Anarchy in Action

Colin Ward Freedom Press, 1996 Libcom.org

PREFACE

'Nothing to declare?' 'Nothing.' Very well. Then political questions. He asks:

'Are you an anarchist?' I answer. '... First, what do we understand under

"anarchism"? Anarchism practical, metaphysical, theoretical, mystical, abstrac­tional, individual, social? When I was young', I say, 'all these had for me signifi­cation.' So we had a very interesting discussion, in consequence of which I passed two whole weeks on Ellis Island.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Pnin

How would you feel if you discovered that the society in which you would really like to live was already here, apart from a few little local difficulties like exploitation, war, dictatorship and starvation? The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organ­ises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege 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 every day life, which operates side by side with, and 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 reconstitution of something that has always been present, which exists alongside the state, albeit buried and laid waste'. And a modern anarchist, Paul Goodman, declared that: 'A free society cannot be the substitution of a "new order" for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.'

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

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

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

ANARCHY AND THE STATE

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

ANDREA CAFFI

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

Marx is an authoritarian and centralising communist . He wants what we want, the complete triumph of economic and social equality, but he wants it in the State and through the State power, through the dictatorship of a very strong and, so to say, despotic provisional government, that is by the negation of liberty. His economic ideal is the State as sole

owner of the land and of all kinds of capital, cultivating the land under the management of State engineers, and controlling all industrial and commercial associations with State capital. We want the same triumph of economic and social equality through the abolition of the State and of all that passes by the name of law (which, in our view, is the permanent negation of human rights). We want the reconstruction of society and the unification of mankind to be achieved, not from above downwards by any sort of authority, nor by socialist officials, engineers, and either accredited men of learning - but from below upwards, by the free feder­ation of all kinds of workers' associations liberated from the yoke of the State.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the nineteenth century T. H. Green remarked that war is the expression of the 'imperfect' state, but he was quite wrong. War is the expression of the state in its most perfect form: it is its finest hour. War is the health of the state the phrase was invented during the First World War by Randolph Bourne, who explained:

The State is the organisation of the herd to act offensively or defensively

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

towards that peacefulness of being at war...

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

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

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

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

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

In fact there have always been two strands to decentralist thinking. Some

authors, e.g. Lao-tse or Tolstoy, make a conservative peasant critique of centralised court and town as inorganic, verbal and ritualistic. But other authors, e.g. Proudhon or Kropotkin, make a democratic urban critique of centralised bureaucracy and power, including feudal industrial power, as exploiting, inefficient, and discouraging initiative. In our present era of State-socialism, corporate feudalism, regimented schooling, brain­ washing mass-communications and urban anomie, both kinds of critique make sense. We need to revive both peasant self-reliance and the democratic power of professional and technical guilds. Any decentralisation that could occur at present would inevitably be

post-urban and post-centralist: it could not be provincial...

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

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

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

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

Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of

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

point it has reached, and then begins the reaction.

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

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

THE THEORY OF SPONTANEOUS ORDER

In every block of houses, in every street, in every town ward, groups of volunteers

will have been organised, and these commissariat volunteers will find it easy to work in unison and keep in touch with each other . . . if only the self-styled 'scien­tific' theorists do not thrust themselves in . . . Or rather let them expound their muddle-headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organisation inherent in the people . . . but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate, even in so huge a city as Paris, and in the midst of a revolution, an immense guild of free workers, ready to furnish to each and all the necessary food.

Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among documents, can doubt it. Speak of the organising genius of the 'Great Misunderstood', the people, to those who have seen it in Paris in the days of the banicades, 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 offical ineptness of Bumbledom.

PETER KROPOTKIN, The Conquest of Bread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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