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
66
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
67
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.
