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.