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 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!'

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.

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:

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 . . . The moral achievement is perhaps unparalleled in revolutionary history . . . 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.

A Hungarian eyewitness of the same events declared:

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...

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, 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.'

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 Two Thousand Words, which induce to anarchist acts, to violating the constitutional character of our political reform.' 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,' 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.'

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' 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:

'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 news­ paper, 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'.

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 enfoeced 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.

THE DISSOLUTION OF LEADERSHIP

Accustomed as is this age to artificial leadership . . . 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.

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 . . .' 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 avail­ able of the effects of these two opposite approaches to the organisation of work. Two of them are mentioned in Chapter XL. Another comes from the architectural profession. The Royal Institute of British Architects sponsored a report on the methods of organisation in archi­tects' offices. 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 under­ stand 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 . . . 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 dispersed type of work organisation which can promote an informal atmosphere of free-flowing ideas . . .' 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 essense of such technique should be to emphasise indi­vidual freedom of initiative, instead of authoritarian direction by a boss . . . synchronising individual effort by a continuous give and take of its members...

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, ' . . . On what principle, then, was our organi­sation based, if there were no votes, no directives and commands, no secretaries, presidents, vicepresidents, etc.?' And he answers:

What kept us together was our 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 . . . Each one made his contribution according to his interest in the work . . . 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.

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 . . . Just as organisational ties result from common work interests, so they dissolve when the work interests dissolve or begin to conflict with each other.'

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 in authority, or you can be an authority, or you can 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 under­ taking. The fantastic inefficiency of any hierarchial 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?' At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers 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 . . . 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.

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'. 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. The system makes its morons, then despises them for their ineptitude, and rewards its 'gifted few' for their rarity. But why are there these privileged enclaves where different rules apply?

But why are there these privileged enclaves where different rules apply?

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

HARMONY THROUGH COMPLEXITY

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.

P.-J. PROUDHON, The Theory of Taxation (1861)

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 Aku-Aku to Wai- Wai. Several anarchist writers of the past did just this: Kropotkin in his chapter on 'Mutual Aid Among Savages', Elie Reclus in his Primitive Folkand Edward Carpenter in his essay on 'Non-govern­ mental 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.

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 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 adjudicati0n 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 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.'

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 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 Tribes Without Rulers.

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 . . 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.'

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 Tribes Without Rulers describes their intricately subdivided society and the very complicated inter-relation­ ships resulting from the fusion and fission of segments in different combinations for different economic and functional purposes.

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 sub tribe may break away from other sections . . , 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.

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:

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 , . , 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 . . . 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.

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.

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 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.

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 . . . 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 Tribes Without Rulers summarise the implications in these terms:

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 . . .

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:

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 . . . Under the name of anarchism, a new interpretation of the past and present life of society arises . . . 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 . . . 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...

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.' 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:

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.

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

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.

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 inter- woven 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.'

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.