Damned Fools In Utopia

And Other Writings on Anarchism and War Resistance

Nicolas Walter, David Goodway

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781604865660
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Anarchismo

Nicolas Walter was the son of the neurologist, W. Grey Walter, and both his grandfathers had known Peter Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter. However, it was the twin jolts of Suez and the Hungarian Revolution while still a student, followed by participation in the resulting New Left and nuclear disarmament movement, that led him to anarchism himself. His personal history is recounted in two autobiographical pieces in this collection as well as the editor's introduction.

During the 1960s he was a militant in the British nuclear disarmament movement—especially its direct-action wing, the Committee of 100—he was one of the Spies for Peace (who revealed the State's preparations for the governance of Britain after a nuclear war), he was close to the innovative Solidarity Group and was a participant in the homelessness agitation. Concurrently with his impressive activism he was analyzing acutely and lucidly the history, practice and theory of these intertwined movements; and it is such writings—including Non-violent Resistance and The Spies for Peace and After —that form the core of this book. But there are also memorable pieces on various libertarians, including the writers George Orwell, Herbert Read and Alan Sillitoe, the publisher C.W. Daniel and the maverick Guy A. Aldred. The Right to be Wrong is a notable polemic against laws limiting the freedom of expression. Other than anarchism, the passion of Walter's intellectual life was the dual cause of atheism and rationalism; and the selection concludes appropriately with a fine essay on Anarchism and Religion and his moving reflections, Facing Death.

Nicolas Walter scorned the pomp and frequent ignorance of the powerful and detested the obfuscatory prose and intellectual limitations of academia. He himself wrote straightforwardly and always accessibly, almost exclusively for the anarchist and freethought movements. The items collected in this volume display him at his considerable best.

1
THIRTY YEARS’ WAR:
SOME AUTOBIOGRAPHY

MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH ANARCHISTS BEGAN EXACTLY THIRTY years ago, during the double crisis of Suez and Hungary in October and November 1956. (At the age of twenty-one, I had just left home and begun my last year at university.) The simultaneous attacks by Britain and France on Egypt and by Soviet Russia on Hungary, which started the general process known as the New Left, also started my personal journey from conventional politics towards anarchism. I took part in some of the demonstrations against the Suez War, and when a letter I wrote about them was published in The Guardian (on Guy Fawkes Day), I was sent a friendly note from Freedom with some recent issues of the paper—an easy and effective way of making new contacts. This was my first introduction to the anarchist movement as a living phenomenon.

I was a fairly typical middle-class recruit to the movement during the late 1950s. I had been brought up (by my mother) as a rather orthodox liberal socialist with strong anti-religious, anti-militarist and anti-statist tendencies, but no systematic ideology or practical experience. In spite of—or because of—an excellent education in history and politics, I knew virtually nothing about anarchism, and virtually everything I did know about it was wrong. I had a grandfather who had once been an active anarchist (Karl Walter, who wrote in Freedom and many other papers and was a British delegate to the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907) and a father who often called himself an anarchist (Grey Walter, the neurologist), but I was no more influenced by them than by having a grandmother who had become a Quaker and was an active pacifist or a stepfather who had been an active Communist and was still a Marxist. It took me a couple of years’ absorption of libertarian literature, involvement in left-wing politics, and resumption of family relationships to make the necessary connections and work out my own position.

I found (and find) most current libertarian writing rather unconvincing; but I remember being impressed by Alan Lovell in New Left Review, Chris Farley in Peace News, and Colin Ward in Freedom. I felt (and feel) much more strongly pushed in a libertarian direction by my personal experience; I was active in the old New Left and the old nuclear disarmament movement, reading papers and books, going to meetings (especially in the Partisan) and on demonstrations (from the Aldermaston March onwards), and discussing politics with everyone I knew. At the end of 1958 I was finally brought into direct contact with anarchists through my father and grandfather, the latter introducing me to Lilian Wolfe. At last the pieces fell into place, and I began to think of myself as an anarchist.

During 1959, I began to visit the Freedom Bookshop regularly and attend London Anarchist Group meetings, to make friends (and enemies) among the anarchists, and to write in anarchist papers—starting with Victor Mayes’s University Libertarian (whose last two issues I helped my grandfather to produce during 1960), but concentrating on the publications of the Freedom Press—using my own name or initials and also an expanding series of pseudonyms. I have now written in Freedom for more than twenty-seven years, working first with Vero Richards and the old editorial group, and then with the protean editorial collective, and becoming more closely involved since 1980. I wrote in Anarchy for more than thirteen years, working first with Colin Ward and then with that even more protean editorial collective until 1974. I have also written in many other anarchist papers, producing hundreds of articles altogether, as well as various leaflets, pamphlets and books (which is what I am concentrating on now). All this time, I have earned my living in demanding editorial jobs, so I have been reluctant to spend too much time on extra editorial work, but I have now been drawn into several editorial collectives from time to time (Freedom and Anarchy, Resistance and Solidarity, Inside Story and Wildcat).

At the same time, I have written hundreds of articles in other papers—liberal and socialist, pacifist and libertarian—and I must have sent several thousand letters to the press over a period of more than thirty years. I have remained active in left-wing politics—especially in the nuclear disarmament movement (being a founding member of the Committee of 100 in 1960 and the London Committee of 100 in 1962, of the Spies for Peace in 1963, and of Peace Anonymous in 1983 and Summit 84 in 1984) and in the wider anti-war movement (involvement with the Vietnam Action Group got me two months’ in prison for my part in the Brighton Church Demonstration of 1966). I have taken part in socialist activity (even working briefly for the Labour Party during the unilateralist phase of 1960-61) and in liberal campaigns (free-thought and civil liberties, capital punishment and prison reform, abortion and euthanasia, obscenity and blasphemy, official secrets and homelessness). I have joined all sorts of demonstrations, and been arrested and imprisoned. I have spoken at all sorts of meetings, and on radio and television. Somehow I have managed to enjoy a busy private life (both my children are strong libertarians), to grow ill and old, then to get better and feel young again.

The Freedom Press has been one of the few fixed points in the revolving world of politics during my adult life, and indeed during my whole life. In fact, I even feel that I can divide the past half-century into five periods which apply equally to my own experience, to the work of the Freedom Press, and to the wider left—a decade of war and despair, a decade of austerity and struggle, a decade of affluence and hope, a decade of confusion and contradiction, and a decade of disillusion and decay. During my own activity in the last three of these decades, I have found that the Freedom Press, with its periodicals and other publications, and the Freedom Bookshop have represented a rare example of persistence and consistency.

Of course, the Freedom Press has frequently been criticized during its second fifty years, just as it was during its first fifty years—but generally for the wrong reasons. Militant anarchists have accused it of being quietist, philosophical anarchists of being adventurist, dogmatic anarchists of being opportunist, pragmatic anarchists of being sectarian, and so on. I have been critical myself, but for different reasons. At times when I have been involved in particular activities, I have found it badly informed, out of touch, and too willing to rely on other papers; and at all times I have found much of the material badly thought out and badly written up. But the quick answer to such criticisms is the old anarchist imperative—if you think something should be done, do it yourself—and this is what I have tried to do.

Anyway, against all such criticisms must be put the facts that for nearly all the past hundred years and for all the past fifty years there has always been at least one regular forum in this country for expressing libertarian opinions and reporting libertarian activities, and that the people producing it have always tried both to give a clear voice to a broad central interpretation of anarchism and to give a fair hearing to all other varieties of anarchism. At most times at least some members of the group have been personally involved in the events they describe and discuss; this has been healthy. At some times the whole group—or at any rate its dominant members—have been particularly committed to various activities or attitudes; this has not been healthy. Contrary to repeated criticisms that it stands too far outside events, its strength is precisely its independence from any single group or aspect of the anarchist movement. This is one reason why it is so irritating but at the same time so important, and also why it has survived when other papers and publishers have not done so.

I wrote for other anarchist papers and publishers before the Freedom Press, I have done so on and off for nearly thirty years, and I shall go on doing so. But I have written far more here than anywhere else, and I shall go on doing so. The reason is not sectarianism or traditionalism, or even personal or political loyalty, but the old virtues of persistence and consistency. The Freedom Press has been working for anarchism longer and better than anyone or anything else, and is still doing the same job after a century. It deserves its success and survival, and therefore gets my support and co-operation.

So where do I stand after what seems like a thirty years’ war? I have become increasingly committed to mainstream anarchism, because it combines my original liberalism and socialism and reconciles the contradiction between individuality and solidarity. But I still consider that, while anarchism may be the truth, it is not the whole truth, and no particular variety of it can claim to be nothing but the truth. We must recognize the value of different roads to freedom and also of differing paths in our own road. We must remember that the end does not justify the means, but that means are ends. We must learn to get on with each other, or we shall never get on at all. What matters in the end is not the anarchist movement, but anarchist movement. This is the direction I have been taking all my life, and I hope to go on doing so for the rest of it. It has been hard work, but also good fun, and even if it hasn’t done much for the world, it has done a lot for me. So I thank Freedom Press for everything it has given to and taken from me. On to the second century.

Originally published in the Freedom Centenary Edition, October 1986.

2
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND TEXTUAL NOTE

MY ESSAY ON NON-VIOLENCE, NON-VIOLENT RESISTANCE: MEN AGAINST WAR, arose not from theoretical speculation but from practical considerations. It was written for an occasion—or rather, a series of occasions—connected with critical periods in the history of the Committee of 100.

When the Committee of 100 was formed, in autumn 1960, I had been involved on the edge of the New Left for four years, of the nuclear disarmament movement for two and a half years, and of the anarchist movement for a year. Like so many other people, I was pushed out of conventional politics by the double stimulus of Hungary and Suez in 1956. I went to meetings and on marches, I listened and talked in places like the Partisan coffee house, I wrote in and helped to produce papers. But none of this was enough. Like so many other people again, I found the Evening Standard report on September 23, 1960, that Bertrand Russell and Michael Scott were organizing mass civil disobedience against nuclear weapons to be the answer to my hopes. I wrote to several papers defending them against the universal barrage of criticism, and on October 4, I had my first letter printed in The Times. An unexpected result was that I was invited to join the Committee of 100, as one of the unknown people brought in to make up the magic number when the supply of well-known people ran out. I was never at all important in the Committee of 100, but it was very important to me.

I attended the inaugural meeting of the Committee of 100 on October 22, 1960, and remained a member until June 1961, when I resigned because of disagreement with its rhetoric and tactics, which worried me from the beginning. But it was the best thing there was, and I continued to go to its public meetings and to go on its demonstrations, so that by the end of 1961 I had been arrested half-a-dozen times. Then I made my contribution to the propaganda, associated with the Committee’s short but significant impact on British politics. I had written about it in Freedom and the London Letter, and on October 6, 1961, I wrote my first article for Peace News, criticizing the over-optimistic reaction to the great Trafalgar Square sit-down of September 17—a criticism which was vindicated by the debacle of the multiple demonstrations of December 9. This was when I began writing the first versions of this essay.

The monthly Anarchy, edited by Colin Ward and published by the Freedom Press, began publication in March 1961. In view of the impact of the Committee of 100 during the next few months, Colin decided to devote two special issues to direct action and disobedience, and in December he asked me to write a long article on each subject, emphasizing the historical and ideological background of the Committee of 100. Meanwhile the bi-monthly New Left Review, which had emerged from the Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner at the beginning of 1960, was suffering a painful transition from the old to the new New Left, from ex-Stalinists to neo-Trotskyists. At the end of 1961, the former group had dissolved but the latter group had not yet crystallized, and a transitional group led by Raphael Samuel was working on a double issue of the paper. In November, Raphael asked me to write a long article on the Committee of 100, emphasizing its historical and ideological background.

So I began preparing all this material at once, trying to address anarchists and other libertarians on one side and Marxists and other socialists on the other. I found little literature on the subject which was both accessible and acceptable, so I started from scratch. I talked to a few people with direct knowledge, such as Michael Randle and April Carter in the Committee of 100, Hugh and Eileen Brock at Peace News, Vernon Richards and Colin Ward at Freedom, and I also read a great many books, pamphlets and papers in the British Museum.

The NLR article was meant to be urgent, so I did it first; but under Raphael’s pressure I had to do it over and over again, and it appeared last. I wrote a first draft in December 1961, a second draft just before Christmas, and a third draft in January 1962; this was drastically abridged in February, and I read proofs in March. Meanwhile, I did the two Anarchy articles. The direct action one was finished at the beginning of February and the disobedience one at the beginning of March; there were no more drafts and no proofs, and each appeared within a month, with few changes and some errors.

“Direct Action and the New Pacifism” was published in Anarchy 13 at the beginning of March, and “Disobedience and the New Pacifism” in Anarchy 14 at the beginning of April 1962. The articles more generally welcomed by both anarchists and pacifists, and had some influence in drawing libertarians and unilateralists together; they also won me the friendship of Colin MacInnes and Alex Comfort. But they were ignored elsewhere.

“Damned Fools in Utopia” was published in New Left Review 13-14 at the beginning of April 1962. (The title expressed two ideas. One was the belief—which I still hold—that the Bomb will one day cause a situation like that which prompted Lord Melbourne’s remark about Catholic Emancipation in 1830: “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass”; the other was the belief—which I also still hold—that it is more realistic to pursue utopia than what Gustav Landauer called “topia.”) The article was generally disliked by socialists, the politest comment coming in NLR 15 (May-June 1962), when Mervyn Jones said that it “compels both respect and irritation in the highest degree, which was no doubt its purpose” (my favorite description of my writing for twenty years!). But it won praise from John Freeman in the New Statesman on April 13, and it also led to my first broadcast. Tony Whitby asked me to provide one minute of voice-over for film of the Wethersfield demonstration in a BBC Gallery programme about the nuclear disarmament movement; it was broadcast on April 12, and my little speech was published in Peace News on April 20. A few weeks later, Alastair Hetherington asked me to write an article on the Committee of 100 for The Guardian, which was published on June 22, 1962.

Meanwhile, the Committee of 100 had expanded and exploded in all directions, the original Committee being superseded by a dozen regional Committees. I attended the inaugural meeting of the London Committee of 100 on April 1, 1962, and remained a member until summer 1965, when I resigned for much the same reasons as before. During its first year I was more active in the movement than at any other time, and I met my wife and most of the people who have been our friends ever since. When the Committee began to disintegrate after the Cuba Crisis of October 1962, we were involved in the developments that led to the Spies for Peace but at the same time my articles were resurrected.

During the long winter of 1962-3, many attempts were made to work out the theory of what had been done in practice during the previous year or two. Private and public meetings were held all over the country to discuss various aspects of non-violence in the context of the achievements of the Committee of 100. The Committee itself, which already had several specialized sub-committees (Legal, Welfare, Industrial, International), established the Schools for Non-violence for those with experience of recent activity to talk to each other and to newcomers. One London group involved in the Schools for Nonviolence, which was based at Ann Davidson’s house in Hampstead and was called Nonviolence 63, decided to produce some publications on the subject. Finding that Anarchy 13 was already out of print, Ann and Dennis Gould suggested reprinting my two Anarchy articles together as a pamphlet; I suggested that I should rewrite them as a single essay, and this was agreed in March 1963.

As I said in the preface, “I have tried to put the two articles together into a single account, and I have also removed some dead wood, corrected some mistakes, and added some now material ...