Colin Ward: Small Steps in the Direction of Anarchy

As Alexander Herzen put it over a century ago: "A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception. A goal must be closer - at the very least the laborer's wage or pleasure in the work performed. Each epoch, each generation, each life has had, and has, its own experience, and the end of each generation must be itself."

The choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions is not a once-and-for-all cataclysmic struggle, it is a series of running engagements, most of them never concluded, which occur, and have occurred, throughout history. Every human society, except the most totalitarian of utopias or anti-utopias, is a plural society with large areas which are not in conformity with the officially imposed or declared values. An example of this can be seen in the alleged division of the world into capitalist and communist blocks: there are vast areas of capitalist societies which are not governed by capitalist principles, and there are many aspects of the socialist societies which cannot be described as socialist. You might even say that the only thing that makes life livable in the capitalist world is the unacknowledged non-capitalist element within it, and the only thing that makes survival possible in the communist world is the unacknowledged capitalist element in it. This is why a controlled market is a left-wing demand in a capitalist economy - along with state control, while a free market is a left-wing demand in a communist society - along with worker's control. In both cases, the demands are for whittling away power from the center, whether it is the power of the state or capitalism, or state-capitalism.

So what are the prospects for increasing the anarchist content of the real world? From one point of view the outlook is bleak: centralized power, whether that of governments or super-governments, or of private capitalism or super-capitalism of giant international corporations, has never been greater. The prophesies of nineteenth-century anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin about the power of the state over the citizen have a relevance today which must have seemed unlikely to their contemporaries.

From another standpoint the outlook is infinitely promising. The very growth of the state and its bureaucracy, the giant corporation and its privileged hierarchy, are exposing their vulnerability to non-cooperation, to sabotage, and to the exploitation of their weaknesses by the weak. They are also giving rise to parallel organizations, counter organizations, alternative organizations, which exemplify the anarchist method. Industrial mergers and rationalization have bred the revival of the demand for worker's control, first as a slogan or a tactic like the work-in, ultimately as a destination. The development of the school and the university as broiler-houses for a place in the occupational pecking-order have given rise to the de-schooling movement and the idea of the anti-university. The use of medicine and psychiatry as agents of conformity has led to the idea of the anti-hospital and the self-help therapeutic group. The failure of Western society to house its citizens has prompted the growth of squatter movements and tenant's cooperatives. The triumph of the supermarket in the United States has begun a mushrooming of food cooperatives. The deliberate pauperization of those who cannot work has led to the recovery of self-respect through Claimant's Unions.

Community organizations of every conceivable kind, community newspapers, movements for child welfare, communal households have resulted from the new consciousness that local as well as central government exploit the poor and are unresponsive to those who are unable to exert effective pressure for themselves. The "rationalization" of local administration in Britain into "larger and more effective units" is evoking a response in the demand for neighborhood councils. A new self-confidence and assertion of their right to exist on their own terms has sprung up among the victims of particular kinds of discrimination - black liberation, women's liberation, homosexual liberation, prisoner's liberation, children's liberation: the list is almost endless and is certainly going to get longer as more and more people become more and more conscious that society is organized in ways which deny them a place in the sun. In the age of mass politics and mass conformity, this is a magnificent reassertion of individual values and of human dignity.

None of these movements is yet a threat to the power structure, and this is scarcely surprising since hardly any of them existed before the late 1960s. None of them fits into the framework of conventional politics. In fact, they don't speak the same language as the political parties. They talk the language of anarchism and they insist on anarchistic principles of organization, which they have learned not from political theory but from their own experience. They organize in loosely associated groups which are voluntary, functional, temporary and small. They depend, not on membership cards, votes, a special leadership and a herd of inactive followers but on small, functional groups which ebb and flow, group and regroup, according to the task in hand. They are networks, not pyramids.

At the very time when the "irresistible trends of modern society" seemed to be leading us to a mass society of enslaved consumers they are reminding us of the truth that the irresistible is simply that which is not resisted. Obviously a whole series of partial and incomplete victories, of concessions won from the holders of power, will not lead to an anarchist society. But it will widen the scope of free action and the potentiality for freedom in the society we have.

The idea of one-step, once-for-all revolution has its attractions. But such compromises of anarchist notions would have to be made, such authoritarian bedfellows chosen, for a frontal attack on the power structure, that the anarchist answer to cries for revolutionary unity is likely to be "Whose noose are you inviting me to put round my neck this time?"

(From Anarchy in Action, Freedom Press, 1973)