Anarchy in Action

"Colin Ward was one of Britain’s most famous anarchist writers from the last century – this year is the 100th anniversary of his birth. He was a social historian and an anarchist theorist. What he was very keen to point out is that there are two basic traditions of anarchism. One is the Molotov-cocktail-throwing protester with a balaclava, or a 19th-century young Russian trying to blow up a tsar. That’s not the tradition he’s interested in or supports. The other, the tradition he’s interested in, is anarchy as a form of social organization. In other words, the way that human communities have managed to organize their lives together, often in local, voluntary, non-hierarchical ways, without the big state, big business or big religion. One of his favorite examples of this – and this was also a favorite example of the 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin in his book, Mutual Aid – was Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which still exists today in multiple towns on the coasts of Britain. Its members will go and save people who are being swept out to sea. It’s a voluntary, local organization, linked together into a relatively flat, non-hierarchical federation. For Colin Ward, that was anarchism in its best form. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Ward’s writings have really influenced the way I think about politics, society and economics, especially through a book he wrote called Anarchy in Action , which tries to bring out all these examples in the present and in the past of where we’ve managed to cooperate. So, for example, he wrote a lot about the history of workers’ cooperatives as they emerged in the 19th century in Italy and in Spain. He wrote about the history of tenant-run housing, of cooperative housing movements. He wrote about lots of forms of political organizing, for example, during the Spanish Civil War when anarchist workers took over factories and ran them themselves, or ran the tram system in Barcelona. What he’s telling us that’s really relevant today is a story of social cooperation and our incredible capacity for it. As we move into an age where we need to leave behind the hyper-individualism of the 20th century – inherited from neoliberal capitalism and self-help culture – we need to be finding more local and communal solutions to our problems. Ward wrote, for example, about that Valencia Tribunal of Waters, which I mentioned earlier. That’s how I first discovered it, years and years ago. I didn’t clock it at the time, but I’ve now gone back to it and realized that he was thinking about the commons. You can see a lot of economic thinkers today, including my partner Kate Raworth, who works on Doughnut Economics , looking at, ‘How do we create a commons’? How do we expand that part of the economy where we share resources, we communicate, we cooperate together to manage forests or fisheries or waterways?’ There’s also a new emerging movement of cooperative businesses and steward-owned companies that are held in public trust, with a legal duty to look after their workers and the planet – like the clothing company Patagonia. Colin Ward has been writing about this kind of thing for 50 years, and so I found huge inspiration in his work. I realize that the title of his book, Anarchy in Action, is a bit scary to some people, but it’s all about redefining anarchism as the gentle art of social cooperation. Asabiya, in a way. Ibn Khaldun would have loved Colin Ward. You do hear that. There’s the great podcast, The Rest is History . One of the hosts, Dominic Sandbrook, has often pointed out that there are no clear lessons from history because it’s different each time. Contexts are different and history never repeats itself. But if you look at what social scientists have been doing for the last century, they’ve been looking for patterns in history – and finding them. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize-winning theorist of ‘the commons’, came up with eight principles that seem to recur when you look at how communities have sustainably managed their resources, such as having penalties for those who break the agreed rules. There are patterns, even if they’re not patterns that hold across all space and all time. They hold for some periods of history, in some places, rather than the kinds of universal laws of history that Karl Marx thought he had discovered. One book we didn’t talk about is How to Blow up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm , who looks at the radical flank effect in social movements – the way that successful movements often have a more radical organization operating alongside them that helps to make the mainstream movement look more moderate and reasonable by comparison. Think of the US civil rights movement around Martin Luther King Jr, in comparison to the more radical Black Power Movement involving Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. The radical flank effect is a powerful historical insight but it isn’t a universal theory because mass social movements only really emerged in the 18th century with the centralization of state power in the nation-state. But we can look at the patterns since then. That’s what political scientists and sociologists are doing all the time. They usually don’t call it ‘learning the lessons of history’, but they are trying to find patterns. In effect, they are challenging the idea that all history is contingent. Ultimately, I think it’s time to take history more seriously as a useful guide to help us navigate the crises of our times. You wouldn’t drive a car without looking in the rearview mirror. Let’s be guided by the Maori proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua – ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.’"