no children will want to go to our schools.”


The anarchist approach to education is grounded, not in a contempt for
learning, but in a respect for the learner. Danilo Dolei told me of
encountering “bandits” in Sicily whose one contact with “education” was
learning to read from an anarchist fellow-prisoner in jail. Arturo Barea
recalled from his childhood in Madrid two poverty-stricken anarchist
pedagogues. One, the Penny Teacher lived in a hut made of petrol cans
in the Barrio de las Injurias. A horde of ragged pupils squatted round
him in the open to learn the ABC at ten centimos a month. The other,
the Saint with the Beard, used to hold his classes in exchange for his
pupils’ collection of cigarette-ends in the Plaza Mayor. The Penny
Teacher was sent to prison as an anarchist and died there. The Saint with
the Beard was warned off from his corner and disappeared. But he
turned up again eventually and went on secretly lending tattered books
to his pupils, for the love of reading.


The most devastating criticism we can make of the organised system
is that its effects are profoundly anti-educational. In Britain, at five years
old, most children cannot wait to get into school. At fifteen, most
cannot wait to get out. On the day I am writing, our biggest-selling
newspaper devotes its front page to a photograph of a thirteen-year-old
truant, with his comment, “The worse part is I thought I only had
another two years to sweat out, then they put the leaving age up to
sixteen. That’s when I thought, sod it.” The likeliest lever for change in
the organised system will come, not from criticism or example from
outside, but from pressure from below. There has always been a proportion
of pupils who attend unwillingly, who resent the authority of the
school and its arbitrary regulations, and who put a low value on the
processes of education because their own experience tells them that it is
an obstacle race in which they are so often the losers that they would be
mugs to enter the competition. \emph{This} is what school has taught them, and
when this army of also-rans, no longer cowed by threats, no longer
amenable to cajolery, no longer to be bludgeoned by physical violence
into sullen acquiescence grows large enough to prevent the school from
functioning with even the semblance of relevance or effectiveness, the
educational revolution will begin.


At the opposite end of the educational spectrum, the university, the
process of renewal through secession has ancient historical precedents.
Oxford was started by seceding English students from Paris, Cambridge
by scholars who fled from Oxford, London by dissenters who could not
accept the religious qualifications required by Oxford and Cambridge.
But the most perfect anarchist model for a university comes from Spain.
Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish government, dominated
then as now, by the Church, dismissed some leading university professors.
A few of them started a “free” school for higher studies, the
\emph{Institueión Libre de Enseñanza} and around this arose the so-called
“Generation of ’98” the small group of intellectuals who, paralleling the
growth of the working class movements of that time, sought to diagnose
the stifling inertia, hypocrisy and corruption of Spanish life — the art
critic and teacher Manuel Cossío, the philosophers Unamuno and
Ortega y Gasset, the economist Joacquín Costa (who summed up his
programme for Spain in the phrase \emph{school and larder}) the poet Antonio
Machado and the novelist Pío Baroja. The \emph{Institución} had an even more
remarkable offspring, the \emph{Residencia de Estudiantes}, or Residential
College for Students, founded by Alberto Jiménez in 1910. Gerald
Brenan gives us a fascinating glimpse of the \emph{Residencia}:



\begin{quote}


Here, over a long course of years, Unamuno, Cossío and Ortega taught,
walking about the garden or sitting in the shade of the trees in the
manner of the ancient philosophers: here Juan Ramon Jiménez wrote
and recited his poems, and here too a later generation of poets, among
them Garcia Lorca and Alberti, learned their trade, coming under the
influence of the school of music and folksong which Eduardo Martinez
Tomer organised. Never, I think, since the early Middle Ages has an
educational establishment produced such astonishing results on the life
of a nation, for it was largely by means of the \emph{Institución} and the
\emph{Residencia} that Spanish culture was raised suddenly to a level it had not
known for three hundred years.\footnote{Gerald Brenan, \emph{The Literature of the Spanish People} (Cambridge, 1951).}



\end{quote}


Lorca, Dali and Bunuel were fellow students at the \emph{Residencia}; a true
community of scholars with a genuine function in the community it
served. The only parallels I can think of are the one-time Black
Mountain College in the US, and the annual two-day History
Workshop at Ruskin College, Oxford (significantly not a part of the
university), where at a cost of 5Op each a thousand students and teachers
gather to present and discuss original research in an atmosphere like that
of a pop festival. It is a festival of scholarship, far away from the world of
vice-chancellors and academic boards, running a finishing school for the
bored aspirants for privileged jobs in the meritocracy.


In the world-wide student revolt of the late 1960s, from one university
after another carne the comment that the period of revolutionary
self-government was the one genuinely educational experience that the
students had encountered. “He had learned more in those six weeks than
in four years of classes,” (Dwight Macdonald on a Columbia student);
“Everyone is a richer person for the experience and has enriched the
community by it,” (LSE student); “The last ten days have been the most
rewarding of my whole university career,” (peter Townsend of Essex
University); “This generation of Hull students has had the opportunity
to take part in events which may well be the most valuable part of their
university lives,” (David Rubinstein on Hull). At Homsey College of Art
one lecturer said, “It’s the greatest educational thing I’ve ever known,”
and another called it “a surge of creativity unheard of in the annals of
higher education”.


What a delicious, but predictable irony, that \emph{real} education, self-education,
should only come from locking out or ignoring the expensive
academic hierarchy. The students’ revolt was a microcosm of
anarchy, spontaneous, self-directed activity replacing the power structure
by a network of autonomous groups and individuals. What the students
experienced was that sense of liberation that comes from taking your
own decisions and assuming your own responsibilities. It is an experience
that we need to carry far beyond the privileged world of higher
education, into the factory, the neighbourhood, the daily lives of people
everywhere.

\chapter{Chapter X. Play as an Anarchist Parable}



\begin{quote}


The boy who swings from rope to horse, leaping back again to the swinging rope,
is learning by his eyes, muscles, joints and by every sense organ he has, to judge,
to estimate, to know. The other twenty-nine boys and girls in the gymnasium
are all as active as he, some if them in his immediate vicinity. But as he swings
he does not avoid. He swings where \emph{there is space} — a very important distinction
— and in doing so he threads his way among the twenty-nine fellows. Using
all his facilities, he is aware if the total situation in that gymnasium — of his own
swinging and if his fellows’ actions. He does not shout to the others to stop, to
wait or move from him — not that there is silence, for running conversations across
the hall are kept up as he speeds through the air. But this “education” in the live
use if all his senses can only come if his twenty-nine fellows are also free and
active. if the room were cleared and twenty-nine boys sat at the side silent while
he swung, we should in effect be saying to him to his legs, body, eyes — “You
give all your attention to swinging, we’ll keep the rest if the world away” —
in fact “Be as egotistical as you like”. By so reducing the diversity in the environment we
should be preventing his learning to apprehend and to move in a complex situation.
We should in effect be saying “Only this and this do; you can’t be expected
to do more. Is it any wonder that he comes to behave as though it is all he \emph{can}
do? By the existing methods of teaching we are in fact inducing the child’s \emph{incoordination}
in society.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Innes Pearse and Lucy Crocker, \emph{The Peckham Experiment}


\end{flushright}


All the problems of social life present a choice between libertarian and
authoritarian solutions, and the ultimate claim we can make for the libertarian
approach is that it fulfils its function better. The adventure playground
is an arresting example of this living anarchy; one that is valuable
both in itself and as an experimental verification of a whole social
approach. The need to provide children’s playgrounds as such is a result of
high density urban living and fast-moving traffic. The authoritarian
response to this need is to provide an area of tarmac and some pieces of
expensive ironmongery in the form of swings, see-saws and roundabouts
which provide a certain amount of fun (though because of their inflexibility
children soon tire of them) but which call for no imaginative or
constructive effort on the child’s part, and cannot be incorporated in any
self chosen or reciprocal activity. Swings and roundabouts can only be
used in one way, they cater for no fantasies, for no developing skills, for
no emulation of adult activities, they call for no mental effort and very
little physical effort, and are giving way to simpler and freer apparatus like
climbing frames, log piles, “jungle gyms”, commando nets, or to play-sculptures
— abstract shapes to clamber through and over, or large
constructions in the form of boats, traction engines, lorries or trains. But
these too provide for a limited age range and a restricted range of activities,
and are sometimes more indulgent to the designer than to the user. It
is not surprising that children find more continual interest in the street,
the derelict building or the scrap yard.


For older boys, team games are the officially approved activity — if they
can find some permitted place to play them, but as Patrick Geddes wrote
before the First World War, “they are at most granted a cricket pitch or
lent a space between football goals but otherwise are jealously watched, as
potential savages, who on the least symptom of their natural activities of
wigwam-building, cave-digging, stream-damming and so on — must be
instantly chivied away, and are lucky if not handed over to the police.”\footnote{Patrick Geddes, \emph{Cities in Evolution} (London, 1915).}


That there should be anything novel in simply providing facilities for
the spontaneous, unorganised activities of childhood is an indication of
how deeply rooted in our social behaviour is the urge to control, direct
and limit the flow of life. But when they get the chance, in the country,
or where there are large gardens, woods, or bits of waste land, what are
children doing? Enclosing space, making caves, tents, dens, from old
bricks, bits of wood and corrugated iron. Finding some corner which
the adult world has passed over, and making it their own. How can
children in towns find and appropriate this kind of private world when,
as Agnete Vestereg of the Copenhagen Junk Playground writes:



\begin{quote}


Every bit of land is put to industrial or commercial use, where every
patch of grass is protected or enclosed, where streams and hollows are
filled in, cultivated and built on?


But more is done for children now than used to be done, it may be
objected. Yes, but that is one of the chief faults — the things are \emph{done}.
Town children move about in a world full of the marvels of technical
science. They may see and be impressed by things; but they long also to
take possession of them, to have them in their hands, to make something
themselves, to create and re-create \dots{}\footnote{Agnete Vestereg in Lady Allen of Hurtwood, \emph{Adventure Playgrounds} (London, 1949).}



\end{quote}


The Emdrup playground was begun in 1943 by the Copenhagen
Workers’ Co-operative Housing Association after their landscape architect,
C. T. Sorensen, who had laid out many orthodox playgrounds had
observed that children seemed to get more pleasure when they stole into
building sites and played with the materials they found there. In spite of
a daily average attendance of 200~children at Emdrup, and that “difficult”
children were specially catered for, it was found that “the noise, screams
and fights found in dull playgrounds are absent, for the opportunities are
so rich that the children do not need to fight”.


The initial success at Copenhagen has led in the years since the war to
a widespread diffusion of the idea and its variations, from “Freetown” in
Stockholm and “The Yard” at Minneapolis, to the \emph{Skrammellegeplads} or
building play rounds of Denmark and the Robinson Crusoe playgrounds
of Switzerland, where children are provided with the raw materials
and tools for building and for making gardens and sculpture. In
Britain we have had twenty years of experience of the successes and
pitfalls of adventure playgrounds and enough documentation of them to
disabuse anyone who thinks it easy to start and operate an adventure
playground, as well as anyone who thinks it a waste of time.\footnote{See, for example, Joe Benjamin, \emph{In Search of Adventure} (London, 1964) and Arvid Bengtsson, \emph{Adventure Playgrounds} (London, 1972).}


When The Yard was opened in Minneapolis with the aim of giving
the children “their own spot of earth and plenty of tools and materials for
digging, building and creating as they see fit”,



\begin{quote}


it was every child for himself. The initial stockpile of secondhand
lumber disappeared like ice off a hot stove. Children helped themselves
to all they could carry, sawed off long boards when short pieces would
have done. Some hoarded tools and supplies in secret caches. Everybody
wanted to build the biggest shack in the shortest time. The workmanship
was shoddy.


Then came the bust. There wasn’t a stick of lumber left. Hijacking
raids were staged on half-finished shacks. Grumbling and bickering
broke out. A few children packed up and left.


But on the second day of the great depression most of the youngsters
banded together spontaneously for a salvage drive. Tools and nails came
out of hiding. For over a week the youngsters made do with what they
had. Rugged individualists who had insisted on building alone invited
others to join in — and bring their supplies along. New ideas popped up
for joint projects. By the time a fresh supply of lumber arrived a
community had been born.\footnote{John Lagemann, “The Yard” in Allen, \emph{op.~cit.}}



\end{quote}


The same story could be told of dozens of similar ventures since then.
Sometimes there is what Sheila Beskine called a “fantastic spontaneous
lease of life’ followed by decline and then by renewal in a different direction.
But permanence is not the criterion of success. As Lady Allen says,
a good adventure playground ‘is in a continual process of destruction and
growth”.


Years ago, when \emph{The Times Educational Supplement} had commented
skeptically on such playgrounds, Joe Benjamin, who started the Grimsby
playground in 1955 and has been concerned with many such ventures
since those days, answered critics in a memorable letter:



\begin{quote}


By what criteria are adventure playgrounds to be judged? If it is by the
disciplined activity of the uniformed organisations, then there is no
doubt but we are a failure. If it is by the success of our football and table
tennis teams then there is no doubt we are a flop. If it is by the enterprise
and endurance called for by some of the national youth awards — then
we must be ashamed.


But these are the standards set by the club movement, in one form or
another, for a particular type of child. They do not attract the so-called
“unclubbable”, and worse — so we read regularly — nor do they hold
those children at whom they are aimed.


May I suggest that we need to examine afresh the pattern taken by
the young at play and then compare it with the needs of the growing
child and the adolescent. We accept that it is natural for boys and girls
below a certain age to play together, and think it equally natural for
them to play at being grown up. We accept, in fact, their right to imitate
the world around them. Yet as soon as a child is old enough to see
through the pretence and demand the reality, we separate him from his
sister and try to fob him off with games and activities which seem only
to put off the day when he will enter the world proper.


The adventure playgrounds in this country, new though they are, are
already providing a number of lessons which we would do well to study.
\dots{} For three successive summers the children have built their dens and
created Shanty Town, with its own hospitals, fire station, shops, etc. As
each den appeared, it became functional and brought with it an appreciation
of its nature and responsibility \dots{} The pattern of adventure playgrounds
is set by the needs of the children who use them; their “toys”
include woodwork benches and sewing machines \dots{} We do not believe
that children can be locked up in neat little parcels labelled by age and sex.
Neither do we believe that education is the prerogative of the schools.\footnote{\emph{The Times Educational Supplement}, 1958.}



\end{quote}


At the playground he ran at Grimsby there was an annual cycle of
growth and renewal. When they began building in the spring, they
began with holes in the ground, which gradually gave way to two-storey
huts. “It’s the same with fires. They begin by lighting them just for fun.
Then they cook potatoes and by the end of the summer they’re cooking
eggs, bacon and beans.” The ever-changing range of activities was “due
entirely to the imagination and enterprise of the children themselves \dots{}
at no time are they expected to continue an activity which no longer
holds an interest for them\dots{}”


The adventure playground is a kind of parable of anarchy, a free
society in miniature, with the same tensions and ever-changing
harmonies, the same diversity and spontaneity, the same unforced
growth of co-operation and release of individual qualities and communal
sense, which lie dormant in a society whose dominant values are competition
and acquisitiveness.


But having discovered something like the ideal conditions for children’s
play — the self-selected evolution from demolition through
discovery to creativity why should we stop there? Do we really accept
the paradox of a free and self-developing childhood followed by a
lifetime of dreary and unfulfilling toil? Isn’t there a place for the adventure
playground or its equivalent in the adult world?


Of course there is, and just as the most striking thing for the visitor,
or the organiser, in an adventure playground is not the improvised
gymnastics, but the making and building that goes on all around, so the
significant thing about adult recreation is not so much the fishing,
sailing, pigeon-fancying or photography aspect (though in their organisation
these frequently illustrate the principles of self-regulation and free
federation that are emphasised in this book), still less is it the commercial
and professional sport which is just another aspect of the entertainment
industry. The significant aspect is the way in which the urge to make
things, and to construct and reconstruct, to repair and remodel, denied
outlet in the ordinary sterile world of employment, emerges in the
explosion of “do-it-yourself” activities of every kind.


This in turn leads to a spontaneous sharing of equipment and skills:



\begin{quote}


“I’ve got two very good friends,” Mrs Jarvis said, “Mrs Barker, who lives
opposite, has got a spin drier and I’ve got a sewing machine. I put my
washing in her spin drier and she uses my sewing machine when she
wants to. Then the lady next door on one side is another friend of mine.
We always help each other out.” Mr Dover’s great hobby is woodwork;
at the time he was interviewed he was busy on a pelmet he was making
for a friend living next door and he had just finished a toy train for the
son of another. He relies on Fred, another friend who is also a neighbour,
to help when needed. “Just today I was sawing a log for the engine
of this train and Fred sees that my saw is blunt and lends me a sharp one.
Anything at all I want he’ll lend it to me if he has it. I’m the same with
him. The other day he knocked when I wasn’t here and borrowed my
steps — we take each other for granted that way.”\footnote{Peter Willmott, \emph{The Evolution of a Community} (London, 1962).}



\end{quote}


The continually increasing scope of the activities people undertake in
their spare time is illustrated by the kind of tools and equipment, beyond
the range of ordinary sharing between neighbours, that can be hired.
One firm which has spread all over the London area hires by the day,
week, “long weekend” and “short weekend” anything up to mechanical
concrete mixers, Kango hammers, scaffolding, industrial spraying plant
and welding equipment. Undoubtedly it provides a valuable service, and
its overheads must be high, but there is little doubt, from a comparison
of its hire charges with the market prices of the equipment, that for
many of the hundreds of items which it lets out on hire, joint ownership
by a group of neighbours would prove more economical to the individual
user.


Take, as another approach, the case of power tools, domestic sales of
which have risen phenomenally in the last twenty years. They have grown
from the introduction in the 1930s of small portable electric drills in the
joinery industry on work which was too large or too unwieldy to be
conveniently brought onto fixed machinery. The typical power drills for
the amateur market have developed from these machines and from the
principle of bringing the tool to the work instead of the work to the
machine. They have enormously increased the capabilities of the home
handyman, not merely by the reduction of the physical work involved but
also by bringing much higher standards of fit and finish within his reach.
The basic tool is always the drill and there is now a wide range of specialist
attachments. The makers also offer bench fitments to convert the portable
tools to bench drills or lathes or saw tables in which the tool is used as a
fixed motor. Commenting on this trend, J. Beresford-Evans said:



\begin{quote}


At first sight this idea seems admirable, yet it is reactionary in that it
denies most of the advantages that the portable tool offers. Most multi-purpose
appliances pay for their versatility by a loss of efficiency in each
individual job they perform — unless the machine is so designed that the
over-all efficiency is great enough to compensate for this loss. But the
degree of power, structural strength and precision of manufacture
required for such a tool would immediately price it out of the very
market at which the makers of amateurs’ power tools are aiming.\footnote{J. Beresford-Ellis in \emph{Design Magazine}, June 1963.}



\end{quote}


The way out of this dilemma is again the pooling of equipment in a
neighbourhood group. Suppose that each member of the group had a
powerful and robust basic tool, while the group as a whole had, for
example, a bench drill, lathes and a saw bench to relieve members from
the attempt to cope with work which required these machines with
inadequate tools of their own, or wasted their resources on under-used
individually-owned plant. This in turn demands some kind of building
to house the machinery: the Community Workshop.


But is the Community Workshop idea nothing more than an aspect
of the leisure industry, a compensation for the tedium of work? Daniel
Bell, commenting on the “fantastic mushrooming of arts-and-crafts
hobbies, of photography, home woodwork shops with power-driven
tools, ceramics, high fidelity, electronics’ notes that this has been
achieved at a very high cost indeed — “the loss of satisfaction in work”.\footnote{Daniel Bell, \emph{Work and Its Discontents} (New York, 1961).}
Another American critic presses home this point:



\begin{quote}


The two worlds of work and leisure drift farther apart. The recreation
world contains all the good, bright, pleasant things, and the work world
becomes the dreariest place imaginable \dots{} There are certain basic
emotional needs that the individual worker must satisfy. To the degree
that the ordinary events of the day are not meeting these needs, recreation
serves as a sort of mixture of concentrates to supply these missing
satisfactions. When the work experience satisfies virtually none of the
requirements, the load on recreation becomes impossible.\footnote{James J. Cox in W. R. Williams (ed.) \emph{Recreation Places} (New York, 1958).}



\end{quote}


I want to return to this problem and to the role of the Community
Workshop but to consider first the anarchist approach to the organisation
of work.

\chapter{Chapter XI. A Self-Employed Society}



\begin{quote}


The split between life and work is probably the greatest contemporary social
problem. You cannot expect men to take a responsible attitude and to display
initiative in daily life when their whole working experience deprives them of the
chance of initiative and responsibility. The personality cannot be successfully
divided into watertight compartments, and even the attempt to do so is dangerous:
if a man is taught to rely upon a paternalistic authority within the factory, he will
be ready to rely upon one outside. If he is rendered irresponsible at work by lack of
opportunity for responsibility, he will be irresponsible when away from work too.
The contemporary social trend towards a centralised, paternalistic, authoritarian
society only reflects conditions which already exist within the factory.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Gordon Rattray Taylor, \emph{Are Workers Human?}


\end{flushright}


The novelist Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on
“incentives” in industry. He remarked that “Industrial psychologists must
stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find
out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging
in his garden.”


But don’t we already know why? He enjoys going home and digging
in his garden because there he is free from foremen, managers and
bosses. He is free from the monotony and slavery of doing the same
thing day in day out, and is in control of the whole job from start to
finish. He is free to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He
is responsible to himself and not to somebody else. He is working
because he \emph{wants} to and not because he \emph{has} to. He is doing his own
thing. He is his own man.


The desire to “be your own boss” is very common indeed. Think of all
the people whose secret dream or cherished ambition is to run a small-holding
or a little shop or to set up in trade on their own account, even
though it may mean working night and day with little prospect of
solvency. Few of them are such optimists as to think they will make a
fortune that way. What they want above all is the sense of independence
and of controlling their own destinies.


The fact that in the twentieth century the production and distribution
of goods and services is far too complicated to be run by millions of
one-man businesses doesn’t lessen this urge for self-determination, and
the politicians, managers and giant international corporations know it.
This is why they present every kind of scheme for “workers’ participation”,
“joint management”, “profit sharing”, “industrial co-partnership”,
everything in fact from suggestion boxes to works councils, to give the
worker the \emph{feeling} that he is more than a cog in the industrial machine
while making sure that effective control of industry is kept out of the
hands of the man on the factory floor. They are in fact like the rich man
in Tolstoy’s fable — they will do anything for the worker except get off
his back.


In every industrial country, and probably in every agricultural
country, the idea of workers’ control has manifested itself at one time or
another — as a demand, an aspiration, a programme or a dream. To
confine ourselves to one century and one country, it was the basis of two
parallel movements in Britain around the First World War, Syndicalism
and Guild Socialism. These two movements dwindled away in the early
1920s, but ever since then there have been sporadic and periodic
attempts to re-create a movement for workers’ control of industry. From
some points of view the advocates of workers’ control had much more
reason for optimism in 1920 than today. In that year the Sankey Report
(a majority report of a Royal Commission) advocating “joint control”
and public ownership of the mining industry in Britain, was turned
down by the government for being too radical, and by the shop stewards
for not being radical enough. When the mines were actually nationalised
after almost thirty years, nothing even as mild as joint control was either
proposed or demanded. In 1920, too, the Building Guilds began their
brief but successful existence. In our own day it is inconceivable that
large local authorities would let big building contracts to guilds of
workers, or that the co-operative movement would finance them. The
idea that workers should have some say in the running of their industries
was accepted then in a way that it has never been since.


And yet the trade union movement today is immeasurably stronger
than it was in the days when workers’ control was a widespread demand.
What has happened is that the labour movement as a whole has accepted
the notion that you gain more by settling for less. In most Western
countries, as Anthony Crosland pointed out, the unions, “greatly aided
by propitious changes in the political and economic background, have
achieved a more effective control through the independent exercise of
their collective bargaining strength than they would ever have achieved
by following the path (beset as it is by practical difficulties on which all
past experiments have foundered) of direct workers’ management.
Indeed we may risk the generalisation that the greater the power of the
unions the less the interest in workers’ management.”\footnote{Anthony Crosland in \emph{The Observer}, 5 October 1958.}


His observation is true, even if it is unpalatable for those who would
like to see the unions, or some more militantly syndicalist kind of industrial
union, as the vehicle for workers’ control. Many advocates of
workers’ control have seen the unions as the organs through which it is
to be exercised, assuming presumably that the attainment of workers’
control would bring complete community of interest in industry and
that the defensive role of the unions would become obsolete. (This is, of
course, the assumption behind trade union organisation in the Soviet
empire). I think this view is a gross over-simplification. Before the First
World War, the Webbs pointed out that “the decisions of the most
democratically elected executive committees with regard to wages,
hours and conditions of employment of particular sections of their
fellow workers, do not always satisfy the latter, or even seem to them to
be just”. And the Yugoslav scholar, Branko Pribicević, in his history of
the shop-stewards’ movement in Britain, emphasises this point in criticising
the reliance on the idea of control by industrial unions:



\begin{quote}


Control of industry is largely incompatible with a union’s character as a
voluntary association of the workers, formed primarily to protect and
represent their interests. Even in the most democratic industrial system,
i.~e. a system in which the workers would have a share in control, there
would still be a need for unions \dots{} Now if we assume that managers
would be responsible to the body of workers, we cannot exclude the
possibility of individual injustices and mistakes. Such cases must be taken
up by the union \dots{} It seems most improbable that a union could fulfil
any of these tasks successfully if it were also the organ of industrial
administration or, in other words, if it had ceased to be a voluntary
organisation \dots{}


It was unfortunate that the idea of workers’ control was almost
completely identified with the concept of union control \dots{} It was
obvious throughout that the unions would oppose any doctrine aiming
at creating a representative structure in industry parallel with their own.\footnote{Branko Pribicevic, \emph{The Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control 1912–1922} (Oxford, 1959).}



\end{quote}


In fact, in the only instances we know of in Britain, of either complete
or partial workers’ control, the trade union structure is entirely separate
from the administration, and there has never been any suggestion that it
should be otherwise. What are these examples? Well, there are the cooperative
co-partnerships which make, for instance, some of the
footware sold in retail co-operative societies. These are, so far as they go,
genuine examples of workers’ control (needless to say I am not speaking
of the factories run by the Cooperative Wholesale Society on orthodox
capitalist lines), but they do not seem to have any capacity for expansion,
or to exercise any influence on industry in general. There are the fishermen
of Brixham in Devon, and the miners of Brora on the coast of
Sutherland in Scotland. This pit was to have shut down, but instead the
miners took it over from the National Coal Board and formed a
company of their own. Then there are those firms where some form of
control by the employees has been sought by idealistic employers. (I am
thinking of firms like Scott Bader Ltd., and Farmer and Co., not of
those heavily paternalistic chocolate manufacturers or of spurious co-partnerships).
There are also odd small workshops like the factories in
Scotland and Wales of the Rowen Engineering Company.


I mention these examples, not because they have any economic
significance, but because the general view is that control of industry by
workers is a beautiful idea which is utterly impracticable because of
some unspecified deficiency, not in the idea, but in those people labelled
as “workers”. The Labour Correspondent of \emph{The Times} remarked of
ventures of this kind that, while they provide “a means of harmonious
self-government in a small concern”, there is no evidence that they
provide “any solution to the problem of establishing democracy in large-scale
industry”. And even more widespread than the opinion that
workers have a built-in capacity for managing themselves, is the regretful
conclusion that workers’ control is a nice idea, but one which is totally
incapable of realisation because of the scale and complexity of modern
industry. Daniel Guerin recommends an interpretation of anarchism
which “rests upon large-scale modern industry, up-to-date techniques,
the modern proletariat, and internationalism on a world scale”. But he
does not tell us how. On the face of it, we could counter the argument
about scope and scale by pointing out how changes in sources of motive
power make the geographical concentration of industry obsolete, and
how changing methods of production (automation for example) make
the concentration of vast numbers of people obsolete too.
Decentralisation is perfectly feasible, and probably economically advantageous
within the structure of industry as it is today. But the arguments
based on the complexity of modern industry actually mean something
quite different.


What the sceptics really mean is that while they can imagine the
isolated case of a small enterprise in which the shares are held by the
employees, but which is run on ordinary business lines — like Scott Bader
Ltd. — or while they can accept the odd example of a firm in which a
management committee is elected by the workers — like the co-operative
co-partnerships — they cannot imagine those who manipulate the
commanding heights of the economy being either disturbed by or, least
of all, influenced by, these admirable small-scale precedents. And they
are right, of course: the minority aspiration for workers’ control which
never completely dies, has at the same time never been widespread
enough to challenge the controllers of industry, in spite of the ideological
implications of the “work-in”.


The tiny minority who would like to see revolutionary changes need
not cherish any illusions about this. Neither in the political parties of the
Left nor in the trade union movement will they find more than a similar
minority in agreement. Nor does the history of syndicalist movements
in any country, even Spain, give them any cause for optimism. Geoffrey
Ostergaard puts their dilemma in these terms: “To be effective as defensive
organisations, the unions needed to embrace as many workers as
possible and this inevitably led to a dilution of their revolutionary objectives.
In practice, the syndicalists were faced with the choice of unions
which were \emph{either} reformist and purely defensive \emph{or} revolutionary and
largely ineffective.”\footnote{Geoffrey Ostergaard, “Approaches to Industrial Democracy”, \emph{Anarchy} 2, April 1961.}


Is there a way out of this dilemma? An approach which combines the
ordinary day-to-day struggle of workers in industry over wages and
conditions with a more radical attempt to shift the balance of power in
the factory? I believe that there is, in what the syndicalists and guild
socialists used to describe as “encroaching control” by means of the
“collective contract”. The syndicalists saw this as “a system by which the
workers within a factory or shop would undertake a specific amount of
work in return for a lump sum to be allocated by the work-group as it
saw fit, on condition that the employers abdicated their control of the
productive process itself”. The late G. D. H. Cole, who returned to the
advocacy of the collective contract system towards the end of his life,
claimed that “the effect would be to link the members of the working
group together in a common enterprise under their joint auspices and
control, and to emancipate them from an externally imposed discipline in
respect of their method of getting the work done”. I believe that it
has, and my evidence for this belief comes from the example of the gang
system worked in some Coventry factories which has some aspects in
common with the collective contract idea, and the “Composite work”
system worked in some Durham coal mines, which has everything in
common with it.


The first of these, the gang system, was described by an American
professor of industrial and management engineering, Seymour Melman,
in his book \emph{Decision-Making and Productivity}, where he sought “to
demonstrate that there are realistic alternatives to managerial rule over
production”. I have been publicising this book for years simply because
in all the pretentious drivel of industrial management literature (which
may not fool the workers, but certainly fools management) it is the only
piece of research I have come across which raises the key question: is
management necessary? Melman sought out an identical product made
under dissimilar conditions, and found it in the Ferguson tractor made
under licence in both Detroit and Coventry. His account of the operation
of the gang system in Coventry was confirmed for me by a
Coventry engineering worker, Reg Wright.


Of Standard’s tractor factory (he is writing of the period before
Standard sold the plant to Massey-Ferguson in 1956, and before Leyland
took over Standard), Melman declares, “In this firm we will show that at
the same time thousands of workers operated virtually without supervision
as conventionally understood, and at high productivity: the highest
wage in British industry was paid; high quality products were produced
at acceptable prices in extensively mechanised plants; the management
conducted its affairs at unusually low costs; also, organised workers had a
substantial role in production decision-making.” The production policy
of the firm at that time was most unorthodox for the motor industry and
was the resultant of two inter-related decision-making systems, that of
the workers and that of management: “In production, the management
has been prepared to pay a high wage and to organise production via the
gang system which requires management to deal with a grouped work
force, rather than with single workers, or with small groups \dots{} the
foremen are concerned with the detailed surveillance of things rather
than with the detailed control over people \dots{} The operation of integrated
plants employing 10,000 production workers did not require the
elaborate and costly hallmark of business management.”\footnote{Seymour Melman, \emph{Decision-Making and Productivity} (Oxford, 1968).}


In the motor-car factory fifteen gangs ranged in size from fifty to five
hundred people and the tractor factory was organised as one huge gang.
From the standpoint of the production workers “the gang system leads to
keeping track of goods instead of keeping track of people”. For payment
purposes the output that was measured was the output of the whole
group. In relation to management, Melman points out: “The grouped
voice of a work force had greater impact than the pressure of single
workers. This effect of the gang system, coupled with trade unionism, is
well understood among many British managements. As a result, many
managements have opposed the use of the gang system and have argued
the value of single worker incentive payments.


In a telling comparison, Melman contrasts the “predatory competition”
which characterises the managerial decision-making system with
the workers” decision-making system in which “The most characteristic
feature of the decision-formulating process is that of \emph{mutuality} in
decision-making with final authority residing in the hands of the
grouped workers themselves.”


Emphasising the \emph{human} significance oEthis mode of industrial organisation,
Reg Wright says:



\begin{quote}


The gang system sets men’s minds free from many worries and enables
them to concentrate completely on the job. It provides a natural frame
of security, it gives confidence, shares money equally, uses all degrees of
skill without distinction and enables jobs to be allocated to the man or
woman best suited to them, the allocation frequently being made by the
workers themselves. Change of job to avoid monotony is an easy matter.
The “gaffer” is abolished and foremen are now technicians called in to
advise, or to act in a breakdown or other emergency. In some firms a
\emph{ganger} will run, not the men, but the \emph{job}. He will be paid out of gang
earnings, and will work himself on a small gang. On a larger gang he will
be fully occupied with organisation and supply of parts and materials. A
larger gang may have a deputy ganger as a second string and also a \emph{gang-steward}
who, being a keen trade unionist or workers’ man, will act as a
corrective should the gangers try to favour management unduly or
interfere with the individual in undesirable ways. Gang meetings are
called as necessary, by the latter and all members of the gang are kept
informed and may (and do) criticise everything and everybody. All three
are subject to recall. Constructive ideas, on the other hand, are usually
the result of one or two people thinking out and trying out new things —
this is taking place continuously \dots{}\footnote{Reg Wright, “The Gang System in Coventry” \emph{Anarchy} 2, April 1961, reprinted in Colin Ward (ed.), \emph{A Decade of Anarchy}, (London, Freedom Press, 1987).}



\end{quote}


He remarks that “The fact of taking responsibility in any of these capacities
is \emph{educative} in every sense.” Certainly the usual methods of work
organisation are not only divisive (“They’d cut your throat for a bit more
overtime,” a Ford worker told Graham Turner) but are profoundly \emph{de-educative},
reducing the worker, as Eric Gill used to put it, to a “subhuman
condition of intellectual irresponsibility”.


My second example comes from the mining industry in Durham.
David Douglass in his book \emph{Pit Life in County Durham}, criticises the
attempts of the National Coal Board to introduce more and more supervision
into the miner’s work, with the intention of working the mines
like factories, remarking that “one of the few redeeming features of pit
work, and one that the miners will fight to maintain, is that of independent
job control”, for while “most factory workers would regard the
mine purely and simply as a black and filthy hole, funnily enough the
miner in turn regards the factory as a prison and its operatives as
captives”. In the early days of mining in Durham, he explains, “the miner
was practically a self-governing agent. The hewers were allowed to
manage their own jobs with practically a total lack of supervision. The
degree of job control (though necessarily limited by private ownership)
was almost complete.” Douglass describes such traditions as the \emph{cavilling}
system (selection of working-place by ballot in order to equalise earning
opportunities) as:



\begin{quote}


the fundamental way in which the Durham miner managed to maintain
an equitable system of work, and managed to stave off the competitiveness,
bullying and injustice of the hated butty system. In essence it was
an embryo of workers’ control, as can be seen from its ability to handle
disputes between sets of workers without recourse to outsiders. It was a
little Soviet which had grown up within the capitalist system. In a sense
it was of necessity restricted in its development. It is, however, a feature
of the worker intervening in the productive process in a conscious way
to say: this is how I run it, you adapt it accordingly.\footnote{David Douglass, \emph{Pit Life in Durham} (Oxford, 1972).}



\end{quote}


The same kind of attempt to run the mines as factories that David
Douglass complains of, accompanied the introduction in the post-war
years of the “long-wall” system of working. A comparative study was
made by the Tavistock Institute of conventional long-wall working with
its introduction of the division of labour, and of factory-type methods,
and the composite long-wall method adopted by the miners in some
pits. Its importance for my argument can b e seen from the opening
words of one of the Tavistock reports:



\begin{quote}


This study concerns a groups of miners who came together to evolve a
new way of working together, planning the type of change they wanted
to put through, and testing it in practice. The new type of work organisation
which has come to be known in the industry as composite
working, has in recent years emerged spontaneously in a number of
different pits in the north-west Durham coalfield. Its roots go back to an
earlier tradition which has been almost completely displaced in the
course of the last century by the introduction of work techniques based
on task segmentation, differential status and payment, and extrinsic hierarchical
control.\footnote{P. G. Herbst, \emph{Autonomous Group Functioning} (London, 1962).}



\end{quote}


A further report notes how the investigation shows “the ability of quite
large primary work groups of 40–50 members to act as self-regulating,
self-developing social organisms able to maintain themselves in a steady
state of high productivity \dots{}”\footnote{Trist, Higgin, Murray and Pollock, \emph{Organisational Choice} (London, 1963).} P. G. Herbst describes the system of
composite working in a way which shows its relationship to the gang
system:



\begin{quote}


The composite work organisation may be described as one in which the
group takes over complete responsibility for the total cycle of operations
involved in mining the coal face. No member of the group has a fixed
work-role. Instead, the men deploy themselves, depending on the
requirements of the ongoing group task. Within the limits of technological
and safety requirements they are free to evolve their own way of
organising and carrying out their task. They are not subject to any
external authority in this respect, nor is there within the group itself any
member who takes over a formal directive leadership function. Whereas
in conventional long-wall working the coal-getting task is split into four
or eight separate work roles, carried out by different teams, each paid at
a different rate, in the composite group members are no longer paid
directly for any of the tasks carried out. The all-in wage agreement is,
instead, based on the negotiated price per ton of coal produced by the
team. The income obtained is divided equally among team members.\footnote{Herbst, \emph{op.~cit.}}



\end{quote}


These examples of on-the-job workers’ control are important in
evolving an anarchist approach to industrial organisation. They do not
entail submission to paternalistic management techniques — in fact they
demolish the myths of managerial expertise and indispensability. They
are a force for solidarity rather than divisiveness between workers on the
basis of pay and status. They illustrate that it is possible to bring decision-making
back to the factory floor and the face-to-face group. They even
satisfy — though this is not my criterion for recommending them — the
capitalist test of productivity. They, like the growing concept of workers’
rights of \emph{possession} in the job tacitly recognised in redundancy payment
legislation, actively demonstrated by workers taking over physical possession
of the workplace as in the “work-in” at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders —
have the great tactical merit of combining short-term aims with long-term
aspirations.


Could the workers run industry? Of course they could. They do
already. Neither of the two examples I have given of successful “on the
job” control, exists in the same form today, for reasons which have
nothing to do with either their efficiency or their productivity. In the
Durham example it has to do with the shift of emphasis in the (publicly-owned)
National Coal Board to the coalfields of South Yorkshire and
Nottingham, and in the case of Standards with the mergers (sponsored
by a Labour government) which led to the formation of British Leyland
as a combine large enough to compete for markets with the giant
American-owned and European firms.


Industry is not dominated by technical expertise, but by the sales
manager, the accountant and the financial tycoon who never made
anything in their lives except money.


For a lucky few work is enjoyable for its own sake, but the proportion
of such people in the total working population grows smaller as work
becomes either more mechanised or more fragmented. Automation,
which was expected to reduce the sheer drudgery of manual labour and
the sheer mental drudgery of clerical work, is feared because in practice
it simply reduces the number of income-gaining opportunities. It is a
saving of labour, not by the worker, but by the owners or controllers of
capital. The lucky few are destined for the jobs which are either created
by or are unaffected by automation. The unlucky majority, condemned
from childhood to the dreary jobs, find them either diminished or extinguished
by the “rationalisation” of work.


Can we imagine that in a situation where the control of an industry, a
factory, any kind of workplace, was in the hands of the people who work
there, they would just carry on production, distribution and bottle-washing
in the ways we are familiar with today? Even within capitalist
society (though not within the “public sector” which belongs to “the
people”) some employers find that what they call job enlargement or job
enrichment, the replacement of conveyor belt tasks by complete
assembly jobs, or deliberate rotation from job to job in the production
process can increase production simply by reducing boredom. When
everyone in an industry has a voice in it, would they stop at this point?


In his brilliant essay \emph{Work and Surplus}, Keith Paton imagines what
would happen in a car factory taken over permanently by its workers.
“After the carnival of revolution come the appeals to return to work” but
“to get into the habit of responding to orders or exhortations to raise the
GNP would be to sell the pass straight away. On the other hand production
must eventually be got going on \emph{some} basis or other. What basis?
Return to \emph{what sort of work}?”



\begin{quote}


So instead of restarting the assembly track (if the young workers haven’t
already smashed it) they spend two months discussing the point of their
work, and how to rearrange it. Private cars? Why do people always want
to go somewhere else? Is it because where they are is so intolerable? And
what part did the automobile play in making the need to escape? What
about day to day convenience? Is being stuck in a traffic jam convenient?
What about the cost to the country? Bugger the “cost to the
country”, that’s just the same crap as the national interest. Have you seen
the faces of old people as they try to cross a busy main road? What about
the inconvenience to pedestrians? What’s the reason for buying a car? Is
it just wanting to HAVE it? Do we think the value of a car rubs off on
us? But that’s the wrong way round. Does having a car really save time?
What’s the average hours worked in manufacturing industry? Let’s look
it up in the library: 45.7 hours work a week. What’s the amount of the
family’s spending money in a week that goes on cars? 10.3 per cent of all
family income. Which means more like 20 per cent if you’ve got a car
because half of us don’t have one. What’s 25 per cent of 45 hours?
Christ, 9 hours! That’s a hell of a long time spent “saving time”! There
must be a better way of getting from A to B. By bus? OK, let’s make
buses. But what about the pollution and that? What about those electric
cars they showed on the telly once? Etc., etc.\footnote{Keith Paton, “Work and Suplus”, \emph{Anarchy} 118, 1970, reprinted in Colin Ward (ed.), \emph{A Decade of Anarchy}, (London, Freedom Press, 1987).}



\end{quote}


He envisages another month of discussion and research in complexly
cross-cutting groups, until the workers reach a consensus for eventual
self-redeployment for making products which the workers consider to
be socially useful. These include car refurbishing (to increase the use-value
of models already on the road), buses, overhead monorail cars,
electric cars and scooters, white bicycles for communal use (as devised
by the Amsterdam provos) , housing units, minimal work for drop-outs,
and for kids and old people who like to make themselves usefuL But he
sees other aspects of the workers’ take-over, voluntary extra work for
example: “As work becomes more and more pleasurable, as technology
and society develop to allow more and more craft aspects to return at
high technological level, the idea of \emph{voluntary extra} over the (reduced)
fixed working week becomes feasible. Even the fixing of the working
week becomes superseded.” The purpose of this voluntary extra? “New
Delhi needs buses, provide them by voluntary work.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.} Keith Paton’s redeployment of the car factory is reprinted in Colin Ward, \emph{Work} (Harmondsworth, 1972).}


The factory itself is open to the community, including children; “thus
every factory worker is a potential ‘environmental studies’ instructor, if
a child comes up and asks him how something works.” The factory in
fact becomes a university, an institute of learning rather than of enforced
stupidity, “using men to a millionth of their capacities” as Norbert
Weiner put it.


The evolution and transformation of the factory envisaged by Keith
Paton leads us back to the idea of the Community Workshop envisaged
in the previous chapter. We tend to think of the motor industry, for
example, as one in which iron ore comes in at one end and a complete
car rolls out at the other (though the purchaser of a “Friday car” in today’s
society had better watch out, for that car rolled off the assembly line
when the workers were waiting for their real life at the weekend to
begin). But in fact two thirds of the factory value of a car is represented
by components bought by the manufacturers from outside suppliers.
The motor industry, like many others, is an \emph{assembly} industry. The fact
that this is so of most consumer goods industries, coupled with the
modern facts of widely distributed industrial skill and motive power,
means that, as the Goodman brothers said in \emph{Communitas}: “In large areas
of our operation, we could go back to old-fashioned domestic industry
with perhaps even a gain in efficiency, for small power is everywhere
available, small machines are cheap and ingenious, and there are easy
means to collect machined parts and centrally assemble them.”\footnote{Paul and Percival Goodman, \emph{Communitas} (Chicago, 1947).} But it
also means that we could \emph{locally} assemble them. It already happens on the
individual spare-time level. Build-it-yourself radio, record-playing, and
television kits are a commonplace, and you can also buy assemble-it-yourself
cars and refrigerators.


Groups of community workshops could combine for bulk ordering of
components, or for sharing according to their capacity the production of
components for mutual exchange and for local assembly. The new
industrial field of plastics (assuming that in a transformed future society,
people find it a genuine economy to use them) offer many unexploited
possibilities for the community workshop. There are three main kinds of
plastics today: thermosetting resins which are moulded under heat with
very high pressures and consequently require plant which is at present
expensive and complex; thermoplastics, which are shaped by extrusion
and by injection moulding (there are already do-it-yourself electric thermoplastic
injection machines on the market); and polyester resins, used
in conjunction with reinforcing materials like glass fibre which can be
moulded at low pressures by simple contact moulding, and are thus
eminently suitable for the potentialities of the community workshop.


As we are frequently reminded by our own experience as consumers,
industrial products in our society are built for a limited life as well as for
an early obsolescence. The products which are available for purchase are
not the products which we would prefer to have. In a worker-controlled
society it would not be worth the workers’ while to produce articles
with a deliberately limited life, nor to make things which were unrepairable.
Products would have \emph{transparency of operation and repair}. When
Henry Ford first marketed his Model T he aimed at a product which
“any hick up a dirt road” could repair with a hammer and a spanner. He
nearly bankrupted his firm in the process, but this is precisely the kind of
product which an anarchist society would need: objects whose functioning
is transparent and whose repair can be undertaken readily
and simply by the user.


In his book \emph{The Worker in an Affluent Society}, Ferdynand Zweig makes
the entertaining observation that “quite often the worker comes to work
on Monday worn out from his weekend activities, especially from ‘Do-it-yourself’.
Quite a number said that the weekend is the most trying
and exacting period of the whole week, and Monday morning in the
factory, in comparison, is relaxing.”\footnote{Ferdynand Zweig, \emph{The Worker in an Affluent Society} (London, 1961).} This leads us to ask — not in the
future, but in our present society — what \emph{is} work and what \emph{is} leisure if we
work harder in our leisure than at our work? The fact that one of these
jobs is paid and the other is not seems almost fortuitous. And this in turn
leads us to a further question. The paradoxes of contemporary capitalism
mean that there are vast numbers of what one American economist calls
\emph{no-people}: the army of the unemployed who are either unwanted by, or
who consciously reject, the meaningless mechanised slavery of contemporary
industrial production. Could they make a livelihood for themselves
today in the community workshop? If the workshop is conceived
merely as a social service for “creative leisure” the answer is that it would
probably be against the rules. Members might complain that so-and-so
was abusing the facilities provided by using them “commercially”. But if
the workshop were conceived on more imaginative lines than any
existing venture of this kind, its potentialities could become a source of
livelihood in the truest sense. In several of the New Towns in Britain,
for example, it has been found necessary and desirable to build groups of
small workshops for individuals and small businesses engaged in such
work as repairing electrical equipment or car bodies, woodworking and
the manufacture of small components. The Community Workshop
would be enhanced by its cluster of separate workplaces for “gainful”
work. Couldn’t the workshop become the community \emph{factory}, providing
work or a place for work for anyone in the locality who wanted to work
that way, not as an optional extra to the economy of the affluent society
which rejects an increasing proportion of its members, but as one of the
prerequisites of the worker-controlled economy of the future?


Keith Paton again, in a far-sighted pamphlet addressed to members of
the Claimants’ Union, urged them not to compete for meaningless jobs
in the economy which has thrown them out as redundant, but to use
their skills to serve their own community. (One of the characteristics of
the affluent world is that it denies its poor the opportunity to feed,
clothe, or house \emph{themselves}, or to meet their own and their families’
needs, except from grudgingly doled-out welfare payments). He
explains that:



\begin{quote}


When we talk of “doing our own thing” we are not advocating going
back to doing everything by hand. This would have been the only
option in the thirties. But since then electrical power and “affluence”
have brought a spread of \emph{intermediate} machines, some of them very
sophisticated, to ordinary working class communities. Even if they do
not own them (as many claimants do not) the possibility exists of
borrowing them from neighbours, relatives, ex-workmates. Knitting
and sewing machines, power tools and other do-it-yourself equipment
comes in this category. Garages can be converted into little workshops,
home-brew kits are popular, parts and machinery can be taken from old
cars and other gadgets. If they saw their opportunity, trained metallurgists
and mechanics could get into advanced scrap technology, recycling
the metal wastes of the consumer society for things which could be used
again regardless of whether they would fetch anything in a shop. Many
hobby enthusiasts could begin to see their interests in a new light.\footnote{Keith Paton, \emph{The Right to Work or the Fight to Live?} (Stoke-on-Trent, 1972).}



\end{quote}


“We do”, he affirms, “\emph{need} each other and the enormous pool of energy
and morale that lies untapped in every ghetto, city district and estate.”
The funny thing is that when we discuss the question of work from an
anarchist point of view, the first question people ask is: What would you
do about the lazy man, the man who will not work? The only possible
answer is that we have all been supporting him for centuries. The
problem that faces every individual and every society is quite different,
it is how to provide people with the opportunity they yearn for: the
chance to be useful.

\chapter{Chapter XII. The Breakdown of Welfare}



\begin{quote}


All institutions, all social organisations, impose a pattern on people and detract
from their individuality; above all it seems to me, they detract from their humanity
\dots{} It seems to me that one thing is in the nature of all institutions, whether they
are for good purposes, like colleges, schools and hospitals, or for evil pluposes, like
prisons. Everyone in an institution is continually adapting himself to it, and to
other people, whereas the glory of humanity is that it adapts its environment to
mankind, not human beings to their environment.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

John Vaizey, \emph{Scenes From Institutional Life}


\end{flushright}


Anarchists are sometimes told that their simple picture of the state as
the protector of the privileges of the powerful is hopelessly out of date:
welfare has changed the state. Some politicians even claim that their
parties invented welfare. The late Hugh Gaitskill, for instance, described
the welfare state as “another Labour achievement”, adding that “unfortunately
gratitude is not a reliable political asset”. In fact the candidates for
office in most Western governments rival each other in the welfare
packages they offer the electorate.


But what do we mean by the welfare state? Social welfare can exist
without the state. States can, and frequently do, exist without undertaking
responsibility for social welfare. Every kind of human association
may be a welfare society: trade unions, Christmas clubs, churches and
teenage gangs — all of which presumably aim at mutual benefit, comfort
and security can be considered as aspects of social welfare. The state, as
we have seen, is a form of social organisation which differs from all the
rest in two respects: firstly, that it claims the allegiance of the whole
population rather than those who have opted to join it, and secondly,
that it has coercive power to enforce that allegiance. Association for
mutual welfare is as old as humanity — we wouldn’t be here if it were not
– and is biological in origin. Kropotkin, whose \emph{Mutual Aid} chronicles
this innate human tendency, describes, not the strengthening, but the
destruction of the social institutions that embodied it, with the growth
of the modern European nation-state from the fifteenth century
onward:



\begin{quote}


For the next three centuries the States, both on the continent and in
these islands, systematically weeded out all institutions in which the
mutual aid tendency had formerly found its expression. The village
communities were bereft of their folkmotes, their courts and independent
administration: their lands were confiscated. The guilds were
spoilated of their possessions and liberties, and placed under the control,
the fancy, and the bribery of the State’s official. The cities were divested
of their sovereignty, and the very springs of their inner life – the
folkmote, the elected justices and their administration, the sovereign
parish and the sovereign guild — were annihilated; the State’s functionary
took possession of every link of what was formerly an organic whole \dots{}
It was taught in the universities and from the pulpit that the institutions
in which men formerly used to embody their needs of mutual support
could not be tolerated in a properly organised State; that the state alone
could represent the bonds of union between its subjects; that federalism
and “particularism” were the enemies of progress, and the State was the
only proper initiator of further development.\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{The State: Its Historic Role} (London, Freedom Press, 1987).}



\end{quote}


This is not an old-fashioned romantic view of the passing of the Middle
Ages: it is reflected in modern scholarship, for example in Ullmann’s
\emph{Government and People in the Middle Ages}. Nor is Kropotkin’s bitter
account of it exaggerated, as you can see from the history of pauperism
in Britain. In the Middle Ages destitution was relieved without recourse
to state action. Guild members who fell into poverty were assisted by the
fraternity, whose concern extended to their widows and orphans. There
were hospitals and lazar-houses for the sick, and monastic hospitality was
extended to all who needed it. But with the establishment of a firmly
based nation-state by the Tudors, it was characteristic that the first state
legislation on poverty required that beggars should be whipped and that
the second required that they should be branded, and that the essence of
the Poor Law from its codification in 1601 to its amendment in 1834
and its final disappearance in our own time, was punitive. Any member
of the Claimants’ Union today would insist that the Poor Law \emph{still} exists
and that it \emph{is} punitive.


We may thus conclude that there is an essential paradox in the fact
that the state whose symbols are the policeman, the jailer and the soldier
should have become the administrator and organiser of social welfare.
The connection between welfare and warfare is in fact very close. Until
late in the nineteenth century the state conducted its wars with profesional
soldiers and mercenaries, but the increasing scale and scope of
wars forced states to pay more and more attention to the physical quality
of recruits, whether volunteers or conscripts, and the discovery that so
large a populationthe eligible cannon-fodder was physically unfit (a
discovery it has made afresh with every war of the last hundred years) led
the state to take measures for improving the physical health of the
nation. Richard Titmuss remarks in his essay on \emph{War and Social Policy} that
“It was the South American War, not one of the notable wars in human
history to change the affairs of men, that touched off the personal health
movement which eventually led to the National Health Service in 1948.”\footnote{Richard Titmuss, “War and Social Policy” in his \emph{Essays on “The Welfare State”} (London, 1958).}


With the extension of warfare to the civilian population, the need to
maintain morale by the formulation of “peace aims” and the general
feeling of guilt over past social injustices and of resolution to do better in
future which war engenders, the concern over physical health extended
to a wider field of social well-being. The “wartime trends towards universalising
public provision for certain basic needs”, as Titrnuss says, “mean in
effect that a social system must be so organised as to enable all citizens
(and not only soldiers) to learn what to make of their lives in peacetime.
In this context, the Education Act of 1944 becomes intelligible; so does
the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the National Insurance, Family
Allowances and National Service Acts. All these measures of social policy
were in part an expression of the needs of war-time strategy to fuse and
unify the conditions of life of civilians and non-civilians alike.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


His sardonic conclusion is that “The aims and content of social policy,
both in peace and war, are thus determined — at least to a substantial
extent — by how far the co-operation of the masses is essential to the
successful prosecution of war.”


There are in fact several quite separate traditions of social welfare: the
product of totally different attitudes to social needs. Even in the unified
provision under the state’s welfare legislation these traditions live on.
A friend of mine, an experimental psychologist who visits many hospitals,
says that although it is several decades since the establishment of the
National Health Service, he can always tell whether a particular institution
grew out of a voluntary hospital, a municipal one, or a Poor Law
institution. One of these traditions is that of a service given grudgingly
and punitively by authority, another is the expression of social responsibility,
or of mutual aid and self-help. One is embodied in \emph{institutions}, the
other in \emph{associations}.


In the jargon of social administration there is an ugly but expressive
word “institutionalisation”, meaning putting people into institutions.
There is also an even uglier word, “de-institutionalisation”, meaning
getting them out again. Regrettable the word may be, but it describes a
trend that is profoundly significant from an anarchist point of view.
“Institution” in a general sense means “an established law, custom, usage,
practice, organisation, or other element in the political or social life of a
people” and in a special sense means “an educational, philanthropic,
remedial, or penal establishment in which a building or system of buildings
plays a major and central role, \emph{e.g.} schools, hospitals, orphanages, old
people’s homes, jails”. If you accept these definitions you will see that
anarchism is hostile to institutions in the general sense, hostile, that is to
say, to the institutionalisation into pre-established forms or legal entities
of the various kinds of human association. It is predisposed towards de-institutionalisation,
towards the breakdown of institutions.


Now de-institutionalisation is a feature of current thought and actual
trends in the second or special sense of the word. There is a characteristic
pattern of development common to many of these special institutions.
Frequently they were founded or modified by some individual pioneer,
a secular or religious philanthropist, to meet some urgent social need, or
remedy some social evil. Then they became the focus of the activities of
a voluntary society, and as the nineteenth century proceeded, gained the
acknowledgement and support of the state. Local authorities filled in the
geographical gaps in their distribution and finally, in our own century,
the institutions themselves have been institutionalised, that is to say
nationalised, or taken over by the state as a public service.


But at the very peak of their growth and development a doubt has
arisen. Are they in fact remedying the evil or serving the purpose for
which they were instituted, or are they merely perpetuating it? A new
generation of pioneer thinkers arises which seeks to set the process in
reverse, to abolish the institution altogether, or to break it down into
non-institutional units, or to meet the same social need in a non-institutional
way. This is so marked a trend that it leads us to speculate on the
extent to which the special institutions can be regarded as microcosms or
models for the critical examination of the general institutions of society.


In one sense the institutions found their architectural expression in a
hierarchy of huge Victorian buildings in the cemetery belt on the fringe
of the cities. “Conveniently adjacent to the cemetery”, wrote C. F.
Masterman, “was the immense fever hospital \dots{} In front was a gigantic
workhouse; behind a gigantic lunatic asylum; to the right, a gigantic
barrack school; to the left, a gigantic prison \dots{} Around the city’s borders
are studded the gigantic buildings, prisons or palaces which witness to its
efforts to grapple with the problems of maimed and distorted life —
witness both to its energy and its failure. The broken, the rebellious, the
lunatic, the deserted children, the deserted old, are cooped up behind
high gates and polished walls.”\footnote{C. F. Masterman quoted by Heather Woolmer, “Within the Fringe”, \emph{Town and Country Planning}, June 1972.} Heather Woolmer commented:
“Masterman sees these features as a deliberate rejection by society of all it
wished to forget, like death, and all which it found inconvenient, like
the destitute, old, or mad. It was almost as though an entire sub-culture
could be processed on the city fringe: from charity school to workhouse,
to old people’s institution to hospital to graveyard: like battery chickens
awaiting the conveyor belt to death.”\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}


And indeed institutionalisation is a cradle-to-grave affair. A generation
ago the accepted “ideal” pattern of childbirth was in a maternity
hospital. The baby was taken away from the mother at birth and put
behind glass by a masked nurse, to be brought out at strictly regulated
hours for feeding. Kissing and cuddling were regarded as unhygienic.
(Most babies were not born that way, but that was the ideal.) Today the
ideal picture is completely different. Baby is born at home with father
helping the midwife, while brothers and sisters are encouraged to “share”
the new acquisition. He is cosseted by all and sundry and fed on
demand. (Again most babies are not born that way, but it is the accepted
ideal.) This change in attitudes can be attributed to the swing of the
pendulum of fashion, or to common sense re-asserting itself, or to the
immensely influential evidence gathered by John Bowlby in his W.H.O.
report on maternal care.\footnote{John Bowlby, \emph{Maternal Care and Mental Health} (London, 1952).} Ashley Montagu writes:



\begin{quote}


there was a disease from which, but half a century ago, more than half of
the children [who died] in the first year of life, regularly died. This
disease was known as \emph{marasmus} from the Greek word meaning “wasting
away”. This disease was also known as infantile atrophy or debility.
When studies were undertaken to track down its cause, it was discovered
that it was generally babies in the “best” homes and hospitals who
were most often its victims, babies who were apparently receiving the
best and most careful physical attention, while babies in the poorest
homes, with a good mother, despite the lack of hygienic physical conditions,
often overcame the physical handicaps and flourished. What was
lacking in the sterilised environment of the babies of the first class and
was generously supplied in the babies of the second class was mother
love. This discovery is responsible for the fact that hospitals today
endeavour to keep the infant for as short a time as possible.\footnote{Ashley Montagu, \emph{The Direction if Human Development} (London, 1957).}



\end{quote}


The conflict between these two “ideal” patterns of childbirth is still
frequently debated. It was reported, for example, that “Many mothers
compare their reception and management in hospital unfavourably with
confinement at home. Of one series of 336~mothers who had at least
one baby in hospital and one at home, 80~per cent preferred home
confinement and only 14~per cent hospital confinement.”\footnote{\emph{The Lancet}, 22 April 1961.} This simply
means of course that mothers want the advantages of both “ideals” —
medical safety and a domestic atmosphere. The real demand is in fact for
the de-institutionalisation of the hospital. Thus when he opened the
obstetric unit of Charing Cross Hospital, Professor Norman Morris
declared that “Twenty-five years of achievement have vastly reduced the
hazards of childbirth, but hospitals too often drown the joys of motherhood
in a sea of inhumanity.” There was, he said, “an atmosphere of
coldness, unfriendliness, and severity, more in keeping with an income
tax office. Many of our systems which involve dragooning and regimentation
must be completely revised.”\footnote{\emph{The Times}, 24 February 1960.} Later he described many existing
maternity units as mere baby factories. “Some even seem to boast that
they have developed a more efficient conveyor belt system than anything
that has gone before.”\footnote{Norman Morris at Royal Society of Health Congress, 29 April 1961.}


The widespread acceptance of the view which has become known as
Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis has profoundly affected attitudes
to the treatment of young children in hospital. The American
paediatricians observed that residence in hospital manifests itself by a
fairly well-defined clinical picture. “A striking feature is the failure to
gain properly, despite the ingestion of diets that are entirely adequate for
growth in the home. Infants in hospitals sleep less than others and they
rarely smile or babble spontaneously. They are listless and apathetic and
look unhappy.” Bowlby notes the same thing and remarks that the condition
of these infants is ‘undoubtedly a form of depression having many
of the hallmarks of the typical adult depressive patient of the mental
hospital”.\footnote{Bowlby, op.cit. See also Kings, Raynes and Tizard, \emph{Patterns of Residential Care} (London, 1972).}


The observations of the effect of the institutional environment on sick
children are also true of physically healthy children. One of the first
comparative studies of orphanage children with a matched control group
led the observers to remark:



\begin{quote}


No one could have predicted, much less proved, the steady tendency to
deteriorate on the part of children maintained under what had previously
been regarded as standard orphanage conditions. With respect to
intelligence, vocabulary, general information, social competence,
personal adjustment, and motor achievement, the whole picture was
one of retardation. The effect of one to three years in a nursery school
still far below its own potentialities, was to reverse the tide of regression,
which, for some, led to feeble-mindedness.\footnote{Iowa Child Research Station, 1938.}



\end{quote}


In Britain during the war Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud
reported in \emph{Infants Without Families} the striking changes in children
showing every sign of retardation when their residential nurseries were
broken down to provide family groups of four children each with their
own substitute mother, and since then a great number of comparisons
have been made in several countries, with results which Barbara
Wootton summed up in these words: “Repeatedly these children have
been found to lag behind the standards of those who live at home; to
have both lower intelligence and lower developmental quotients, and to
be, moreover, relatively backward in both speech and walking \dots{} They
were also more destructive and aggressive, more restless and less able to
concentrate and more indifferent to privacy rights than other children.
They were, in fact, impoverished in all aspects of their personality.”\footnote{Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, \emph{Infants Without Families} (London, 1944) .} The
change in public and official opinion in Britain began with a letter to
\emph{The Times} in 1944 from Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who followed it with
a pamphlet drawing attention to the grossly unsatisfactory conditions in
children’s homes and orphanages, giving examples of unimaginative and
cruel treatment. As a result a committee was set up in the following year
and its report (the Curtis Report on the Care of Children) was issued in
December 1946 severely criticising the institutional care of children and
making recommendations that have been so widely accepted since that
Bowlby was able to write that “The controversy over the merits of
foster-homes and of institutional care can now be regarded as settled.
There is now no-one who advocates the care of children in large groups
— indeed all advise strongly against it.”


It is not surprising that the methods and attitudes that have proved
most successful in de-institutionalising the treatment of normal children
and “normally” sick children should b e even more striking with children
afflicted in some way, for example spastic or epileptic children, and with
mentally handicapped children. In the research project undertaken at
Brooklands, Reigate by Dr J. Tizard and Miss Daly, a group of sixteen
“imbecile” children were matched with a control group at the parent
hospital. Even after the first year the children cared for on “family” lines
gained an average of eight months in mental age on a verbal intelligence
test as against three months for the control group. In personal independence,
measured on an age scale, they had increased by six months as
against three in the control group, and there were significant developments
in speech, social and emotional behaviour and self-chosen activity.
Similar experiences of the benefits of small, permissive, family groups
have rewarded those who have sought to de-institutionalise the residential
care of “delinquent” or maladjusted children — George Lyward at
Finchden Manor, or David Wills at Bodenham, for example.


For many generations the word “institution” meant, to the majority
of people in Britain, one thing, \emph{the} Institution, the Poor Law Infirmary
or Union Workhouse, admission to which was a disgrace and a last
refuge, regarded with dread and hatred. The Poor Law has gone but its
traditions remain. Slowly we have learned that any institution for the
old encourages senility, while every effort to help them to live their
own lives in a place of their own encourages independence and zest for
life.



\begin{quote}


Probably the first thing for anyone to learn who has old people to care
for is the need to allow them the utmost freedom of action, to realise
that their personality is still individual and that social significance is
essential to happiness. It is all too easy to take the attitude that the old are
past doing anything and encourage resting and doing nothing. This is a
mistaken kindness, though it may be an easy way of satisfying the
conscience compared with the more exacting way of continual encouragement
to be active, to go out, to find worthwhile occupation. The
latter course, however, is much more likely to promote happiness and to
forestall the troubles which may arise later on, from infirmity and
apathy.\footnote{Margaret Neville Hill, \emph{An Aproach to Old Age and its Problems} (London, 1960).}



\end{quote}


The de-institutionalisation of the treatment of mental illness began in
the eighteenth century when William Tuke founded the York Retreat,
and when Pinel in the same year (1792) struck off the chains from his
mad patients at Bicêtre. But in the nineteenth century, with what
Kathleen Jones calls “the triumph of legalism”, the pattern was laid down
of huge isolated lunatic asylums as a sinister appendage to the Poor Law
— the heritage against which the modern pioneers have to struggle.
Kropotkin, in his remarkable lecture on prisons, delivered in Paris in
1887, took Pinel as the starting point for the “community care” which is
now declared policy for mental health:



\begin{quote}


It will be said, however, there will always remain some people, the sick,
if you wish to call them that, who constitute a danger to society. Will it
not be necessary somehow to rid ourselves of them, or at least prevent
them from harming others?


No society, no matter how little intelligent, will need such an absurd
solution, and this is why. Formerly the insane were looked upon as
possessed by demons and were treated accordingly. They were kept in
chains in places like stables, riveted to the walls like wild beasts. But
along came Pinel, a man of the Great Revolution, who dared to remove
their chains and tried treating them as brothers. “You will be devoured
by them,” cried the keepers. But Pinel dared. Those who were believed
to be wild beasts gathered around Pinel and proved by their attitude that
he was right in believing in the better side of human nature even when
the intelligence is clouded by disease. Then the cause was won. They
stopped chaining the insane.


Then the peasants of the little Belgian village, Gheel, found something
better. They said: “Send us your insane. We will give them
absolute freedom.” They adopted them into their families, they gave
them places at their tables, the chance alongside them to cultivate their
fields and a place among their young people at their country balls. “Eat,
drink, and dance with us. Work, run about the fields and be free.” That
was the system, that was all the science the Belgian peasant had. And
liberty worked a miracle. The insane became cured. Even those who
had incurable, organic lesions became sweet, tractable members of the
family like the rest. The diseased mind would always work in an
abnormal fashion but the heart was in the right place. They cried it was a
miracle. The cures were attributed to a saint and a virgin. But this virgin
was liberty and the saint was work in the fields and fraternal treatment.


At one of the extremes of the immense “space between mental disease
and crime” of which Maudsley speaks, liberty and fraternal treatment
have worked their miracle. They will do the same at the other
extreme.\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Prisons and their Moral Influence on Prisoners} (1887) reprinted in Baldwin (ed.), \emph{Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets} (New York, 1927, 1968).}



\end{quote}


Very slowly public sentiment and official policy have been catching up
with this attitude. “The first reform in the care of the mentally ill in
America put the insane into state hospitals”, writes J. B. Martin, “the
second reform is now in progress — to get them out again.”\footnote{J. B. Martin, \emph{A Pane of Glass} (London 1960).} Exactly the
same is true of Britain. Evidence has been piling up for years to indicate
that the institution manufactures madness. One key piece of research (by
Hilliard and Munday at the Fountain Mental Deficiency Hospital) indicated
that 54~per cent of the “high-grade” patients were not in fact intellectually
defective. Commenting in the light of this on “the false
impression of the problem of mental deficiency” resulting from present
classifications, they remarked that “such patients may be socially incompetent,
but in many cases institutional life itself has aggravated their
emotional difficulties.”\footnote{Hilliard and Munday, “Diagnostic Problems in the Feeble-Minded”, \emph{The Lancet} (25 September 1954).}


The law itself has changed, sweeping away the whole process of certification
and seeking the treatment of mental sickness like any other
illness and mental deficiency like any physical handicap. Outpatient
facilities, occupation centres and the variety of provisions known as
“community care” are intended to replace institutions wherever possible.
And yet every year still brings a fresh crop of stories of grotesque conditions
in allegedly therapeutic institutions, of terrible ill-treatment of
helpless patients, or of the continued illegal detention of people who,
years ago, had been placed in an institution because they were a nuisance
to their relations or to a local authority and who had, over the years,
been reduced to a state of premature senility by the institution itself.


But why, in the face of known facts about the harmful effects of institutions,
and in the face of the officially declared policy of “community
care”, have we failed, in spite of some glowing exceptions, to de-institutionalise
mental illness? The answer is not merely the parsimony of
public spending on mental health, it has two other important components.
How can we adopt a policy of “the replacement of a custodial
authoritarian system by a permissive and tolerant culture in which the
patients are encouraged to be themselves and share their feelings,”\footnote{Dr Wadsworth, Medical Superintendent at Cheadle Royal Hospital.} when
the staff themselves are organised in the rigid and authoritarian hierarchy
that characterises every hospital? The people whose lives are spent in
closest contact with the patients are themselves at the bottom of the
pyramid of bullying and exploitation: there is no “permissive and tolerant
culture” for them, let alone for the inmates (This aspect of institutions is
brilliantly illuminated in Erving Goffinan’s book \emph{Asylums}.) The other
factor is what the PEP report on community mental health calls the
“important irrational component” in public attitudes to deviancy.\footnote{PEP, \emph{Community Mental Health Services} (London, 1960).} Dr
Joshua Bierer remarked that “I and my colleagues are convinced that it is
our own anxiety which forces us to lock people up, to brand them
and make them criminals. I believe if we can overcome our own anxiety and
treat adults and adolescents as members of the community, we will create
fewer mental patients and fewer criminals.”\footnote{Dr Joshua Bierer at the 1960 conference of the World Federation of Mental Health.}


There are indeed some people whose presence in ordinary society
arouses such anxiety or hostility or fear, or for whose welfare it is so
unwilling to assume responsibility in its normal primary groups like the
family, that the special institutions we have discussed were established to
contain them: asylums for the insane, orphanages for homeless children,
the workhouse for the poor and aged, barracks for the defenders of the
state, prisons and reformatories for those who transgress and get caught.
Discipline, routine obedience and submission were the characteristics
sought in the well-regulated institution, best obtained in an enclosed
environment, away from the distractions, comforts, seductions and
dangerous liberties of ordinary society. In the nineteenth century — the
great institution-building age — indeed, the same characteristics were
sought in the ordinary “open” institutions of outside society, the factory,
the school, the developing civil service, the patriarchal family.


The prison is simply the ultimate institution, and every effort to
reform the institution leaves its fundamental character untouched. It is,
as Merfyn Turner says, “an embarrassment to those who support the
system it personifies, and a source of despair for those who would
change it”. Godwin underlined the basic dilemma as long ago as the
1790s:



\begin{quote}


The most common method pursued in depriving the offender of the
liberty he has abused is to erect a public jail, in which offenders of every
description are thrust together, and left to form among themselves what
species of society they can. Various circumstances contribute to imbue
them with habits of indolence and vice, and to discourage industry; and
no effort is made to remove or soften these circumstances. It cannot be
necessary to expatiate upon the atrociousness of this system. Jails are, to a
proverb, seminaries of vice; and he must be an uncommon proficient in
the passion and the practice of injustice, or a man of sublime virtue, who
does not come out of them a much worse man than when he entered.\footnote{William Godwin, \emph{An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice} (London, 1793).}



\end{quote}


And in the 1880s, Kropotkin (who originated the definition of prisons
as “universities of crime”) explained the futility of attempts at reform:



\begin{quote}


Whatever changes are introduced in the prison regime, the problem
of second offenders does not decrease. That is inevitable: it must be
so — the prison kills all the qualities in a man which make him best
adapted to community life. It makes him the kind of person who will
inevitably return to prison \dots{}


I might propose that a Pestalozzi be placed at the head of each prison
\dots{} I might also propose that in the place of the present guards, ex-soldiers
and ex-policemen, sixty Pestalozzis be substited. But, you
will ask, where are we to find them? A pertinent question. The great
Swiss teacher would certainly refuse to be a prison guard, for, basically
the principle of all prisons is wrong because it deprives men
of liberty. So long as you deprive a man of his liberty, you will not make
him better. You will cultivate habitual criminals.\footnote{Kropotkin, \emph{op.cit.}}



\end{quote}


One of the things that emerges from the study of institutions is the existence
of a recognisable dehumanised institutional character. In its
ultimate form it was described by the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim in
his book \emph{The Informed Heart} (where he relates his previous studies of
concentration camp behaviour and of emotionally disturbed children to
the human condition in modern mass society). Bettelheim was a
prisoner at Dachau and Buchenwald, and he describes those prisoners
who were known as \emph{Muselmänner} (“moslems”), the walking corpses who
“were so deprived of affect, self-esteem, and every form of stimulation,
so totally exhausted, both physically and emotionally, that they had given
the environment total power over them. They did this when they gave
up trying to exercise any further influence over their life and environment”.\footnote{Bruno Bettelheim, \emph{The Informed Heart} (London, 1970).}
His terrible description of the ultimate institutional man goes on:



\begin{quote}


But even the moslems, being organisms, could not help reacting
somehow to their environment, and this they did by depriving it of the
power to influence them as subjects in any way whatsoever. To achieve
this, they had to give up responding to it all , and became objects, but
with this they gave up being persons. At this point such men still obeyed
orders, but only blindly or automatically; no longer selectively or with
inner reservation or any hatred at being so abused. They still looked
about, or at least moved their eyes around. The looking stopped much
later, though even then they still moved their bodies when ordered, but
never did anything on their own any more. Typically, this stopping of
action began when they no longer lifted their legs as they walked, but
only shuffled them. When finally even the looking about on their own
stopped, they soon died.\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}



\end{quote}


This description has a recognisable affinity to the behaviour observed in
“normal” institutions. “Often the children sit inert or rock themselves for
hours,” says Dr Bowlby of institution children. “Go and watch them
staring at the radiator, waiting to die,” says Brian Abel-Smith of institutional
pensioners. Dr Russell Barton gave this man-made disease the
name \emph{institutional neurosis} and described its clinical features in mental
hospitals, its differential diagnosis, aetiology, treatment and prevention. It
is, he says,



\begin{quote}


a disease characterised by apathy, lack of initiative, loss of interest, especially
in things of an impersonal nature, submissiveness, apparent
inability to make plans for the future, lack of individuality, and sometimes
a characteristic posture and gait. Permutations of these words and
phrases, “institutionalised”, “dull”, “apathetic”, “withdrawn”, “inaccessible”,
“solitary”, “unoccupied”, “lacking in initiative”, “lacking in spontaneity”,
“uncommunicative”, “simple”, “childish”, “gives no trouble”, “has settled
down well”, “is cooperative”, should always make one suspect that the
process of institutionalisation has produced neurosis.\footnote{Russell Barton, \emph{Institutional Neurosis} (Bristol, 1959).}



\end{quote}


He associates seven factors with the environment in which the disease
occurs in mental hospitals: (1) Loss of contact with the outside world. (2)
Enforced idleness. (3) Bossiness of medical and nursing staff. (4) Loss
of personal friends, possessions, and personal events. (5) Drugs. (6) Ward
atmosphere. (7) Loss of prospects outside the institution. Other writers
have called the condition “psychological institutionalism” or “prison
stupor”, and many years ago Lord Brockway, in his book on prisons,
depicted the type exactly in his description of the Ideal Prisoner: “The
man who has no personality: who is content to become a mere cog in
the prison machine; whose mind is so dull that he does not feel the
hardship of separate confinement; who has nothing to say to his fellows;
who has no desires, except to feed and sleep, who shirks responsibility
for his own existence and consequently is quite ready to live at others’
orders, performing the allotted task, marching here and there as
commanded, shutting the door of his cell upon his own confinement as
required.”\footnote{Fenner Brockway (with Stephen Hobhouse), \emph{English Prisons Today} (London, 1921).}


This is the ideal type of Institution Man, the kind of person who fits
the system of public institutions which we have inherited from the past.
It is no accident that it is also the ideal type for the bottom people of all
authoritarian institutions. It is the ideal soldier (theirs not to reason
why), the ideal worshipper (Have thine own way, Lord\Slash{}Have thine own
way\Slash{}Thou art the potter\Slash{}I am the clay) , the ideal worker (You’re not
paid to think, just get on with it), the ideal wife (a chattel), the ideal
child (seen but not heard) — the ideal product of the Education Act of
1870.


The institutions were a microcosm, or in some cases a caricature, of
the society that produced them. Rigid, authoritarian, hierarchical, the
virtues they sought were obedience and subservience. But the people
who sought to break down the institutions, the pioneers of the changes
which are slowly taking place, or which have still to be fought for, were
motivated by different values. The key words in \emph{their} vocabulary have
been love, sympathy, permissiveness, and instead of institutions they have
postulated families, communities, leaderless groups, autonomous groups.
The qualities they have sought to foster are self-reliance, autonomy, self-respect,
and, \emph{as a consequence}, social responsibility, mutual respect and
mutual aid.


When we compare the Victorian antecedents of our public institutions
with the organs of working-class mutual aid in the same period the
very names speak volumes. On the one side the Workhouse, the Poor
Law Infirmary, the National Society for the Education of the Poor in
Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church; and, on the
other, the \emph{Friendly} Society, the Sick \emph{Club}, the \emph{Cooperative} Society, the
Trade \emph{Union}. One represents the tradition of fraternal and autonomous
associations springing up from below, the other that of authoritarian
institutions directed from above.


It is important to note that the servants of the institution are as much
its victims as the inmates. Russell Barton says that “it is my impression
that an authoritarian attitude is the rule rather than the exception” in
mental hospitals, and he relates this to the fact that the nurse herself is
“subject to a process of institutionalisation in the nurses’ home where she
lives”. He finds it useless to blame any individual, for “individuals change
frequently but mental hospitals have remained unchanged”, and he
suggests that the fault lies with the administrative structure. Richard
Titmuss, in his study of “The Hospital and its Patients” attributes the
barrier of silence so frequently met with in ordinary hospitals to “the
effect on people of working and living in a closed institution with rigid
social hierarchies and codes of behaviour \dots{} These people tend to deal
with their insecurity by attempting to limit responsibility, and increase
efficiency through the formulation of rigid rules and regulations and by
developing an authoritative and protective discipline. The barrier of
silence is one device employed to maintain authority. We find it used in
many different settings when we look at other institutions where the
relationship between the staff and the inmates is not a happy one.”\footnote{Richard Titmuss, “The Hospital and Its Patients’ in his \emph{Essays on “The Welfare State”} (London, 1958).}


And John Vaizey, remarking that “everything in our social life is
capable of being institutionalised, and it seems to me that our political
energies should be devoted to restraining institutions” says that “above all
\dots{} institutions give inadequate people what they want — power. Army
officers, hospital sisters, prison warders — many of these people are inadequate
and unfulfilled and they lust for power and control.”\footnote{John Vaizey, \emph{Scenes from Institutional Life} (London, 1959).} In \emph{The
Criminal and His Victim}, von Hentig takes this view further: “The police
force and the ranks of prison officers attract many aberrant characters
because they afford legal channels for pain-inflicting, power-wielding
behaviour, and because these very positions confer upon their holders a
large degree of immunity, this in turn causes psychopathic dispositions to
grow more and more disorganised \dots{}”\footnote{H. von Hentig, \emph{The Criminal and His Victim} (Yale, 1948).} The point is emphasised with
many telling illustrations in a modern anarchist classic, Alex Comfort’s
\emph{Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State}.


The anarchist approach is clear: the breakdown of institutions into
small units in the wider society, based on self-help and mutual support,
like Synanon or Alcoholics Anonymous, or the many other supportive
groups of this kind which have sprung up outside the official machinery
of social welfare. Brian Abel-Smith (by no means an anarchist), when
asked how we should rebuild and restructure the social services so that
they really serve, replied:



\begin{quote}


We would rebuild hospitals on modern lines — outpatients’ departments
or health centres, with a few beds tucked away in the corners. We
would close the mental deficiency colonies and build new villas with
small wards. How many could be looked after by quasi-housemothers in
units of eight just like good local authorities are doing for children
deprived of a normal home life? How many could be looked after at
home if there were proper occupational centres and domiciliary
services? We would plough up the sinister old mental hospitals and build
small ones in or near the towns. We would pull down most of the institutions
for old people and provide them with suitable housing \dots{} We
would provide a full range of occupations at home and elsewhere
for the disabled, the aged and the sick.\footnote{Brian Abel-Smith, “Whose Welfare State?” in \emph{Conviction} (London 1958).}



\end{quote}


And an anarchist approach to the penal institution? There is none,
except to shut it down. The organisation called Radical Alternatives to
Prison has listed twelve existing alternatives within the community, each
of which is likely to be more effective than incarceration by impersonal,
punitive and incompetent authorities, in enabling “offenders” of different
kinds to play a part as creative and influential members of society.\footnote{RAP, \emph{The Case for Radical Alternatives to Prison} (London, 1971).}


Within the structure of social security as at present constituted, social
welfare as a substitute for social justice — the most anarchical feature is
the rapid growth of Claimants’ Unions. This is a direct reaction to the
way in which a so-called social insurance scheme has been institutionalised
into a punitive, inquisitorial bureaucracy which declines to reveal
to the “clients” the basis on which payments are made or withheld.\footnote{Tony Gould and Joe Kenyon, \emph{Stories from the Dole Queue} (London, 1972).}
Anna Coote’s account of the Claimants’ Unions notes that: “Their
growth has been entirely spontaneous, like the recent mushrooming of
tenants’ associations, play groups, neighbourhood newspapers and
advice centres. They have no political affiliations and each one is anxious
to maintain its independence, not to be controlled or influenced by any
organisation. All Claimants’ Unions are formed at grass-roots level
amongst the claimants themselves and in response to a specific need.”\footnote{Anna Coote, “The new Aggro at the Social Security Office”, \emph{Evening Standard}, 17 April 1972.}


She makes the very significant observation that members of a
Claimants’ Union treat the social security office like home. “They stand
around exchanging information, conferring in corners, organising,
handing out leaflets and words of encouragement’ while “claimants who
don’t belong to a union tend to sit still, without talking, looking
anxious”.


A multiplicity of mutual aid organisations among claimants, patients,
victims, represents the most potent lever for change in transforming the
welfare state into a genuine welfare society, in turning community care
into a caring community.

\chapter{Chapter XIII. How Deviant Dare You Get?}



\begin{quote}


In a free society you would have to come to terms with yourself and with others
like yourself, with the man who backs his car into yours, with the man next door
who has to feed three times as many mouths as you do, with the drunks who get
into your garden. You would have to sort things out with them yourself, instead of
having social workers or political parties or policemen or shop stewards to do the job
for you, and in the process you would be forced to face up to what sort of person
you yourself really were.



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

Peter Brown, \emph{Smallcreep’s Day}


\end{flushright}


Every anarchist propagandist would agree that the aspect of anarchist
ideas of social organisation which people find hardest to swallow is the
anarchist rejection of the law, the legal system and the agencies of law-enforcement.
They may ruefully agree with our criticism of the methods of the
police, the fallibility of the courts, lawyers and judges,
the barbarity of the penal system and the fatuity of the legislature. But
they remain sceptical about the idea of a society in which the protection
offered by the law is absent, and unconvinced that there are alternatives
more desirable than ‘the rule of law’ which, with all its admitted failings,
imperfections and abuses, is regarded as a precious achievement of
civilised society and the best guarantee of the liberty of the individual
citizen.


Maybe we are not worried by the mingled incredulity and bewilderment
which meets our bland declaration that society should do away
with the police and the law; perhaps we are perfectly satisfied to
contemplate our own feeling that we can do without them; or perhaps
we just enjoy a sense of revolutionary rectitude and superiority by
deriding them. But it is our fellow-citizens that we have to convince if
we are really concerned with gaining acceptance for the anarchist point
of view.


The characteristic anarchist answer to the question of how an anarchist
society would cope with criminal acts runs something like this: (a)
most crimes are of theft in one form or another, and in a society in
which real property and productive property were communally held and
personal property shared out on a more equitable basis, the incentive for
theft would disappear; (b) crimes of violence not originating in theft
would dwindle away since a genuinely permissive and non-competitive
society would not produce personalities prone to violence; (c) motoring
offences would not present the problems that they do now because
people would be more socially conscious and responsible, would tend to
use public transport when the private car had lost its status, and in a
more leisured society would lose the pathological love of speed and
aggressiveness that you see on the roads today; (d) in a decentralised
society vast urban conglomerations would cease to exist and people
would be more considerate and concerned for their neighbours. But the
difficulty about this kind of argument is that it brings the obvious
response that it calls for a new kind of human being, a social paragon of a
kind we do not often meet in real life. No, replies the anarchist, it calls
for a different kind of human environment, the kind that we are seeking
to build. But the trouble is, as an American criminologist, Paul Tappan,
put it, that as a society we prefer the social problems that surround us “to
the consequences of deliberate and heroic efforts so drastically to change
the culture that man could live in uncomplicated adjustment to an
uncomplicated world”.


Any standard definition of the concepts of law, crime and law-enforcement
will indicate that they are incompatible with the idea of anarchy:



\begin{quote}


\emph{Law:} The expressed will of the state. A command or a prohibition
emanating from the authorised agencies of the state, and backed up by
the authority and the capacity to exercise force which is characteristic of
the state \dots{}


\emph{Crime:} A violation of the criminal law, i.e. a breach of the conduct code
specifically sanctioned by the state, which through its legislative agencies
defines crimes and their penalties, and through its administrative
agencies prosecutes offenders and imposes and administers punishments.


\emph{Police:} Agents of the law charged with the responsibility of maintaining
law and order among the citizens.\footnote{H. P. Fairchild, \emph{Dictionary of Sociology} (London, 1959).}



\end{quote}


It is possible, of course, to re-define the concept of law in a non-legalistic
sense: in the sense of common law, the embodiment of pre-existing
social custom, or in a looser sociological sense as the whole body of rules
of all sorts that exist in a society; and it is possible to re-define the
concept of crimes as anti-social acts — whether or not they are illegal
acts. The nineteenth-century criminologist, Garofallo, enlarged the
definition of crime to “any action which goes against the prevalent
norms of probity and compassion”, and his modern successor E. H.
Sutherland, in his study of white-collar crime, insisted that “legal classification
should not confine the work of the criminologist and he should
be completely free to push across the barriers of definition when he sees
non-criminal behaviour which resembles criminal behaviour”. (Alex
Comfort has done this brilliantly from the anarchist standpoint in his
castigation of lawmakers and power-seekers in \emph{Authority and Deliquency
in the Modern State}.)


On the other hand it is scarcely possible for us to re-define the police,
the agents of law-enforcement, in a way that is shorn of authoritarian
connotations. Obviously in our society the police fulfil certain \emph{social}
functions, but everyone will agree that their primary purpose is to fulfil
\emph{governmental} functions. John Coatman’s volume \emph{The Police} in the Home
University Library, for instance, declares that our police system is “the
pith and marrow of the English conduct of government” and that the
policeman themselves are the “guardians of the established system of
government”. With which we would all agree.


No, there is no non-authoritarian equivalent for the policeman,
except for the concept which we would now call “social control”, of the
means by which individuals and communities may protect themselves
from anti-social acts. This concept first appeared in anarchist thought in
Godwin’s \emph{Political Justice} where, adopting the decentralist approach to the
question, he declared: “If communities \dots{} were contented with a small
district, with a proviso of confederation in cases of necessity, every individual
would then live in the public eye; and the disapprobation of his
neighbours, a species of coercion, not derived from the caprice of men
but from the system of the universe, would inevitably oblige him either
to reform or to emigrate.”\footnote{William Godwin, \emph{An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice} (London, 1793).} Many people, I fear, especially those who
have experience of living under the censorious eyes of neighbours in a
village, would find this a rather unattractive way of inhibiting anti-social
behaviour, and because it also inhibits many other varieties of non-conforming
behaviour as well, would prefer the anonymous city life.


This insistence on a more closely-knit community as the means by
which society can “contain” anti-social acts recurs time and again in the
writings of Kropotkin, who of all the classical anarchist thinkers devoted
most consideration to the question of crime, the law and the penal
system:



\begin{quote}


Of course in every society, no matter how well organised, people will
be found with easily aroused passions, who may, from time to time,
commit anti-social deeds. But what is necessary to prevent this is to give
their passions a healthy direction, another outlet.


Today we live too isolated. Private property has led us to an egotistic
individualism in all our mutual relations. We know one another only
slightly; our points of contact are too rare. But we have seen in history
examples of a communal life which is more intimately bound together —
the “composite family” in China, the agrarian communes, for example.
There people really know one another. By force of circumstances they
must aid one another materially and morally.


Family life, based on the original community, has disappeared. A new
family, based on community of aspirations, will take its place. In this
family people will be obliged to know one another, to aid one another
and to lean on one another for moral support on every occasion. And
this mutual prop will prevent the great number of anti-social acts which
we see today.\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Prisons and their Moral Influence on Prisoners}, 1877, reprinted in Baldwin (ed.) \emph{Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets} (New York 1927, 1968).}



\end{quote}


The concept was first given the name \emph{social control} by Edward Allsworth
Ross in a book of that name published in 1901, in which he cited
instances of “frontier” societies where, through unorganised or informal
measures, order is effectively maintained without benefit of legally
constituted authority: “Sympathy, sociability, the sense of justice and
resentment are competent, under favourable circumstances”, wrote Ross,
“to work out by themselves a true, natural order, that is to say, an order
without design or art.” Today the term social control has been extended
to refer to “the aggregate of values and norms by means of which
tensions and conflicts between individuals and groups are resolved or
mitigated in order to maintain the solidarity of some more inclusive
group, and also to the arrangements through which these values and
norms are communicated and instilled \dots{} Social control as the regulation
of behaviour by values and norms is to be contrasted with regulation
by force. These two modes are not, of course, entirely separable in
actual social life \dots{} But the distinction is valuable and important.”\footnote{T. B. Bottomore, \emph{Sociology} (London, 1962).}


George C. Homans in \emph{The Human Group} puts the distinction thus:
“The process by which conformity is achieved we call \emph{social control} if we
are thinking of compliance with norms, or \emph{authority} if we are thinking of
obedience to orders.” It is the size and scale of the community which, in
the opinion of the sociologists, diminishes the effectiveness of social
control: “It is only as groups grow large, and come to be composed of
individuals with conflicting moral standards, that informal controls yield
priority to those that are formal, such as laws and codes.”\footnote{Ogburn and Nimkoff, \emph{A Handbook of Sociology} (London, 1953).}


One of the few observers of modern city life to think about the way
social control actually operates in the contemporary urban environment
is Jane Jacobs, who discusses the function of streets and their pavements
or sidewalks in these terms:



\begin{quote}


To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks
\dots{} Great cities \dots{} differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways,
and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers \dots{}


The bedrock attitude of a successful city district is that a person must feel
personally safe and secure on the street among all those strangers. He
must not feel automatically menaced by them \dots{} The first thing to
understand is that the public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of
cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as the police are. It is
kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary
controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by
the people themselves. In some city areas — older public housing projects
and streets with a very high population turnover are often conspicuous
examples – the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost
entirely to the police and special guards. Such places are jungles. No
amount of police can enforce civilisation where the normal, casual
enforcement of it has broken down.\footnote{Jane Jacobs, \emph{The Death and Life of Great American Cities} (London, 1961) .}



\end{quote}


Her point is that the populous street has an unconscious do-it-yourself
surveillance system of \emph{eyes} in the street, the eyes of the residents and the
users of shops, cafes, news-stands and so on:



\begin{quote}


Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another
sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the streets works
best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of suspicion or hostility
precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets
voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing \dots{}


In settlements that are smaller and simpler than big cities, controls on
acceptable public behaviour, if not on crime, seem to operate with
greater or lesser success through a web of reputation, gossip, approval,
disapproval and sanctions, all of which are powerful if people know each
other and words travel But a city’s streets, which must control not only
the behaviour of the people of the city but also of visitors from suburbs
and towns who want to have a big time away from the gossip and sanctions
at home, have to operate by more direct, straightforward methods.
It is a wonder cities have solved such an inherently difficult problem at
all. And yet in many streets they do it magnificently.\footnote{\emph{ibid.}}



\end{quote}


The English reader of Mrs Jacobs’ book will by now no longer be
amazed by her assumption of the insecurity of the American citizen in
public places from “rape, muggings, beatings, hold-ups and the like”.
Today, she declares, “barbarism has taken over many city streets, or
people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end”. In
spite of her faith in the effectiveness of informal social control, nothing is
going to destroy \emph{her} belief in the necessity of the police. The terrifying
breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense
institutionalised police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated
aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon
mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman. The most honest
and unequivocal attempt to grasp this particular nettle from the anarchist
point of view comes from Errico Malatesta:



\begin{quote}


This necessary defence against those who violate, not the \emph{status quo}, but
the deepest feelings which distinguish man from the beasts, is one of the
pretexts by which governments justify their existence. We must eliminate
all the social causes of crime, we must develop in man brotherly
feelings, and mutual respect; we must, as Fourier put it, seek useful
alternatives to crime. But if, and so long as, there are criminals, either
people will find the means, and have the energy, to defend themselves
directly against them, or the police and the magistrature will reappear,
and with them, government. We do not solve a problem by denying its
existence \dots{}


We can, with justification, fear that this necessary defence against
crime could be the beginning of, and the pretext for, a new system of
oppression and privilege. It is the mission of the anarchists to see that this
does not happen. By seeking the causes of each crime and making every
effort to eliminate them; by making it impossible for anyone to derive
personal advantage out of the detection of crime, and by leaving it to the
interested groups themselves to take whatever steps they deem necessary
for their defence; by accustoming ourselves to consider criminals as
brothers who have strayed, as sick people needing loving treatment, as
one would for any victim of hydrophobia or dangerous lunatic — it will
be possible to reconcile the complete freedom of all with defence against
those who obviously and dangerously threaten it \dots{}


For us the carrying out of social duties must be a voluntary act, and
we only have the right to intervene with material force against those
who offend against others \emph{violently} and prevent them from living in
peace. Force, physical restraint, must only be used against attacks of
violence and for no other reason than that of self-defence. But who will
judge? Who will provide the necessary defence? Who will establish what
measures of restraint are to be used? We do not see any other way than
that of leaving it to the interested parties, to the people, that is the mass
of citizens, who will act differently according to the circumstances and
according to their different degrees of social development. We must,
above all, avoid the creation of bodies specialising in police work;
perhaps something will be lost in repressive efficiency but we will avoid
the creation of the instrument of every tyranny. In every respect the
injustice, and transitory violence of the people is better than the leaden
rule, the legalised state violence of the judiciary and police. We are, in
any case, only one of the forces acting in society, and history will
advance, as always, in the direction of the resultant of all the forces.\footnote{Vernon Richards (ed.), \emph{Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas} (London, Freedom Press, 1965).}



\end{quote}


Three things stand out from Malatesta’s observations. Firstly, he recognised
that any and every do-it-yourself justice system would have a
tendency to harden into an institution. The difficulty is that this might
very well be for very good reasons: the attempt to give the accused a
“fair”’ trial (for I take it that the restraint of offenders would include some
procedure to find out whether the accused committed the offence). If
the offender is to be more fairly treated than he would be under existing
systems of jurisprudence, certain safeguards which exist in the present
system must survive in any \emph{ad hoc} arrangement. There must be recognition
of the principle of \emph{habeas corpus}, the accused must be told what he is
accused of, he must be given facilities to defend himself, there must be
generally accepted rules of evidence, and so on. The history of revolutionary
regimes is littered with committees of public safety, people’s
courts and similar “revolutionary” bodies, which have turned out to be
just as dubious a proposition, from the point of view of those who are
brought before them, as the bourgeois institutions they replaced. The
more fortunate of the East European countries have slowly reintroduced
“Western” juridical principles and safeguards — to everybody’s relief. The
problem in Malatesta’s terms is how to build these principles of “natural
justice” into popular bodies which nevertheless retain an impermanent
non-institutional character.


The second thing that stands out in the passage from Malatesta is his
faith in “the people”; a point which adversaries would gleefully take up,
drawing attention to the fact that he is presupposing a different kind of
people. We know that our “people” are as vindictive as our judges.
Three-quarters of the population of Britain are said to favour the reintroduction
of capital punishment, and an even larger proportion the
re-introduction of flogging and birching. Here we are at the crux of the
difficulty which we anarchists have in getting our ideas on this subject
taken seriously. There seems to be an immense anxiety and fear floating
around in our society which is out of proportion to actual dangers.
People are afraid of defencelessness. (In another field this explains why
people cannot accept the idea of disarmament — they believe that they
are actually being defended.) Observation of the general intense preoccupation
and fascination with crime certainly seems to bear out the
psychoanalytical theory that society not only makes its criminals, but
that it \emph{needs} them, and consequently seduces its deviant individuals into
the “acting-out” of criminal roles.


“Society”, wrote Paul Reiwald, “opposed the innovators with determined
resistance \dots{} Society did not wish to abandon the principle of an
eye for an eye; it did not wish to be deprived of its long observed relations
to the criminal and it did not wish to have the ‘contrary ones’
taken from it.”\footnote{Paul Reiwald, \emph{Society and Its Criminals} (London, 1949).} Ruth Eissler expresses it even more dramatically:
“Society, by using its criminals as scapegoats and by trying to destroy
them because it is unable to bear the reflection of its own guilt, actually
stabs at its own heart.”\footnote{Ruth S. Eissler in \emph{Searchlights on Delinquency} (London, 1949).}


Obviously some people are conspicuously lacking in this pent-up
anxiety and guilt, the kind of people who are singularly successful in
supportive, rather than punitive, work with delinquents or deviants,
people who are sufficiently at ease with themselves to cope with the
mental strain, the irritation and time-consuming tedium which our
deviants frequently impose on us. If we want to change society it is
probably more important for us to find out what produces people like
\emph{them} than to find out what makes delinquents. This is important for the
whole idea of the social control of anti-social behaviour. What is anti-social?
If this question is to be decided by a bunch of censorious busy-bodies
we can well imagine people saying “No thanks. I’d rather have
The Law.” There must be room for deviance in society, and there must
be support for the right to deviate. This, I suppose, is the basis of
Durkheim’s celebrated observation that crime itself is a social norm, “a
factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies” since a
crimeless society would be an ossified society with an unimaginable
degree of social conformity, and that “crime implies not only that the
way remains open to necessary changes but that in certain cases it
precipitates these changes”. As anarchists — criminals ourselves in some
people’s view — we should be the first to appreciate this.


And this brings us to Malatesta’s final point, his observation that “we
are, in any case, only one of the forces acting in society”. It is not a
matter of a hypothetical anarchist society, but of any society, now or in
the future, where different social philosophies and attitudes coexist and
conflict. There will always be anti-social acts, and there will always be
people with an urge to punish, to maintain a whole punitive machinery
with everything that it entails. If we do not discover and make use of
methods of \emph{containing} such acts within society or of evolving a form of
society capable of containing them, we shall certainly continue to be the
victims of those authoritarian solutions which others are so ready and
eager to apply.

\chapter{Chapter XIV. Anarchy and a Plausible Future}



\begin{quote}


For the earlier part of my life I was quieted by being told that ours was the richest
country in the world, until I woke up to know that what \emph{I} meant by riches was
learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes; perhaps in the
coming days of poverty we may get more of these \dots{}



\end{quote}



\begin{flushright}

W. R. Lethaby, \emph{Form in Civilisation}


\end{flushright}


This book has illustrated the arguments for anarchism, not from
theories, but from actual examples of tendencies which already exist,
alongside much more powerful and dominant authoritarian methods of
social organisation. The important question is, therefore, not whether
anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and
influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in
which human beings organise their society. Is an anarchist society
possible?


We can only say, from the evidence of human history, that no kind of
society is impossible. If you are powerful enough and ruthless enough
you can impose almost any kind of social organisation on people — for a
while. But you can only do so by methods which, however natural and
appropriate they may be for any other kind of “ism” — acting on the well-known
principle that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,
are repugnant to anarchists, unless they see themselves as yet another of
those revolutionary elites “leading the people” to the promised land. You
can impose authority but you cannot impose freedom. An anarchist
society is improbable, not because anarchy is infeasible, or unfashionable,
or unpopular, but because human society is not like that, because,
as Malatesta put it in the passage quoted in the last chapter, “we are, in
any case, only one of the forces acting in society”.


The degree of social cohesion implied in the idea of “an anarchist
society” could only occur in a society so embedded in the cake of
custom that the idea of \emph{choice} among alternative patterns of social behaviour
simply did not occur to people. I cannot imagine that degree of
unanimity and I would dislike it if I could, because the idea of choice is
crucial to any philosophy of freedom and spontaneity. So we don’t have
to worry about the boredom of utopia: we shan’t get there. But what
results from this conclusion? One response would be to stress anarchism
as an ideal of personal liberation, ceasing to think of changing society,
except by example. Another would be to conclude that because no roads
lead to utopia no road leads anywhere, an attitude which, in the end, is
identical with the utopian one because it asserts that there are no partial,
piecemeal, compromise or temporary solutions, only \emph{one} attainable or
unattainable final solution. But, as Alexander Herzen put it over a
century ago: “A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a
deception. A goal must be closer — at the very least the labourer’s wage
or pleasure in the work performed. Each epoch, each generation, each
life has had, and has, its own experience, and the end of each generation
must be itself.”\footnote{Alexander Herzen, \emph{From the Other Shore} (London, 1956).}


The choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions is not a
once-and-for-all cataclysmic struggle, it is a series of running engagements,
most of them never concluded, which occur, and have occurred,
throughout history. Every human society; except the most totalitarian of
utopias or anti-utopias, is a plural society with large areas which are not
in conformity with the officially imposed or declared values. An
example of this can be seen in the alleged division of the world into
capitalist and communist blocks: there are vast areas of capitalist societies
which are not governed by capitalist principles, and there are many
aspects of the socialist societies which cannot be described as socialist.
You might even say that the only thing that makes life liveable in the
capitalist world is the unacknowledged non-capitalist element within it,
and the only thing that makes survival possible in the communist world
is the unacknowledged capitalist element in it. This is why a controlled
market is a left-wing demand in a capitalist economy along with state
control, while a free market is a left-wing demand in a communist
society — along with workers’ control. In both cases, the demands are for
whittling away power from the centre, whether it is the power of the
state or capitalism, or state-capitalism.


So what are the prospects for increasing the anarchist content of the
real world? From one point of view the outlook is bleak: centralised
power, whether that of government or super-government, or of private
capitalism or the super-capitalism of giant international corporations,
has never been greater. The prophesies of nineteenth-century anarchists
like Proudhon and Bakunin about the power of the state over the citizen
have a relevance today which must have seemed unlikely for their
contemporaries.


From another standpoint the outlook is infinitely promising. The
very growth of the state and its bureaucracy, the giant corporation and
its privileged hierarchy, are exposing their vulnerability to non-cooperation,
to sabotage, and to the exploitation of \emph{their} weaknesses by the
weak. They are also giving rise to parallel organisations,
counter organisations, alternative organisations, which exemplify the anarchist method.
Industrial mergers and rationalisation have bred the revival of the
demand for workers’ control, first as a slogan or a tactic like the work-in,
ultimately as a destination. The development of the school and the
university as broiler-houses for a place in the occupational pecking-order
have given rise to the de-schooling movement and the idea of the
anti-university. The use of medicine and psychiatry as agents, of conformity
has led to the idea of the anti-hospital and the self-help therapeutic
group. The failure of Western society to house its citizens has prompted
the growth of squatter movements and tenants’ co-operatives. The
triumph of the supermarket in the United States has begun a mushrooming
of food cooperatives. The deliberate pauperisation of those
who cannot work has led to the recovery of self-respect through
Claimants’ Unions.


Community organisations of every conceivable kind, community
newspapers, movements for child welfare, communal households have
resulted from the new consciousness that local as well as central governments
exploit the poor and are unresponsive to those who are unable to
exert effective pressure for themselves. The “rationalisation” of local
administration in Britain into “larger and more effective units” is evoking
a response in the demand for neighbourhood councils. A new self-confidence
and assertion of their right to exist on their own terms has
sprung up among the victims of particular kinds of discrimination —
black liberation, women’s liberation, homosexual liberation, prisoners’
liberation, children’s liberation: the list is almost endless and is certainly
going to get longer as more and more people become more and more
conscious that society is organised in ways which deny them a place in
the sun. In the age of mass politics and mass conformity, this is a magnificent
re-assertion of individual value and of human dignity.


None of these movements is yet a threat to the power structure, and
this is scarcely surprising since hardly any of them existed before the late
1960s. None of them fits into the framework of conventional politics. In
fact, they don’t speak the same language as the political parties. They talk
the language of anarchism and they insist on anarchist principles of
organisation, which they have learned not from political theory but from
their own experience. They organise in loosely associated groups which
are \emph{voluntary}, \emph{functional}, \emph{temporary} and \emph{small}. They depend, not on
membership cards, votes, a special leadership and a herd of inactive
followers but on small, functional groups which ebb and flow, group and
regroup, according to the task in hand. They are networks, not
pyramids.


At the very time when the “irresistible trends of modern society”
seemed to be leading us to a mass society of enslaved consumers they are
reminding us of the truth that the irresistible is simply that which is not
resisted. But obviously a whole series of partial and incomplete victories,
of concessions won from the holders of power, will not lead to an anarchist
society. But it will widen the scope of free action and the potentiality
for freedom in the society we have. But such compromises of
anarchist notions would have to be made, such authoritarian bedfellows
chosen, for a frontal attack on the power structure, that the anarchist
answer to cries for revolutionary unity is likely to be “Whose noose are
you inviting me to put round my neck this time?”


But in thinking about a plausible future, another factor has entered
into the general consciousness since the late 1960s. So many books, so
many reports, so many conferences have been devoted to it, that it is
only necessary for me to state a few general propositions about it. The
first is that the world’s resources are finite. The second is that the wealthy
economies have been exploiting the non-renewable resources at a rate
which the planet cannot sustain. The third is that these “developed”
economies are also exploiting the resources of the “Third World” countries
as cheap raw materials. This means, not only that the Third World
countries can never hope to achieve the levels of consumption of the
rich world, but that the rich countries themselves cannot continue to
consume at the present accelerating rate. The public debate around these
issues is not about the truth of the contentions, it is simply about the
question: How Soon? How soon before the fossil fuels run out? How
soon before the Third World rises in revolt against international
exploitation? How soon will we be facing the consequences of the non-viability
of future economic growth? I leave aside the related questions
about pollution and about population. But all these questions
profoundly affect all our futures and the predictions we make about
social change, whether we mean the changes we desire or the ones
which circumstances force upon us. They also cut completely across
accepted political categories, as do the policies of the ecology lobby or
the environmental pressure groups in both Britain and the United States.


The growth economists, the politicians of both right and left, who
envisaged an ever-expanding cycle of consumption, with the philosophy
characterised by Kenneth Burke as Borrow, Spend, Buy, Waste, Want,\footnote{Kenneth Burke, “Recipe for Prosperity”, \emph{The Nation}, 8 September 1956.}
have just not caught up with future realities. If anyone has it is that
minority among the young in the affluent countries who have
consciously rejected the mass consumption society — its values as well as
its dearly-bought products — and adopted, not out of puritanism but out
of a different set of priorities, an earlier consumer philosophy: Eat it up,
wear it out, make it do, or do without. The editor of \emph{The Ecologist}
summed up the argument thus: “affluence for everybody is an impossible
dream: the world simply does not contain sufficient resources, nor could
it absorb the heat and other waste generated by the immense amount of
energy required. Indeed, the most important thing to realise, when we
plan our future, is that affluence is both a local and a temporary
phenomenon. Unfortunately it is the principal, if not the only, goal our
industrial society gives us.” His journal in its “Blueprint for Survival” has
the distinction of being among the few commentaries on the crisis of
environment and resources to go beyond predicting the consequences of
continued population growth and depletion of resources, to envisaging
the kind of physical and economic structure of life which its authors
regard as indispensable for a viable future, drawing up a timetable for
change for the century 1975–2075, to establish in that time “a network
of self-sufficient, self-regulating communities.”\footnote{“Blueprint for Survival”, \emph{The Ecologist}, January 1972.} The authors cheerfully
accept the charge that their programme is unsophisticated and oversimplified,
the implication being that if the reader can formulate a better
alternative, or a different time-scale, he should do so. The interesting
thing is that they have re-invented an older vision of the future. Back in
the 1890s three men, equally unqualified as shareholders in Utopia
Limited, formulated their prescriptions for the physical setting of a
future society. William Morris, designer and socialist, wrote \emph{News from
Nowhere}; Peter Kropotkin, geographer and anarchist, wrote \emph{Fields,
Factories and Workshops}; and Ebenezer Howard, inventor and parliamentary
shorthand writer, wrote \emph{Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform}.
Each of these blueprints for survival was more influential than its
original readers could have supposed, though less than its author would
have hoped. Morris’s vision was totally irrelevant for the twentieth
century, but his picture of a post-industrial, decentralised, state-free
Britain in the twenty-first century, certainly makes sense for the new
ecologically-aware generation, while any American will recognise the
force of his backward glance at the future of the United States: “For
these lands, and, I say, especially the northern parts of America, suffered so
terribly from the full force of the last days of civilisation, and became
such horrible places to live in, that one may say that for nearly a hundred
years the people of the northern parts of America have been engaged in
gradually making a dwelling-place out of a stinking dust-heap \dots{}”\footnote{William Morris, \emph{News from Nowhere} (London, 1892).}


Howard’s legacy is of course the new towns: his immediate purpose
was to mobilise voluntary initiative for the building of one demonstration
model, confident that its advantages would set in motion a large-scale
adoption of the idea of urban dispersal in “social cities”, or what the
TCPA calls “a many-centred nexus of urban communities”. Lewis
Mumford notes that “By now, our neotechnic and biotechnic facilities
have at last caught up with Howard’s and Kropotkin’s intuitions.
Howard’s plan for canalising the flow of population, diverting it from the
existing centres to new centres; his plan for decentralising industry and
setting up both city and industry within a rural matrix, the whole
planned to a human scale, is technologically far more feasible today than
it was \dots{}\footnote{Lewis Mumford, Introduction to the post-war edition of Ebenezer Howard, \emph{Garden Cities of Tomorrow} (London, 1945).}


Kropotkin’s own vision of the future, with industry decentralised, and
the competition for markets replaced by local production and consumption
while people themselves alternate brain work and manual work, is
being realised in a political climate he hardly foresaw, in China, but is
equally in harmony with the programme of the “Blueprint for Survival”:



\begin{quote}


The scattering of industries over the country — so as to bring the factory
amidst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits which it
always finds in being combined with industry and to produce a combination
of industrial with agricultural work — is surely the next step to be
taken \dots{} This step is imposed by the necessity for each healthy man and
woman to spend a part of their lives in manual work in the free air; and
it will be rendered the more necessary when the great social movements,
which have now become unavoidable, come to disturb the present
international trade, and compel each nation to revert to her own
resources for her own maintenance.”\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow}, ed. by Colin Ward (London, Freedom Press, 1985).}



\end{quote}


The authors of the “Blueprint”, having set out their analysis of the crisis
of population, resources and environment, sketch out what they see as a
necessary and desirable future for the human habitat. They argue for
decentralisation on several grounds. Their first reason is that it would
“promote the social conditions in which public opinion and full public
participation in decision-making become as far as possible the means
whereby communities are ordered”. Their second reason is that, on
ecological grounds, they foresee a return to diversified farming instead
of prairie-type crop-growing or factory-type livestock rearing, with
production for a local market and the return of domestic sewage to the
land, in the setting of ‘a decentralised society of small communities
where industries are small enough to be responsive to each community’s
needs”. Thirdly, they think it significant that “the decreasing autonomy of
communities and local regions, and the increasing centralisation of
decision-making and authority in the cumbersome bureaucracies of the
state, have been accompanied by the rise of self-conscious individualism,
an individualism that feels threatened unless it is harped upon”.


They see the accumulation of material goods as the accompaniment
of this self-conscious individualism (what others would call “privatisation”)
and believe that the rewards of significant relationships and mutual
responsibilities in a small community will provide ample compensation
for the decreasing emphasis on consumption which will be essential for
the conservation of resources and the minimisation of pollution. Their
final reason is that “to deploy a population in small towns and villages is
to reduce to the minimum its impact on the environment. This is
because the actual urban superstructure required per inhabitant goes up
radically as the size of the town increases beyond a certain point.”
Affirming that they are \emph{not} proposing inward-looking, self-obsessed, or
closed communities, but in fact want “an efficient and sensitive communications
network between all communities”, they conclude with the
splendid declaration: “We emphasise that our goal should be to create
\emph{community} feeling and \emph{global} awareness, rather than that dangerous and
sterile compromise which is nationalism.”\footnote{“Blueprint for Survival”, \emph{The Ecologist}, January 1972.}


But will it ever happen? Will this humane and essentially anarchistic
vision of a workable future simply join all the other anarchical utopias
of the past? Years ago George Orwell remarked:



\begin{quote}


If one considers the probabilities one is driven to the conclusion that
anarchism implies a low standard of living. It need not imply a hungry or
uncomfortable world, but it rules out the kind of air-conditioned,
chromium-plated, gadget-ridden existence which is now considered
desirable and enlightened. The processes involved in making, say, an
aeroplane are so complex as to be only possible in a planned, centralised
society , with all the repressive apparatus that that implies. Unless there is
some unpredictable change in human nature, liberty and efficiency must
pull in opposite directions.\footnote{George Orwell in \emph{Poetry Quarterly}, Autumn 1945.}



\end{quote}


This, from Orwell’s point of view (he was not a lover of luxury) is not in
itself a criticism of anarchism, and he is certainly right in thinking that
an anarchist society would never build Concorde or land men on the
moon. But were either of these technological triumphs efficient in terms
of the resources poured into them and the results for the ordinary inhabitant
of this planet? Size and resources are to the technologist what
power is to the politician: he can never have too much of them. A
different kind of society, with different priorities, would evolve a
different technology: its bases already exist\footnote{See Colin Ward, “Harnessing the Sun”, \emph{Freedom} 23 March 1957; “Harnessing the Wind”, \emph{Freedom}, 13 July 1957; “Power from the Sea”, \emph{Freedom}, 1 March 1958; Lewis Herber, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”, \emph{Anarchy} 69, November 1966; “Towards a Liberatory Technology”, \emph{Anarchy} 78, August 1967 - both the latter are reprinted in Murray Bookchin, \emph{Post-Scarcity Anarchism} (Berkeley, Cal. 1971). See also Victor Papanek, \emph{Design for the Real World} (London, 1972).} and in terms of the tasks to
be performed it would be far more “efficient” than either Western capitalism
or Soviet state-capitalism. Not only technology but also
economics would have to be redefined. As Kropotkin envisaged it:
“Political economy tends more and more to become a science devoted to
the study of the needs of men and of the means of satisfying them with
the least possible waste of energy, that is, a sort of physiology of society.”\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, \emph{op.cit.}}


But it is not in the least likely that states and governments, in either
the rich or the poor worlds will, of their own volition, embark on the
drastic change of direction which a consideration of our probable future
demands. Necessity may reduce the rate of resource-consumption but
the powerful and privileged will hang on to their share — both within
nations and between nations. Power and privilege have never been
known to abdicate. This is why anarchism is bound to be a call to revolution.
But what kind of revolution? Nothing has been said in this book
about the two great irrelevancies of discussion about anarchism: the false
antitheses between violence and nonviolence and between revolution
and reform. The most violent institution in our society is the state and it
reacts violently to efforts to take away its power. “As Malatesta used to
say, you try to do your thing and they intervene, and then \emph{you} are to
blame for the fight that happens.”\footnote{Paul Goodman, \emph{Little Prayers and Finite Experiences} (New York, 1972).} Does this mean that the effort should
not be made? A distinction has to be made between the violence of the
oppressor and the resistance of the oppressed.


Similarly, there is a distinction not between revolution and reform but
on the one hand between the kind of revolution which installs a
different gang of rulers or the kind of reform which makes oppression
more palatable or more efficient, and on the other those social changes,
whether revolutionary or reformist, through which people enlarge their
autonomy and reduce their subjection to external authority.


Anarchism in all its guises is an assertion of human dignity and
responsibility. It is not a programme for political change but an act of
social self-determination.




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The Anarchist Library



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Anti-Copyright



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Colin Ward

Anarchy in Action



1996


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PDF from \href{https://libcom.org/files/Ward\_-\_Anarchy\_in\_Action\_3.pdf}{\texttt{https://libcom.org/files/Ward\_-\_Anarchy\_in\_Action\_3.pdf}} and MediaWiki version from \href{https://anarchyinaction.org/}{\texttt{https://anarchyinaction.org/}}
   
First published 1973 by George Allen \& Unwin Ltd. This edition, with a new introduction, published by Freedom Press 84b Whitechapel High Street London E17QX 1982, reprinted 1996. ISBN 0 900384 20 4. In Memory of Paul Goodman 1911 — 1972
   



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