Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader

"Colin Ward started reading anarchist literature towards the tail end of World War II ; he wasn’t a conscientious objector. He was called to give evidence when anarchists had been put on trial for sedition, because he had himself read this pamphlet that was supposed to be seditious. That was his entry into anarchism. For ten years he edited the journal Anarchy , and he became the leading voice of what he sometimes called pragmatic anarchism. He was interested in thinking about how, in a different post-War world, the ideas of historical anarchists could still be applied and used constructively through social policy and the institutions that we have, to ‘anarchise’ society. That was his real contribution. “When Proudhon says that property is theft, he’s talking about the constitutional right to exclusive ownership” He was a self-educated, incredibly well-read man, with a background in local planning. A lot of what he says straddles politics, sociology, and urban planning. There’s a slightly nostalgic feel about some of his writings. He writes about England in a way that few people have since George Orwell ; a place that has been created by grassroots communal action. He’s not talking about activist movements, but about people who, in their everyday lives, behave in ways that expand the field of liberty, against authority and central control. Many social movement analysts would tell you that social justice groups, movements for taking the squares, Occupy , all of these big movements in recent years have been anarchistic. Occupy in particular, insofar as Wall Street kickstarted a global movement, had anarchists directly involved in it, including David Graeber. There are many of those fragmented social groups, but anarchism is also made of the people who take the opportunities as they see them: squatters’ movements, precarious workers, indigenous people, no-border movements, feminists, etc. I would say that today anarchism is the animating force, in the way that when I was an undergraduate, Marxism was the animating force. The ideas of leaderlessness , mutual aid, horizontalism, are standards of most forms of activism these days, and they come from an anarchist inspiration. I think the idea of revolution is probably less prominent today than at any other time in the past. In a sense that’s a shame, because the concept of revolution has sometimes been read back into historical movements to discredit them. If you look at the ways in which people like Voltairine de Cleyre thought about revolution, it’s not necessarily about barricades. I’m not sure that people who enter into black bloc groups think of themselves as revolutionaries. There’s certainly a culture within black bloc groups, but it’s not defined by violence as such, but by anger, resistance, and a particular idea of what protest involves. It’s always easy to look at the headline event, and think that those people are just irrational crazies. The great thing about black bloc is that anyone can be a black bloc, and nobody will know. You join a set of people and you feel the strength of that, without anybody orchestrating it. It does have an anarchistic element, and it’s interesting because within Anonymous too, there have been arguments about the ethics of what is being done, and the extent to which actions have to be correctly targeted and well conceived. Again, groups can be anarchistic in form, but more or less anarchistic within them."