to start with, can you try to give us your own definition of anarchism?
It’s always complicated. I believe that anarchism describes a set of practices; describes the policy; it also describes a tradition, and within that tradition there is a set of cultures. it is a limited political movement, but it is defined by how its advocates, those who call themselves anarchists, engage with those traditions and cultures, and change their practices over time.
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It may be the political theory loaded with the most misconceptions and the biggest contrast between how theorists define it and what a random person on the street would think when they heard the word “anarchy.” ?
It is very difficult for people who come from other types of politics, within the mainstream, to understand anarchism. Most of the ways we think about our political institutions, constitutions, and organizations are framed in a particular way: at a minimum, the theoretical premise is that we need some kind of structure to make citizens obey and co-operate. we anarchists start from a very different base: that we naturally cooperate. it can be in a very sociable way, in the sense that we have friendly relationships, or it can mean in a more subtle way, that we can cooperate despite our anxieties, antagonisms, and conflicts. and we anarchists think that it is through this cooperation that we will build our institutions.
It is very difficult for political theorists to think of anarchism in other than a negative way, because it seems to contradict everything that politics is based on: the idea that we need a constructed and defined order, and that we cannot coordinate . our actions unless someone helps us to do so. anarchists come with the idea that anarchy is order and what exists is disorder. that scares people. and the way the anarchist movement emerges in the post-French and post-American revolutionary context makes it seem much more threatening than other critical groups, because they are not playing by the rules of the game.
The early history of anarchist practice gets caught up in this: when anarchists react to the repressive force used against them in the late 19th century, they enter those cycles of violence and earn a reputation for being the same as they. say they are not. it becomes easy to point to the evidence that anarchists are these terroristic, aggressive, destructive and nihilistic individuals, simply because you can point to various murderers and groups that advocate violent means to overthrow existing institutions. the image is quite powerful and becomes almost romantic in a way. It gets a lot of attention in literature, and then in movies, which helps perpetuate it. it becomes very difficult for anarchists to escape from him; but sometimes they also play with it.
Is this why it’s become weird to hear people, especially public intellectuals, describe themselves as anarchists? while socialism and communism, despite their equally tainted history, still seem to have many people openly supporting them?
there are still public intellectuals who label themselves anarchists; noam chomsky is one of them, or naomi klein, who i’m not sure he said he’s an anarchist, but he has clearly expressed views that are anarchist. he talks about anarchist movements, he supports anarchist practices. then there are people who call themselves anarchists. There are certainly also social movements that call themselves anarchists, or workers’ organizations that are full of people who call themselves anarchists, even though the union isn’t called that. the industrial workers of the world, for example, is essentially an anarchist union in terms of membership, even if it does not adhere to a particular ideology. certainly since the rise of the social justice movement in the late 1990s, there has been a much greater sense in which the grassroots left is defined by anarchist ideas. now there is a great literature on anarchism; there are publishers and cooperative movements that call themselves anarchists. so it’s there, it exists, but you’re right that it doesn’t exist very publicly, at least not in the mainstream.
How did you become interested in the subject?
when I was an undergraduate student. I had never come across anarchism before that. practically everything was defined by Marxism, in one form or another. all the literature tried to determine what kind of Marxist you were. some unusual courses were beginning to arrive at universities, such as feminism. I got interested in it, but I didn’t identify with any of the Marxist groups that were active within the university.
So, I did a couple of courses. one was about modern spain, looking at the origins and outbreak of the spanish civil war and revolution. It was then that I first came across the anarchist movement, and I had never seen anything like it. It encouraged me to think about the dilemma facing the anarchist movement in the Spanish context: do you fight for a revolution, or do you commit the revolution to fight against a fascist regime? I was introduced to some of the anarchist answers to that dilemma, and that’s when I started reading anarchist literature.
“kropotkin liked to quote the french utopian socialist charles fourier, saying: ‘take a box of stones and shake them, and they will organize themselves’”.
most of my interest was in political ideas and political theory, so before that, i had done the conventional course from machiavelli to marx, but in my last year i took an optional course on political thoughts and texts. It was run by a man named William J. fishman, who had been teaching it for many years, and was an anarchist. He was a friend of Fermin Rocker, son of anarcho-syndicalist theorist and activist Rudolf Rocker, who was also a Jewish trade unionist in East London. the course was a critique of socialist and leninist politics. we looked at all kinds of literature that I had never heard of. It was then that I was introduced to Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. I started going to the freedom bookstore and buying those books, and little by little I got hooked. then I had the opportunity to continue studying it and decided to find out more.
I think it’s still the case today: I studied political theory ten years ago, and although we learned about socialist thinkers and briefly mentioned proudhon, I think we never read kropotkin or bakunin.
It is also because anarchists are not considered great theorists. they play with some incredibly complex ideas and tie into a lot of mainstream political theory including rousseau, hobbes, marx, machiavelli… but anarchists tend to be essayists so there isn’t a single great work I can easily point to and say that it is the essence of the theory. there are no das capital, there is no communist manifesto. that makes it very difficult to insert into a curriculum. because not only do you need to think very differently and challenge all your received ideas to see where anarchists come from, but there is no single clear text to do so. And some of them are easy to ridicule: Bakunin wrote those long, unstructured, unpublished speeches; it is very easy to say that it lacks rigor, that it is just a diatribe. but I think it’s a mistake.
since you mentioned it, let’s start by talking about your first choice, which is peter kropotkin’s (1842-1921) entry on anarchism in the brittany encyclopedia, published in 1911. do you know how he was invited to write this article?
I’m not sure who invited him, but by 1911 Kropotkin was certainly fairly established in literary circles. he was exiled from russia and spent the first part of his exile in switzerland and france, where he was sent to prison. There was a huge campaign to free him and he arrived in England in the early 1880s. He was known as a geographer, scientist and aristocrat. there was certainly negative press against him, but he too had a solid base of support and was well integrated in some literary circles. so it’s no surprise that he’s been asked to write something about anarchism for the britannica. Of course, I can’t imagine someone like him being invited to write an encyclopedic article now. It may seem strange, but in reality the beginning of the 20th century was a different time, and they just thought of him as an expert.
A couple of books on anarchism had already been published, one by the austrian journalist ernst viktor zenker, and another famous one by the german law professor paul eltzbacher. so anarchism was getting coverage, people were trying to figure out what it meant. In his article, Kropotkin also mentions Leo Tolstoy, who at that time had already done much to promote anarchist ideas, although he did not call himself an anarchist. so these ideas circulated and were taken seriously in some quarters.
kropotkin’s article, and I guess that’s why it was your first choice, gives a long and precise definition of everything anarchism is and could be. its first sentence defines it as “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society without government is conceived – harmony in such a society is obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as well as for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.” he later calls anarchism the “left wing of socialism.” Do you think that is a good way to summarize it?
For a long time I thought this entry on anarchism in the UK was pretty boring. I always preferred his shorter and earlier essays; its appeal to young people is fantastic writing. but the more I read the entry, the better I think it is. in a way, the whole article is a definition, and it looks at anarchism from many different perspectives. it starts with the idea that anarchism is about free agreement, and tries to break down what ‘free agreement’ means. it is not a contract, it is any type of agreement that you enter into voluntarily; It’s a very liberal idea, in a way. but it takes away all kinds of authority, by saying that free agreement can only come from below, and through negotiation with your peers, with whom you live and share points of view.
free agreement is what defines its politics, and it is theoretically linked to the ideas of fluidity and change. in anarchy there is no such thing as a final agreement, or set of rules against which we judge everything else. it is a process we enter into. That is the starting point. then he explains that this idea has been around forever: we can see it in the Greeks, in ancient Chinese thought, it’s everywhere. it crystallized today through the organization of the first international. Starting in the 1860s, we see a political movement that we can call anarchist, which is taking this timeless idea of fluidity, flux and free agreement, and placing it in the particular context of the struggle of the workers against the exploiters. it also speaks of masters and slaves, and of domination.
in this sense he says that anarchism can be put to the left of socialism, because anarchists are not people who simply want to take control of the government and use its instruments to achieve equality; they want to completely abolish this system that imposes sets of rules and regulations against which you must always judge your practice. that’s why it’s on the left.
while kropotkin goes through the history of the concept, he talks about the pre-socratic philosopher zeno of citium, mentions the middle ages, but explains that pierre-joseph proudhon was really the first anarchist. would you agree with that?
one of the things i like about this essay is that kropotkin tries to distinguish the concept of “anarchy” from the ideology of “anarchism”. there is a politics of resistance and there is an idea, based on the affirmation of individual sovereignty, which admits that people are born into a social context, but ultimately any decision they make must fall on them. proudhon is important because he is the first person to use the concept that everyone fears, anarchy, and define it positively. in doing so, he sets the springboard for the anarchist movement. for him, anarchy is not, as conventional thinking would say, the corruption of democracy, it is something we must wholeheartedly embrace. that’s a great statement to make.
kropotkin does a great job of asking what anarchy means, in terms of freedom, fluidity, and change. And when Proudhon calls himself an anarchist, that is exactly what he is talking about: the flow of free forces and the way people interact without the intervention of third parties. Kropotkin liked to quote French utopian socialist Charles Fourier as saying, “Take a box of stones and shake them up, and they’ll organize themselves.”
You mentioned Hobbes and Rousseau earlier. In a way, do anarchists fundamentally think that human beings are naturally good and will behave positively even without restrictions or rules?
When anarchists say that individuals cooperate, they don’t mean that they are necessarily good, just that they are cooperative. His criticism of both Hobbes and Rousseau is that in their thought experiments, people are alone. and its isolation establishes the conditions for its survival. it means they end up competing with each other. but there are no conditions in the world where people are alone. Anarchists say that when people find themselves living in conditions where resources are limited, their best option is to cooperate, because much more can be contributed through collaboration than as one person. and cooperation will engender its own rules; it is not for anyone outside this framework to judge what the rules should be. the rules will change over time and people will adopt new practices, but they will always cooperate.
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Let’s quickly talk about “property is theft”, proudhon’s most famous quote, and possibly anarchism’s, but also perhaps the most misunderstood. what did you mean by that?
proudhon distinguishes between two types of property: property in use and property as domain. when he says that property is theft, he is talking about the constitutional right to exclusive property. if the constitution defends someone’s right to exclusively own land, work or anything, then that necessarily establishes an inequality, because we have limited resources. some people will become owners and others will be dispossessed as a result. the idea here is that there is no moral basis for individual property. in the world, everything belongs to everyone in common; you have to invent a principle to justify why he should have more than you. and as soon as you do that, says proudhon, you deprive everyone else of property. the dispossessed become dependent on the owners for everything, to maintain their well-being and subsistence. and although they work and produce, they have to cede most of it to someone else. that’s theft but that doesn’t mean you can’t own something; People often ask, “can I still call this my toothbrush?” yes, you can!
another aspect that kropotkin mentions, for being part of the anarchist scene, is the individualist tradition of the german philosopher max stirner. it is very much alive today in ideologies like anarcho-capitalism. Do many people call themselves anarchists without being from the left?
max stirner is back in fashion, largely thanks to the work of people like the british political theorist saul newman on post-anarchism. stirner has always been problematic for socialist anarchists; In the United States, he and other individualist anarchist thinkers have been adopted by anarcho-capitalists and right-libertarians of the minimal state. so there seems to be an overlap, which socialist anarchists always deny.
Kropotkin’s treatment of the agitator is really interesting; he is very positive with him, as he is with friedrich nietzsche. he says they produced fantastic and incredibly inspiring literature. Stirner’s big idea is that you shouldn’t have to subordinate yourself to a higher ideal that isn’t of your own making. in the ego and in his own, he explains how individuals are forced to accept certain principles by groups that say they have a program that will fulfill for humanity. but he asks: what is humanity? And why should I accept restrictions to offer this program that, according to you, will benefit everyone? at some point he writes that the French revolution began by declaring the rights of man, and ended by beheading men. corruption is something we should be aware of. kropotkin would be completely enrolled in it. the fact that he also says that anarchy is about recognizing the sovereignty of the individual, is a statement about the importance of each of us as an individual.
“anarchism is not just a phenomenon of the past…it continues to resonate in the present.”
but the difference between them is that stirner abstracts the individual from any kind of social context and, in doing so, sees any kind of social arrangement as a constraint. Kropotkin says that you can’t take us out of our social context, and that means you have to think about how you can organize social relationships in ways that allow people to challenge norms, traditions, habits, and customs. Stirner’s mistake is to say, ‘Theoretically, I am going to abstract the individual from the social context; and normatively, therefore, I will assert the individual’s right to accomplish any end, against any other person.” That, says Kropotkin, is problematic, because it is aristocratic, competitive, and likely to end in inequality based on “power is Right.’ it does not take into account the welfare of less able, less capable, less powerful or simply different people who do not want to live that way. Ethically, that is a fundamental difference between a socialist like Kropotkin and an individualist like Stirner.
Having said that, I don’t think that just because anarcho-capitalists claim their heritage, it should lead us to say that all their ideas are necessarily tainted. for example, i think stirner said some very interesting things about education.
that’s a great transition to your second choice, a book by eugenia c. Delamotte on another who started out as an individualist anarchist: Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912). Who was she and what was she writing about?
was an American writer as well as a poet, but initially entered the anarchist movement as a freethinker. Her father named her Voltairine, after the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. She grew up in a free thought tradition, and her anarchism has some of the hallmarks: she criticizes the church, she reads thomas paine, she’s steeped in an american republican tradition. she starts out as an educator in philadelphia, but for her and many other anarchists at the time, there is a major turning point with the execution of the haymarket anarchists in 1887.
The 1880s in the United States, particularly in Chicago, was a period of intense labor struggle. Workers were campaigning for the 8-hour day, organizing huge labor protests, and these were put down with incredible violence by the private armies of Pinkerton, which the employers hired and deployed against the workers. anarchist groups were very active in chicago. there was an influx of German immigrants who wanted to escape the old world and find a place for themselves in the new, only to discover that they weren’t that different in terms of repression. many of them had passed through the paris commune and the unification of germany; they had seen the rise of the state and the ways in which education was spreading in dire ways. They entered an American context and discovered that the United States was not the “land of the free.” so they started organizing, particularly around the 8-hour day movement.
a demonstration took place in haymarket square in 1886 in chicago. a bomb was dropped and several people were killed. but the key event is what happened after the demonstration: several anarchists were arrested, simply because they were anarchists. they were judged; the jury was rigged, the process was completely unfair, everyone could see that it was a corrupt trial, since there was no particular evidence against the accused. one of the significant features of the trial is that the anarchists were given space to defend themselves, and what they did was give lengthy statements to justify their anarchist beliefs. Albert Parsons, who was considered the most eloquent of the men on trial, gave a speech to the jury that lasted eight hours. these are incredibly powerful statements.
There were a long series of appeals and the trial became an international cause célèbre at the time, but ultimately five were sentenced to death. one committed suicide before execution and the other four were hanged. a few years later the verdict was overturned, the trial was recognized as utterly corrupt and unfair, but by this point the example of the hay market anarchists had become one of the rallying cries of the early anarchist movement. Just at the time that anarchism was beginning to define itself against other forms of socialism, particularly Marxist socialism, anarchists had a number of people they could identify with, statements explaining what anarchism was, and an annual celebration that brought together to the people. all of these things helped define the anarchist position.
then, from these events, voltairine de cleyre began to see herself as part of the movement. she took up the anarchist cause, not only in her daily life, but also writing essays, defending the Mexican revolution, and denouncing US colonial rule. another reason I chose her is that she writes about what anarchism means for everyday social relations; she writes a series on what she calls “sexual slavery” and the question of marriage. she doesn’t call herself a feminist, because at the time feminism is mostly associated with women fighting for the right to vote; but she is one of the most powerful voices of what would now be called anarchist feminism.
was she, like her contemporary emma goldman, defending women fighting for suffrage?
their general opinion was that the suffrage campaign was a meaningless fight. the anarchists had already had this discussion with the Marxist social democrats, in the context of the emancipation of the workers. they had already established the general position that you cannot win power by running for elections in representative institutions, because you will be absorbed into that power. you cannot make fundamental changes by entering these institutions, because the institutions themselves are constituted in ways that limit your sphere of action. so the only thing you can do is work off of them. anarchist women, including de cleyre and goldman, make the same argument, basically saying: you can fight for the vote, or for certain rights, like going to college, but fundamentally that won’t alter the dependency that exists within the system, through of marriage laws, and their structural subordination to men. you have to fight it on the ground.
In his essay called direct action, de cleyre writes that the difference between anarchists and people fighting for suffrage is that they are using anarchist tactics, but only instrumentally. they are not actually enrolled in self-liberation, but only in protest. She doesn’t disapprove of suffrage activists, but she says the only way she can truly secure her rights is through continued use of direct action, every day. In her essay “The Gates of Liberty” she writes: “those who dare to maintain them have rights”. we can judge social systems by the rights they grant people, but in the end, the value of rights lies in the defiance of the oppressed in the struggle for justice, not in settling for a set of compromises.
you mentioned that de cleyre started out as a freethinker and that she tried to criticize many social constructs, including marriage, religion, beauty, sexuality, with this idea of rejecting popular opinion and preconceived notions. in this sense it seems to follow in the footsteps of john stuart mill, and his idea that there is an intrinsic benefit in allowing free thought to exist, never ceasing to question the way we live, and willingly choosing whether we want to keep things as they are .
it is interesting that you mention john stuart mill, because like mill, voltairine de cleyre was inspired by the english philosopher mary wollstonecraft. both took that republican rejection of domination as the touchstone of their politics. If you think about tyranny and the ways in which lordship works to make people servile, to subdue them and limit their imaginations, there is something in common between what de Cleyre says and what Mill says about liberty, about fostering freedom. diversity and letting people think. different, pursue their own interests and desires, follow their paths. this quest becomes anarchistic when it pushes in a certain direction. if your principle says, ‘let’s follow any kind of desire and see where it leads’, it’s different from the anarchist rejection of exploitation and domination. free thinking is important, but not everything goes, and neither is it important for mill. there is an ethic.
later in her life, she ended up calling herself an “anarchist without adjectives”, which brings us to the subject of the many “adjectives” that accompany anarchism. Do you think it is partly due to this pursuit of free thought that anarchism is a political theory with so many subgroups?
the argument itself arises after a change within anarchism, of which kropotkin is a part, but also errico malatesta and other italian anarchists. after the dissolution of the first international, the anarchists begin to organize separately. many anarchists come from Proudhonist and Bakuninist traditions, and the dominant affiliation at the time is what is called collectivism, which was then increasingly understood as a principle of distribution according to work.
kropotkin’s argument was that this is problematic, because it implies some kind of ownership, and he thinks that if anarchists want to be consistent, they need to call themselves communists. he and others fought against the idea of communism stretching back to the french revolution, where communism is understood as a system of government, highly centralized and planned, inherited from jacobinism through the likes of gracchus babeuf and other utopians. Kropotkin basically says that communism is just a principle of distribution according to need and that this is the surest basis for anarchy because it inhibits the rise of economic inequalities and domination.
as the movement changes and kropotkin wins the argument, communism became the predominant trend within anarchism. But there were groups on the ground, especially in Spain, where Bakuninist traditions were deep-rooted, asking: why should you be the one telling us how we should organize our affairs? in fact, it may be that we do want to recognize some kind of property. as anarchists, we should have the flexibility to determine this on the ground.” This is how a movement develops within Spanish anarchism, which says that in order to be consistent revolutionaries, the people must be allowed to determine all their relationships, including economic ones. Instead of calling themselves communists or collectivists, they call themselves “anarchists without adjectives.” voltairine de cleyre agreed.
The reason why so many subgroups appear, such as eco-anarchism, anarcho-feminism, anarcho-syndicalism, is that the movement tends to develop through its practices and with changes in political conditions. after anarchism appears on the scene, it is possible to label any specific issue or campaign, such as patriarchy, economic sustainability, degrowth, etc. in any group, one can have a more or less anarchist vision. people call themselves eco-anarchists within the environmental movement to express a rejection of hierarchy. in doing so, they are picking up fragments of the anarchist tradition. everything forms a kind of family and helps build common ground.
Do you think anarchism can be confusing when you first approach those ideas and discover all these subgroups and movements?
possibly, but if you think about other traditions like Marxism, you could also be a Stalinist, a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Lukácsist, etc. but they have names, which somehow makes it more accessible.
Your third choice was the essay The Slavery of Our Times by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). he was often labeled as a christian anarchist, yet another adjective, but as you mentioned before, he never called himself that.
That’s right, but anarchists all over the world adopted it. He is the most translated anarchist in China and Japan, for example, and he had a great influence on Mahatma Gandhi in India.
Historically, what has been the relationship between anarchism and religion? intuitively, I would expect a very hostile approach, given the church’s history of domination.
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in fact, it is very problematic. certainly in europe, and especially in places like france and spain with strong catholic churches, the anarchist movement has traditionally been anticlerical and hostile to religious control over society, particularly in education. it is in spain where francisco ferrer tried to set up his modern school against the church.
However, within that, the argument that people like Bakunin make is that it’s not so much about the church itself, but about the ways in which certain ideas about human evil and inadequacy are structured into our way of thinking. to think. and that is not only done by the church, but also by the statists. secular politics generally works on the same logic as the church: people need to be perfected, and they can only be perfected by ethical institutions. Bakunin called this political theology.
if he’s against political theology, he’s probably anticlerical, but it’s possible to imagine religious practice without theology. I think that’s really where the anarchists are, and where Tolstoy is. their faith is not based on the imposition of external rules. in the slavery of our time, he writes that you cannot have free will if you are constantly threatened by some kind of punishment, in this world or in the hereafter. faith is about mobilizing what is good in yourself and others to live a better life.
no doubt some anarchists would say that they cannot accept that, because it admits the idea of a divinity, which goes against their principles. but I think there is room within anarchism for faith. certainly within contemporary anarchist movements, especially those interested in decolonizing and finding solidarity with indigenous groups, there is much more freedom to think about different belief systems and ways in which they can intersect, overlap and still find resonance with the anarchist practice.
The book itself is a pamphlet on Tolstoy’s views on the situation of workers in the 19th century, what should be done about it, and why we can’t trust the state to do those things. It begins with various descriptions of men and women who work excruciatingly long hours, sometimes 36 hours straight for next to no pay, and live in overcrowded and unsanitary housing. Even though things are still very bad for many people around the world today, working conditions in Europe have improved substantially since then. Do you think that anarchism had its golden age in the 19th century for those reasons, but that it is becoming more and more difficult to mobilize the masses against the state system as living conditions have generally improved?
It’s easy to be seduced into thinking that these kinds of difficulties don’t exist. At some point Tolstoy writes that we are ‘hypnotized’ and also says that we are being ‘bought’ by the goods that are available to us. for him, one of the defects of socialism is to think that all we have to do is take control of the means of production, and everyone can have everything that the rich have now. Tolstoy thinks it ridiculous to say that; if you really want to live an anarchist life, you will have to get used to living very differently and within your means. for us today, it could be living within our ecological means; For Tolstoy he was thinking of what was available in a rural society through local production.
we have a lot of precariousness now, and different kinds of problems that tolstoy knew in his time: anxiety, depression, stress, boredom, delinquency, and all those things that later anarchists talk about, like paul goodman in the years 1960. Those are still conditions of slavery. Tolstoy says that it is not just a metaphor; this is happening scratches the surface and there it is. and you won’t get rid of it until you change the fundamental ways we live. one of the reasons I chose the essay is because of the way it presents it as a story. they take you into this conversation between workers, and you can still imagine that happening in a different context today.
do you think the shit jobs david graeber writes about, another example of a contemporary anarchist intellectual, would be a modern form of slavery? in the sense that it takes away the purpose of the daily work from him?
Slavery is the relationship that forces you to work to survive. Tolstoy lives in a time when slavery was abolished in America and twenty million serfs were emancipated in Russia. and yet he says: everything is an illusion. there is no real freedom. emancipated serfs have been forced into debt to serve masters who used to own them outright. That is exactly what David Graeber argues: debt is the foundation on which we are enslaved. Tolstoy asks what is the difference between the ‘slave john’ who used to be forced to clean the cesspool for his master, and the ‘worker john’ who, on the basis of a free contract, can refuse to clean the cesspool for his master? employer, but whose place can be taken by any number of workers who are ready to do the job. it is still a relationship of slavery, based on domination. what has changed is the principle of ownership.
Your fourth book is Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility, a collection of writings by British anarchist Colin Ward (1924-2010). he was considered one of the great anarchist thinkers of the 20th century.
colin ward started reading anarchist literature towards the end of the second world war; he was not a conscientious objector. he was called to testify when the anarchists had been tried for sedition, because he himself had read this pamphlet which was supposed to be seditious. that was his entry into anarchism. for ten years he edited anarchy magazine and 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 the social policy and institutions we have, to “anarchize” society. that was his real contribution.
“when proudhon says that property is theft, he is talking about the constitutional right to exclusive property”
He was an incredibly educated, self-taught man with a background in local planning. much of what he says straddles both sides of politics, sociology, and urban planning. there’s a bit of a nostalgic feel about some of his writing. he writes about england as few people have since george orwell; a place that has been created by grassroots community action. he is not talking about activist movements, but about people who, in their daily lives, behave in ways that expand the field of freedom, against central authority and control.
colin ward passed away in 2010. how would you describe the anarchist movement since then, in the 21st century? where can you find it? Is it in the many social movements that have marked the 2010s?
A lot of social movement analysts would tell you that the social justice groups, the movements to take over the squares, occupy, all these big movements in the last few years have been anarchist. Occupy in particular, to the extent that Wall Street started a global movement, had anarchists directly involved in it, including David Graeber. there are a lot of those fragmented social groups, but anarchism is also made of people who seize opportunities as they see them: squatter movements, precarious workers, indigenous people, movements without borders, feminists, etc. I would say that today anarchism is the animating force, in the same way that when I was a university student, Marxism was the animating force. the ideas of lack of leadership, mutual aid, horizontalism, are standard for most forms of activism these days, and come from an anarchist inspiration.
one of the most debated aspects of anarchism today, especially in the mainstream media, are its more radical sections, such as the black bloc groups or the invisible committee in france. Are they the remnants of the anarchists still waiting for a revolution?
I think the idea of revolution is probably less prominent today than at any time in the past. in a sense it is a shame, because the concept of revolution has sometimes been read again in historical movements to discredit them. if you look at the ways that people like voltairine de cleyre thought about revolution, it’s not necessarily barricades.
I’m not sure people who join black bloc groups consider themselves revolutionaries. there is certainly a culture within black groups, but it is not defined by violence as such, but by anger, resistance, and a particular idea of what protest entails. It’s always easy to look at the main event and think those people are just irrational nuts. The great thing about black block is that anyone can be a black block and no one will know. you join a group of people and feel the force of that, without anyone orchestrating it.
this makes me think of anonymous, another movement that has sometimes been labeled anarchist in recent years. That’s probably more difficult to say, because so many different people, with a wide range of political views, have been involved in it. but do you think the means they use, and the leaderless form the movement takes, has at least an anarchist element to it?
It has an anarchist element, and it’s interesting because within anonymous there have also been discussions about the ethics of what is being done and to what extent actions should be properly directed and well conceived. again, groups can be anarchist in form, but more or less anarchist within them.
Finally, your fifth choice is a more recent scholarly book by scholars Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt: Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World. why did you choose this as important reading?
I wanted to show the breadth of anarchism and the work that is now being done on it. this is an incredibly important book, in terms of correcting some of the myths about anarchism as a movement that schematically had its glory in spain, was crushed, came back in 1968 and constantly rides these waves. one of the very persuasive arguments they make is that it’s problematic to perceive anarchism in this way within a European context, but it’s definitely misleading and wrong if you look at anarchism in a global context. they are interested not only in highlighting areas of the world outside of europe where anarchism had a large presence in both urban and rural movements, but also in building an image of the networks through which anarchism has operated.
If you read this book, you’ll have a better idea of how small groups, and sometimes a handful of individuals, built significant movements in areas where people might not normally think anarchism had a presence. Argentina, Cuba, China, Egypt, South Africa, are mentioned and studied. this is a network of labor movements that fed on common ideas and organized in local contexts to fight local struggles in particular ways. In this way, it is possible to see anarchism as a much more important force for change than is typical in Europe today. anarchism is not just a phenomenon of the past; the book shows how it continues to resonate in the present.
Beyond Spain at the beginning of the 20th century, have there been other places in the world where anarchism has been attempted?
The example people are now talking about is Rojava, the democratic federation of northern Syria, where the ideas of American social theorist Murray Bookchin have been taken up to think about alternative non-state relations within an incredibly diverse ethnic population. it is in a situation similar to that of spain in a certain sense, because there are so many enemies of this revolution that its back is against the wall. but it has worked nonetheless. it has an incredibly dynamic feminist thread, it’s horizontalist, it’s complicated, it’s anarchist.
it is always difficult to talk about examples, because although these instances and moments are important, one of the points that hirsch and van der walt make is that what anarchism really does is maintain constant pressure on the ground, to organize struggles and movements differently. these local movements were a deliberate attempt to maintain power within the collective, and not relinquish it through a series of deals with politicians, particularly for labor groups. it is a much broader kind of struggle, one that takes into account the ways in which the local communities of those workers need and want to operate.
Do you think that, as with other movements such as gender studies or feminism, anarchism has been slow to recognize things that happened outside of Europe and the United States?
Yes, it has, and it’s partly due to the way academic studies work. it’s hard to find a space for anarchism within a university system, and the few people who have the privilege to work on such issues are more likely to look at their own movements first. There have been local studies of anarchist movements for a long time, but what is unusual about this book is that it thinks not only about different national histories, but about transnational movements as well. the group of multilingual scholars who wrote it were able to share their experiences and insights to build a picture of what anarchism is all over the world. And it makes sense, because in a way, how can you understand a movement that wants to abolish borders and states, if not on a global level?
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