Anarchy 85/Conversations about anarchism

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Conversations
about anarchism

RICHARD BOSTON

  Richard Boston went round with a tape-recor­der inter­view­ing anar­chists, and reduced eight or nine hours of tape to a forty-minute radio pro­gramme, pro­duced by Tony Gould for BBC Radio 3, and broad­cast on January 10th and 30th. The voices heard, apart from that of Richard Boston, were those of Bill Christopher, Paul Goodman, George Melly, Jack Robinson, Donald and Irene Rooum, Peter Turner, Nicolas Walter and Colin Ward. The fol­low­ing is the text of the pro­gramme.

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Announcer: Who are the anar­chists? What do they believe? What sort of society do they want, and what actions do they take to realise it?

CW: I consider myself to be an anar­chist-commu­nist, in the Kropot­kin tradi­tion.

NW: I think that if I had to label myself very quickly I would say I was an anar­chist-socia­list, or liber­ta­rian socia­list even, if the word anar­chist gave rise to mis­under­stan­ding.

BC: I would des­cribe myself as an anarcho-syndi­calist, anar­chism being my philo­sophy and syndi­ca­lism the method of strug­gle.

JR: I don’t call myself an anarcho-syndi­ca­list. I could be called an anarcho-paci­fist-indi­vidu­alist with slight commu­nist ten­den­cies, which is a long title, but this is a way of defi­ning a compass point.

PT: First of all I’m an anar­chist because I don’t believe in govern­ments, and also I think that syndi­ca­lism is the anar­chist appli­ca­tion to orga­nis­ing indus­try.

DR: I des­cribe myself as a Stir­ner­ite, a cons­cious egoist.

JR: We even have a strange aber­ra­tion known as Catho­lic anar­chists, hich seems to be a contra­dic­tion in terms, but never­the­less they seem to get along with it.

RB: There are so many sorts of anar­chist that one some­times wonders whether such a thing as a plain and simple anar­chist even exists, but the dif­feren­ces are mainly dif­feren­ces of empha­sis. Anar­chists are agreed on

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the basic prin­ciple: anarchy—the absence of rule, which is not the same thing as chaos, al­though the words anar­chy and chaos are popu­larly con­fused. As the anar­chist sees it, chaos is what we’ve got now. Anarchy is the alter­na­tive he offers. In the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Birtannica, Kropotkin defined anar­chism as, “The name given to a prin­ciple or theory of life and conduct under which society is con­ceived without govern­ment, harmony in such a society being ob­tained not by submis­sion to law or by obedi­ence to any autho­rity, but by free agree­ments con­clu­ded between the various groups, terri­torial and profes­sional, freely con­stitu­ted for the sake of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion.” I think most anar­chists of today of what­ever label would agree with this. Where do they differ then? Well, one impor­tant dif­fer­ence is between those who, like the anar­chist-commu­nists and anarcho-syndi­ca­lists, empha­sise col­lec­tive organi­sa­tion and those like the Stir­ner­ites whose chief concern is with the indi­vi­dual. But in fact an anar­chist-commu­nist like Colin Ward and an indi­vidu­alist anar­chist like Donald Rooum still have a great deal in common.

CW: For me anar­chism is a social philo­sophy based on the absence of autho­rity. Anar­chism can be an indi­vi­dual outlook or a social one. I’m con­cerned with anar­chism as a social point of view—the idea that we could have a society and that it’s desi­rable that we should have a society, in which the prin­ciple of autho­rity is super­seded by that of volun­tary co-opera­tion. You could say that anar­chism is the ulti­mate decen­trali­sation. I believe in a decen­tra­lised society. What I want to do is to change a mass society into a mass of societies.

DR: The anar­chist thinks that society is there for the benefit of the indi­vi­dual. The indi­vi­dual doesn’t owe any­thing to society at all. Society is the crea­tion of indi­vi­duals, it is there for their benefit. And from that the rest of it follows. Even­tu­ally, as the ulti­mate aim of anar­chism, which may or may not be achieved, the idea is to have a society of so­ver­eign indi­vi­duals.

RB: But how do you set about achie­ving an anar­chist society? Well, there are two tra­ditio­nal anar­chist methods, propa­ganda of the deed—at one time this meant assas­sina­ting royalty and states­men, but nowa­days is almost invar­iably non-violent—and propa­ganda of the word. Propa­ganda of the word is partly the spoken word. In London, for example, Speakers’ Corner, and the meeting every Sunday night at the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, where there are usually about fifty people, but mostly the word means the printed word, and, apart from the Syndi­ca­list Workers’ Fede­ra­tion’s monthly paper <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: Direct Action">Direct Action, this mostly centres round the publi­ca­tions of the Freedom Press.

CW: anarchy was started in 1961. It’s an off­shoot of the anar­chist weekly <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: freedom">freedom which is the oldest news­paper of the Left in this country I think. It was founded by Kropotkin in 1886. In anarchy what I try to do is to find ways of rela­ting a way-out ideo­logy like anar­chism to con­tempo­rary life and to find those posi­tive appli­ca­tions which people are looking for. There are prob­lems you see. If you have a revo­lutio­nary ideo­logy in a non-revo­lutio­nary situ­ation, what exactly do you do? If you’ve got a point of view which every­body

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con­siders to be way out, do you act up to it, or do you lean over back­wards to show how normal and prac­tical your ideas are? What I would like anar­chism to have is intel­lec­tual respec­tabi­lity.

RB: What sort of sub­jects are dis­cussed in anarchy?

CW: There do seem to be recur­ring themes, prin­ci­pally because they are what people will write about. They are topics like educa­tion, like this ques­tion of a tech­no­logy in which people would have a certain degree of per­sonal freedom and per­sonal choice in work, instead of none at all, as the vast majo­rity of people have today. anarchy dis­cusses topics like housing, anarchy tries to take the prob­lems which face people in our society, the society we’re living in, and to see if there are anar­chist solu­tions.

RB: anarchy is a monthly. freedom, on the other hand, as a weekly paper, is more con­cerned with com­men­ting on day-to-day poli­tical events and repor­ting on anar­chist acti­vi­ties. It is itself run on anar­chist lines. Jack Robinson of the Freedom Group:

JR: The whole of freedom is pro­duced with volun­tary labour. I my­self have a slight grant of £3 a week, and thus we exploit labour. Lilian Wolfe, who is working with us, is now 91 years of age, which I think is a record in the exploi­ta­tion of old people’s labour, but never­the­less she still comes in cheer­fully three days a week. There is a car­pen­ter, a print-worker, a furni­ture remover, who do the edito­rial work, and there is a type-designer who actu­ally does the layout for us. Every member of the edito­rial com­mit­tee has the power of veto but we do try to argue things out until a unani­mous deci­sion is arrived at.

RB: Propa­ganda of the deed nowa­days mostly means what anar­chists call Direct Action, that is to say, doing some­thing your­self about your own prob­lems rather than waiting for someone else to come along and do it for you. Some­times this may take the form of illegal action.

CW: It does seem to me amazing that in the last few years, for in­stance, there hasn’t been mass squat­ting in office blocks, when you get the situ­ation of local autho­rities having huge housing waiting lists while you can see dozens of new spe­cula­tive office blocks with TO LET plas­tered all over them. The very in­teres­ting in­stance in the last few years, of course, was the King Hill Hostel affair. King Hill Hostel was a recep­tion centre for home­less fami­lies in Kent where all sorts of res­tric­tions were placed on the home­less, the most stri­king of which, of course, was the sepa­ra­tion of hus­bands from wives. People were treated in a puni­tivbe way as though their home­less­ness were somehow the result of their own moral turpi­tude. A handful of people adopted Direct Action methods to embar­rass the autho­ri­ties, and they embar­rassed them so much that they achieved much more for impro­ving the condi­tions of recep­tion centres for the home­less than had ever been done by legis­la­tive action for years. Direct Action is an anar­chist method because it is a method which expands. People are pushed on by success. They are given more confi­dence in their own ability to shape their own destiny by being suc­cess­ful in some small way. The person who takes Direct Action is a dif­fer­ent kind of person from the person who just lets things happen to him.

RB: Colin Ward gives another example of Direct Action in the mass squat­ting cam­paign that took place after the war when the home­less seized dere­lict army camps.

CW: Minis­ter of Health at the time, the Labour Minis­ter of Health who was in charge of housing, Aneurin Bevan, said that these people were somehow jumping their place in the housing queue, they were part of a Commu­nist plot, and all sorts of rubbish of that kind. But local autho­ri­ties were very soon empow­ered to take over army camps for them­selves. People who went round noticed that the people who seized the places for them­selves had done a great deal to make them habi­table—the usual tempo­rary, make­shift impro­visa­tions to make life, family life, pos­sible in such places. Those who were in­stalled there by local coun­cils did nothing. They wanted for things to happen to them. This is an exam­ple, it seems to me, of the social psycho­logy of Direct Action. The direct-action­ist is someone who shapes his own destiny while other people are the victims of cir­cum­stan­ces, of the whims of autho­rity: things happen to them.

RB: Direct Action has also been the anar­chists’ pre­ferred method in their oppo­si­tion to war and the state’s prepa­ra­tions for war, and their most con­spicu­ous con­tribu­tions to the peace move­ment have been when the peace move­ment has turned to Direct Action. One anar­chist who has been active in the peace move­ment is Nicolas Walter.

NW: As soon as the Committee of 100 was formed I knew that I agreed with what it was trying to do. So I joined. And I’ve been active in that sort of thing more or less ever since, and I did all the normal things, I went on sit-downs, I got arres­ted, got fined and so on. But, more than that, there are things which I have done in the general anti-war move­ment, which I suppose one could say are the sort of things which I’ve done as an anar­chist. One thing was being in­volved in the Spies for Peace, which, I think, is a perfect example of anar­chist acti­vity al­though not all the people in­volved were anar­chists, in that here was a situ­ation in which the Govern­ment had done some­thing, for the sake of the people offi­cial­ly, which the people didn’t know about.

RB: What was this?

NW: Setting up a regio­nal orga­nisa­tion to rule the country in the event of nuclear war demo­lish­ing the State appa­ratus, so that if for example, <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: South-West England">South-West England was cut off from the rest of England, there would be a ready-made govern­ment to take over and rule it. And this was all set up, it was set up se­cret­ly behind the scenes. No one knew about it. And, just by chance, this infor­ma­tion fell into the hands of people in the Com­mit­tee of 100, of whom I was one. And we pub­lished it, se­cret­ly, we didn’t want to get caught. Then another, in a sense much smaller, thing, though it had more effect on me, was going along to a church where the Prime Minister was going to read the lesson, before the Labour Party Conference, and inter­rup­ting to say that I thought this was hypo­crisy. This isn’t a very serious thing, it was just propa­ganda by deed. It was to try and say, at the time and place where a lot of people would take notice, what I thought about the sort of thing the Labour Government does. Ant this got us landed in prison, a

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couple of us.

RB: For the anar­chist, in Ran­dolph Bourne’s phrase, “War is the health of the State.” This sounds like a paradox, but, as Jack Robin­son says, “to speak of a healthy state is like talking about a healthy cancer”. The anar­chist doesn’t want a healthy state, he wants a healthy society. For this reason alone, many anar­chists are also paci­fists, even if they don’t always rule out vio­lence alto­gether. Here is the Ameri­can writer Paul Goodman.

PG: My back­ground is psycho-analy­tic, and psycho-analy­ti­cally, we feel that face-to-face vio­lence, like a fist fight, is natural, and it does damage to try to repress it; that it’s better to have the fight out. There­fore on that level I have no oppo­si­tion to vio­lence. Natu­rally I don’t like to see people pun­ching each other, but anger is a rather beau­tiful thing, and anger will lead to a blow, and there you are. When people are under a ter­rible oppres­sion, as say Negroes in the United States or the Parisians, let’s say, during Hitler’s occu­pa­tion of Paris, it seems inevi­table that at a certain point they are going to blow up and fight back. And that seems to me like a force of nature. You can do nothing about that, and there­fore I don’t disap­prove. That kind of warfare, guer­rilla warfare, parti­san warfare, bru­tali­ses people, of course it does, but it’s human and I would make no moral judge­ment.

  As soon as warfare, vio­lence, becomes orga­nised, however, and you are told by some­body else, “Kill him”, where it’s not your own hatred and anger which are pouring out, but some ab­stract policy or party line or a com­plica­ted stra­tegic cam­paign, then to exert vio­lence turns you into a thing, because vio­lence in­volves too much of you to be able to do it at some­body else’s direc­tion. There­fore I am en­tire­ly opposed to any kind of warfare, stan­ding armies as opposed to guer­rilla armies and so forth. There­fore all war is en­tire­ly unac­cep­table because it mecha­nises human beings and inevi­tably leads to more harm than good. There­fore I am a paci­fist.

IR: I’m a paci­fist. I call myself a paci­fist anar­chist and I think that is basic really. I disap­prove of govern­ments because they wage war. I don’t want to die, I don’t want my chil­dren to die, and I don’t want to have to watch other people dying for govern­ment, and killing people they don’t know and have never met and have got nothing to do with.

RB: That was Irene Rooum. A fre­quent criti­cism of anar­chists is that their ideas are utopian. How do they answer this?

CW: It’s per­fect­ly pos­sible to say that anar­chism is utopian, but of course so is social­ism or any other poli­tical “ism”. All the “isms” are what the soci­olo­gists call “ideal types” and you can make fun of the ideal type of an anar­chist society, but you can also do it to that of a social­ist society, which is very different from anything Harold Wilson has in mind. It seems to me that all soci­eties are mixed soci­eties, and while, if it cheers us up, we can dream about an anar­chist society, the sort of society that we or our des­cen­dants are going to get is a society where these two prin­ci­ples of autho­rity and volun­tar­ism are strug­gling. But because no road leads to utopia it doesn’t mean that no road leads any­where.

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NW: I want to work towards anarchy. I don’t want to estab­lish it over­night. So I would take the—almost a slogan—view that means are ends, that what happens now is an end. To say that you are working towards an end strikes me as mea­ning­less. What you are working to­wards is what you are actu­ally doing. If you over­throw a govern­ment over­night you could say that this is estab­lish­ing anarchy. I would say that you are much more likely to estab­lish an extreme dicta­tor­ship.

GM: There are in the world thou­sands of people who haven’t enough to eat, there are wars going on, there are far too many people over the earth’s surface, there are dis­eases as yet un­checked. There is an enor­mous amount of money being spent in fling­ing expen­sive toys up into outer space, when there are people rotting from disease and lack of food down here. And it seems to me that the argu­ment against anar­chism that it is an im­prac­tical, lovable ideal which could never be real­ised, is unpro­ven in the face of the inef­fi­cien­cy of the forms of govern­ment that have existed and exist on the earth’s surface.

PG: The impor­tant crisis at present has to do with autho­rity and mili­ta­rism. That’s the real danger, and if we could get rid of the mili­ta­rism and if we could get rid of this prin­ciple of autho­rity by which people don’t run their own lives, then society could become decent, and that’s all you want of society. It is not up to govern­ments or states to make anybody happy. They can’t do it. What they can do is main­tain a mini­mum level of decency and freedom.

NW: Yes, in general I want a govern­ment that governs less, but I want the les­sen­ing process to be con­tinu­ous, so that govern­ment always governs less and less, and the people always look after them­selves more and more until in the end there is a govern­ment that does not govern at all—is simply a clearing-house, a post box, a way for people to collect their health bene­fits.

BC: Probably now, more than any other time, ordi­nary people have got more than a slight­ly cynical ap­proach to parlia­ment and poli­ti­cians. People are begin­ning to say that they’re all alike and we’re just not going to bother to vote at all. But going on from there and saying, “What are we going to do?”, this is the crunch, this is the problem. We have had illus­tra­tions in recent <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: by-elec­tions">by-elec­tions of people ab­stain­ing. But I think we can get over the idea now that the par­lia­men­tary system is a big laugh, is a big giggle. Once you start getting people thin­king in terms of really query­ing the par­lia­men­tary system and expo­sing it for what it’s worth—a gas­works—then I think we’re making pro­gress.

CW: Well, anar­chists usually indulge in anti-elec­tion pro­pagan­da, that is to say, they say “Don’t vote for anybody!” And they’re often criti­cised for this. This is pointed out to be some­how nega­tive or irres­pon­sible and so on. Obvi­ous­ly, being opposed to the prin­ciple of autho­rity, anar­chists don’t see the point in deci­ding which group of autho­rita­rians are going to rule us.

RB: Autho­rita­rians, cen­trali­sa­tion, coer­cion, capi­ta­lism, these are the sort of things anar­chists are against. George Melly:

GM: With a think like the motor car, which is one of the great killers of our time, you have a whole society geared to sell people motor cars,

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to impress them with the idea that without one they are fail­ures, it will give them sexual potency, and a thou­sand other ideas; entire­ly linked to an eco­no­mic situ­ation in which people have to make motor cars and people have to sell motor cars and there­fore more motor cars have to be used. But why do they have to make them? Because if they didn’t make them the whole eco­no­mic machine would break down. But this machine is arti­fi­cial in itself. There’s no need for every­body to be em­ployed all the time. The more un­plea­sant jobs are always pro­duced as an excuse against anar­chism. Who would sweep roads, who would mine coal? But a lot of these things would be solved so that nobody need do them at all. There could be auto­matic street washers and the use of atomic energy instead of coal, but we daren’t use atomic energy instead of coal because this would shut the mines and this would create an eco­no­mic crisis. Eco­no­mics is an arti­fi­cial defor­ma­tion, or seems to me to be it, and if one scrapped it all and started from human needs, and if one scrapped the whole of the thou­sands of law books in every country and started from good sense and good will, one might be moving towards a freer society.