Anarchism by Colin Ward
Anarchism, from 2004, lays out the history
and principles behind an oft-misunderstood
political ideology.
Crucially, anarchists emphasize freedom over
oppression, thereby seeking to do away with
human life’s many hierarchies, be they those
imposed by the modern nation-state, by patriarchal
societies or even by religious organizations.
Anarchism envisions a world free from any
sort of coercion.
Who should read this?
Anyone looking to learn about alternative
societal models,
Students of politics or history,
and citizens concerned about climate change
and how we might stop it
Who wrote the book?
Colin Ward, a British anarchist and prolific
author, wrote multiple books on politics,
ecology and urban issues.
He is also the author of Anarchy in Action,
Cotters and Squatters and Talking Green.
What’s in it for me?
Discover the history of anarchism and its
influence on modern society.
There’s no doubt you’ve heard of anarchism.
Sadly, the term is often used in a negative
sense to describe chaos, riots or even societal
collapse.
But the true meaning of anarchism is anything
but negative.
Indeed, it was originally a term used by many
key nineteenth-century philosophers to describe
their vision of a more egalitarian and just
society.
So what is the main goal of anarchism?
It seeks to remove all oppressive hierarchies
from human life, whether that hierarchy is
imposed by the state and its police forces,
by patriarchal social systems or even by religious
organizations.
Once these oppressive elements are removed,
anarchists envision societies based on mutual
cooperation, direct democracy and communities
federalizing with others for the benefit of
all.
Although it grew out of the failures of the
French Revolution in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, anarchism remains
as relevant today as it was back then.
With crises such as increasing inequality
and climate change looming ever larger, anarchist
theories may represent an unlikely lifeline.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
how anarchism flourished on a large scale
during the Spanish Civil War;
why anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said
that property is both “theft” and “freedom”;
how anarchist ideas could help solve the problem
of overcrowding in modern prisons.
Anarchism is a political philosophy revolving
around the rejection of all hierarchies.
The term anarchy stems from the Greek word
anarkhia, which translates to “without leader.”
But its modern meaning took hold in the mid-nineteenth
century, when French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon attached “anarchism” to his political
ideology.
This ideology, anarchism, contended that society
could – and should – be organized without
central governments or authorities.
Proudhon and later anarchists believed that
society ought to be organized around voluntary
agreements between individuals and groups,
and that such a society would be able to meet,
with both efficiency and fairness, all of
its members’ production and consumption
needs.
But why did Proudhon feel the need for such
a society?
The answer lies in the failures of the French
Revolution.
After the Revolution, peasants and workers
became disillusioned when they realized that
the newly ascendant bourgeois political class
was no better than the aristocrats who’d
just been ousted.
Oppressed by institutions such as punitive
police forces and brutal armies, early anarchist
thinkers like Proudhon noted that it wasn’t
the rulers themselves who were the problem.
It was the very concept of rule – a concept
that placed one group of people over another
– that was at the root of society’s ills.
It is thus the problem of the state – and
how to abolish it and build a fairer society
– that has concerned anarchists since the
eighteenth century.
How to do this, however, depends on who you
ask.
The most prominent grouping of anarchists
is anarcho-communists.
They believe that land, resources and the
means of production ought to be controlled
by the communities that benefit from them.
Other offshoots of anarchist thought emphasize,
for example, feminism or green politics, but
all anarchists reject hierarchies and all
forms of external control, whether imposed
by states, employers or religious organizations.
But how would an anarchist society be organized?
Well, there are four main principles that
would likely be involved.
First, anarchist organizations should be voluntary
– membership mustn’t be required, as this
would impede individual freedom and responsibility.
Second, they must be functional, having a
clear purpose and reason for existence.
Third, they must be temporary, since permanent
organizations tend to outlive their usefulness,
becoming more concerned with perpetuating
their survival than with serving their original
purpose.
Finally, anarchist organizations must be small,
as hierarchical tendencies are less likely
to develop when individuals come together
in person to solve problems.
Maybe this all seems like head-in-the-clouds
theorizing?
Well, in the next blink we’ll explore how
specific anarchist thinkers envisioned social
change, and how anarchism has worked in practice.
Anarchism was promulgated by the likes of
Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
and it worked best in Spain.
While there have been many philosophies of
and attempts at anarchism, there are three
parts of its history that can’t be overlooked:
the political theories of the eighteenth-century
Russian philosopher Peter Kropotkin; the ideas
of his counterpart, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon;
and the ideological furor surrounding the
Spanish Civil War.
Aside from being the first to use the term
“anarchism,” Proudhon also famously asserted
that “property is theft” and that “property
is freedom.”
For him, this was not contradictory – property
was theft, since landowners’ and capitalists’
property was usually the fruit of exploitation
or conquest.
But property was also freedom because peasants
and workers needed homes, land and the means
of production in order to have the freedom
to thrive – a freedom that needn’t be
obtained by exploitative or coercive means.
But it was Proudhon’s insistence on the
need for federalism between communes that
would play an important role in the Paris
Commune of March-May 1871 – arguably the
first example of revolutionary socialism being
put into practice.
During its short-lived existence, the revolutionary
communards realized per Proudhon that they
would have to federate with other communes
in order to sustain theirs.
Alas, their commune didn’t last long enough
for that to happen.
In addition to Proudhon, an important early
advocate of anarchism was Peter Kropotkin.
A scientifically minded man, he attempted
to establish a well-justified foundation for
budding ideology.
For instance, in one of his more famous works,
The Conquest of Bread, he laid out a framework
for how communes in post-revolutionary society
could self-organize through mutual aid and
voluntary cooperation.
Years later, Kropotkin’s theories on how
workers could collectivize industry and agriculture
played a crucial role during the Spanish Civil
War, following the revolution of 1936.
In the 1930s, Spain was a mostly agricultural
society – and 2 percent of the population
owned 67 percent of the land.
After the revolution, this all changed.
In many parts of the country, private property
was effectively abolished, with agricultural
land and its cultivation going through massive
collectivization.
And in Revolutionary Catalonia, collectivization
extended toward other areas of society, such
as public transport, electricity and telecommunications.
Although the Spanish Civil War was eventually
won by fascist forces under Francisco Franco,
the practical success of anarchism in Spain
would go on to suggest that anarchism had
the potential to achieve remarkable social
transformation.
“The state is not something which can be
destroyed by a revolution... we destroy it
by contracting other relationships, by behaving
differently.”
– Gustav Landauer
Anarchism provides much-needed ideas about
how to fix societal problems, such as those
blighting the US’s penal system.
Although the goal of anarchists might be to
implement a society without hierarchies, the
many ideas inspired by anarchist philosophies
can also shed light on how to solve problems
within the existing social framework.
One area where anarchism could prove useful
is prison reform.
Many of the formative anarchist philosophers
spent time in prison for their political activism.
Kropotkin, for example, was imprisoned on
numerous occasions and, in the process, learned
much about the negative effects of the modern
penal system.
It was Kropotkin, for example, who first called
prisons “universities of crime.”
While imprisoned, many petty criminals learn
from cellmates how to carry out more sophisticated
criminal actions.
Upon release, this phenomenon leads to increased
crime and repeat incarcerations.
Kropotkin’s observations had an influence
on later American penal reformers.
Many of them had been imprisoned as conscientious
objectors during the two World Wars, and they’d
observed that many prisoners came from disadvantaged
backgrounds.
Poverty, it appeared, increased the likelihood
of someone committing petty crimes.
Send these disadvantaged individuals to the
“university of crime,” and you get a vicious
cycle: poverty, petty crime, imprisonment,
more crime, reimprisonment and so on.
The penal reformers who noticed this pattern
played a key role in the steady humanization
of the US criminal justice system.
They facilitated, for example, the creation
of the probation service, where probation
officers supervise, advise and help criminals
get back on their feet after imprisonment,
lessening chances of reincarceration and helping
to break the cycle.
Sadly, much of this progress has been undone
in recent years.
In 2000, for example, America was home to
as many as 2 million inmates.
To this day, the country has the largest prison
population relative to general population
size in the history of modern nation-states.
Again, we can look to anarchism to help solve
modern issues such as the overcrowding in
prisons due to drug-related offenses.
In 1922, for example, Italian anarchist Errico
Malatesta noticed that imprisoning drug users
to reduce drug use has the opposite effect;
it actually increases addiction rates in society
and drives up levels of drug trafficking.
Malatesta’s suggestion?
The decriminalization of both drug use and
drug sale.
Not only would this reduce the prison population;
it’d also cut the criminal aspect out of
the drug trade, reducing prices and rates
of addiction, since drugs are appealing, at
least in part, because they’re illicit.
Both Zurich and Amsterdam have implemented
decriminalization policies, and both have
confirmed Malatesta’s hypothesis.
Small revolutions, both quiet and loud, have
been made possible by anarchism.
There can be no doubt – anarchists have
not made much progress in bringing about massive,
societal change via revolution.
But that doesn’t mean that the political
efforts of anarchists have been for naught.
On the contrary, many aspects of our lives
that we take for granted were, in fact, made
possible by anarchist activism.
Take the way we dress, for example.
We often forget that as recently as fifty
years ago, what we wore was restricted by
class or gender.
But, by practicing radical nonconformity and
rejecting fashion, anarchists throughout the
twentieth century were able to contribute
to a huge relaxation of what different people
were expected to wear.
The same can be said when it comes to the
women’s movement.
Emma Goldman, one of the most prominent feminist
philosophers within the anarchist tradition,
wrote an influential treatise rejecting male
dominance titled The Tragedy of Women’s
Emancipation, first published in 1906.
Within its pages, she explains why suffrage
is not enough for the emancipation of women.
Decades before mainstream feminists would
campaign on the same issues, she asserted
that women also needed to fight for the right
to choose whether or not to have children,
or to engage in sexual relations at all.
Beyond her influences on feminism, Goldman
was an early advocate – and practitioner
– of free love, which was central to how
she envisioned the function of sexual relations
within a potential anarchist society.
Anarchists, including Goldman, were indeed
the first to promote free unions as an alternative
to state or church-sanctioned marriage.
And by the end of the twentieth century, combined
with advancements in contraception, their
revolutionary practice of free love had become
the norm.
These quiet revolutions have undoubtedly revolutionized
our daily lives.
But not all small revolutions undertaken by
anarchists have been so hushed.
With the introduction of the internet, for
example, anarchists have been able to take
their fight online, and coordinate activism
with fellow groupings all over the world.
Such coordination was evident in 1999, when
anarchists and other anticapitalists successfully
demonstrated against the “Multilateral Agreement
on Investment,” a treaty drawn up by OECD
nations and big business that would’ve made
it possible for corporations to sue countries
restricting their profit-making activities.
Internet activists were able to acquire and
leak the draft treaty and subsequently organize
massive protests.
In November 1999, treaty negotiators met in
Seattle only to be greeted by tens of thousands
of protesters that were so disruptive that
the talks collapsed.
With our planet’s future at risk, only anarchist
principles can help solve the ecological problems
humanity faces.
As the twenty-first century has progressed,
humanity has increasingly faced challenges
presented by climate change and finite resources.
However, capitalism has proved incapable of
solving these problems; by its very nature,
it is a system based on continuous, infinite
growth, ever-increasing consumption and expanding
markets.
But as capitalism currently seems to show
no sign of abating, anarchists and their allies
in the green movement have realized that we
must take our future into our own hands.
If capitalism cannot solve the ecological
crises it’s created, then we have to do
something about it ourselves and change our
lifestyles accordingly.
Peter Harper, a leading proponent of sustainability
and environmental politics, identifies two
contrasting strains of green lifestyles that
have formed over the last decades – light
greens and deep greens.
Light greens, having money to fund an alternative,
individualized lifestyle, concern themselves
with investing in expensive green technologies,
such as electric cars, solar panels and organic
food.
On the other hand, deep greens, with less
emphasis on money and more on collectivization,
promote public transport and cycling, localized
and homegrown food initiatives and alternative
currency schemes.
Harper contends that those practicing a deep
green lifestyle inspired by anarchist principles
of collectivization combined with environmental
sustainability will be best-equipped to face
the many inevitable ecological crises.
But this isn’t all.
Anarchist ideas are prominent in the battle
against ecological collapse.
Take localized, urban farming, for example.
Again, we go back to the timeless ideas of
Kropotkin, who, a century ago, identified
the potential issues of exhaustible resources
and the need to promote small-scale, local
food production over cheap, international
food supply chains.
Kropotkin suggested that an island like Great
Britain could itself grow all its food needs,
an idea that, at the time, was considered
absurd.
But, as with many other anarchists who were
ahead of their time, his ideas have been redeemed
– UN reports show that in Chinese cities,
for example, 90 percent of vegetables are
grown and consumed locally.
As with many of the anarchists we’ve discussed,
Kropotkin’s ideas remain vital for a reimagining
of how future human societies can function
as collectivized, egalitarian units – and
how our planet might survive upcoming ecological
catastrophes.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
Anarchism has its roots in the nineteenth
century, and revolves around the political
philosophy of rejecting hierarchies in all
forms, whether the state, religious organizations
or patriarchal social norms.
While major anarchist revolutionary success
has been limited to the likes of anarchist
Spain during the 1930s, anarchist thought
has led to a myriad of small victories – the
modern parole system, marriage-less relationships
and women’s reproductive rights, to name
just a few.
And while an anarchist revolution doesn’t
seem to be on the horizon, crises such as
worsening climate change will eventually force
societies to evolve – anarchist ideas will
come more and more to the fore.
Suggested further reading: Man, the State
and War by Kenneth N. Waltz
In Man, the State and War, Kenneth Waltz develops
a groundbreaking analysis of the nature and
causes of war, offering readers a wide overview
of the major political theories of war from
the perspective of political philosophers,
psychologists and anthropologists.
