Talking Anarchy

Colin Ward, David Goodway

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781604869057
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Of all political views, anarchism is the most ill-represented. For more than thirty years, in over thirty books, Colin Ward patiently explained anarchist solutions to everything from vandalism to climate change—and celebrated unofficial uses of the landscape as commons, from holiday camps to squatter communities. Ward was an anarchist journalist and editor for almost sixty years, most famously editing the journal Anarchy. He was also a columnist for New Statesman, New Society, Freedom, and Town and Country Planning.

In Talking Anarchy, Colin Ward discusses with David Goodway the ups and downs of the anarchist movement during the last century, including the many famous characters who were anarchists, or associated with the movement, including Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Marie Louise Berneri, Paul Goodman, Noam Chomsky, and George Orwell.

TALKING ANARCHY

First, and most obviously, tell me how you became an anarchist

I came from a Labour Party family in one of the eastern suburbs of London and I knew about the existence of anarchism because of the Spanish war. My father was the youngest of a family of ten children from the East India Dock Road, where his father was described as a “general dealer.” In his early teens he became a “pupil teacher” at the school he attended and subsequently won a place at a teacher-training college. After the First World War, while teaching in the London docklands, he earned a degree in geography at the London School of Economics, one of the few institutions catering for that kind of part-time study. My mother was the daughter of a carpenter from the same area of London.

I passed what was known as the scholarship examination to the local high school, but left at the end of the fourth year at fifteen in 1939. I must have been a disappointment to my parents, and I am sure that my father felt that, if I was not capable of the sustained effort that he had imposed on himself, there was no point in pushing me to succeed. One of my big interests as a boy was in printing (of the now obsolete kind, with moveable metal type). I bought an old treadle-operated press, and a friend of my brother who worked for a newspaper used to bring home parcels of old type for me. Later, when I wanted to show him the results of his kindness, I learned that he had been killed in an air raid.

I failed to find a job in the printing trade, but my third job, in 1941, was working on the drawing board for an elderly architect whose own history went back to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1890s. His own work had dwindled to temporary repairs to factories in the East End of London, very familiar to me, which had been destroyed in the blitz of September 1940.

But, like any young worker, in the centre of London for the first time, I spent a lot of time exploring the city itself, and remember discovering the Socialist Book Centre in Essex Street, off the Strand, run by Orwell’s friend Jon Kimche. It was there that I discovered Orwell’s writings, hard to find elsewhere, and journals like Tribune and the New Leader.

Like any other eighteen-year-old (for I knew no war-resisters), I was conscripted into the army in 1942 and, because of my occupation, was automatically sent to join the Royal Engineers. I was taught how to build bridges and how to make explosions, but there must have been a sudden shortage of draughtsmen because, in the extraordinary way that military strategy works, I was sent to the Army School of Hygiene, to make large-scale drawings of latrines and of deadly insects, as a guide to camp builders and sanitary engineers.

Then, in the autumn of 1943, the same vagaries of military strategy sent me to Glasgow in Scotland, to work in a requisitioned mansion in Park Terrace with a wonderful panorama of the smoky city below us, where heavy industry was booming for the first time since the First World War. My Sundays were free, and I would spend them exploring the city, and its wonderful, free, and open-on-Sundays Mitchell Library, until it was time to hear the open-air political orators. Glasgow had a long tradition of political oratory, and at this time anarchism was represented by two remarkably witty and sardonic speakers, Eddie Shaw and Jimmie Dick. They handed out leaflets directing us to the anarchist bookshop in George Street and the nearby meeting room above the Hangman’s Rest pub in Wilson Street.

They were working men, weren’t they, and, ideologically, managed to combine individualism and syndicalism?

Yes, you are right. Both the propagandists I mentioned linked the most apparently incompatible versions of anarchism. But for me, the most impressive of the Glasgow anarchists was Frank Leech. He was an Irishman, not from Ireland, but from Lancashire in England, a Navy boxing champion in the First World War. He had a general shop in one of the housing estates on the fringe of the city. There he had housed refugees from Germany and from Spain, and operated a printing press. When I told him about the material from official American publications that I had read in the Mitchell Library describing plans for postwar Europe, he urged me to put it together in articles for the London publication War Commentary—for Anarchism, and to post them to Mrs. M.L. Richards. This I did, and the material appeared in, I think, December 1943.

By that time Frank Leech was in trouble with the law and was anxious to make propaganda out of staging a hunger strike in Barlinnie Prison. He was a much-loved character, and his friends, worried about his health, urged me to attempt to visit him at the prison to persuade him to abandon his hunger strike. They thought that a soldier in uniform, with a London rather than a Glasgow accent, would be more likely to be admitted by the prison governor. My visit to the prison was evidently noted, because immediately afterwards I was posted by the army to a maintenance unit in the Orkney and Shetland Islands at the extreme North-East of Scotland.

There is an irony here. My suspected unreliability kept me in safety for the rest of the war, while many other conscripts of my generation died in forgotten and meaningless battles in South-East Asia.

But I had been won for anarchism by the busy self-educated Glasgow propagandists, who had put me in touch with their bookshop, selling the range of available anarchist literature and, by post, with the Freedom Press Bookshop in London.

Why did anarchism so appeal, at a time when enthusiasm for Soviet Communism was at its zenith?

I am not quite sure how I managed not to be swept up into the Stalin-worship that infected the British Left. But the literature on sale at the anarchist bookshop in Glasgow included the writings of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Frank Leech himself printed and published Emma Goldman’s pamphlet Trotsky Protests Too Much. I was influenced very early by the writings of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. Lilian Wolfe, a veteran from earlier years of Freedom Press, put me on her mailing list for copies of several dissident journals, like for example, Dwight Macdonald’s Politics from 1944, whose common factor was hostility to the blanket Stalinism of the regular left-wing press. Also in 1944, Freedom Press first published Marie Louise Berneri’s book Workers in Stalin’s Russia, reprinting several times in the postwar years. It argued that the fundamental test of any political regime was “How do the workers fare under it?” and that, by this test, the Soviet regime was a disaster, with the same extremes of wealth and poverty as the capitalist world. It appeared at a time when there was a tacit agreement in the British press not to criticise the Soviet Union. I am certain that later generations will never be able to comprehend how deeply Marxist and Stalinist ideas had circumscribed the assumptions of the British and Western European intelligentsia.

How would you account for this quasi-religious infatuation?

It really was like a religious conversion for many people: the search for ultimate certainties. Probably it was Orwell who described it as “transferred patriotism,” meaning that people who had rejected unconditional loyalty to the country of their birth, applied it, like an adhesive plaster, to a different country. You could see this in the postwar decades, where British Marxists, prised away from Stalin-worship, applied their loyalty to Tito’s Yugoslavia, and when disillusioned there, immediately shifted it to Castro’s Cuba. I know of no weapon against this, except ridicule.

How do you define anarchism? Are you a socialist? Does your anarchism include that of the syndicalists, individualists, pacifists, and so on?

To define anarchism I always adopt the opening words of the article on anarchism that Kropotkin wrote for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1905, where he explains that it is “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilised being.”

I am in complete agreement with the definition that Kropotkin expands from this preliminary statement. This means that I am, by definition, a socialist or what Kropotkin would have called an anarchist communist. But equally, I would always stress the common ground between people who have arrived at anarchist attitudes from different starting points. I think that the Freedom Press Group of the wartime years brought together people from all the tendencies you mention, and I think that this was characteristic of the people connected with Freedom all though its history.

I actually mistrust those anarchists who spend their time demolishing the contentions of another anarchist faction.

I certainly take your point, yet I must press you on this issue. I don’t see any reference to socialism—the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange—in the definition you have adopted from Kropotkin.

That is because most of the varieties of socialism that we know about involve the activities of central or local government. But the co-operative movement around the world illustrates a variety of forms of common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, without dependence on the state.

Of course, yet I consider Kropotkin’s definition to be of anarchism only, and not of socialism—even if it may have socialist implications. How do you, personally, relate to syndicalism?

Workers’ control of industrial production seems to me to be the only approach compatible with anarchism, so I am automatically a supporter of syndicalist aims. But on the other hand, I have frequently seen the attempts by a militant minority to push minor disputes into an ultimate struggle, inevitably losing majority support and causing ordinary workers to fear militancy. Syndicalists, just like novelists and social critics, tended to exaggerate the extent to which manufacturing industry was dominated by vast Ford-type factories, organized with military precision, when, as Kropotkin stressed a hundred years ago, the typical workplace is a small workshop. Probably, when syndicalists succeed in abandoning historical romanticism, they will be exploiting the new communications technology to fight international capitalism on an international scale.

And individualism?

I scarcely need to tell you that the most individualistic people I have known have been people who rejected ideologies of individualism, and firmly believed in communist anarchism. I don’t say this as a joke but as an everyday observation.

And pacifism?

Once again, I have watched different generations of anarchists adopting attitudes on violence and non-violence. I remember a delightful old Irish anarchist from many years ago, Matt Kavanagh, who used to say (with reference to people known to you and me) “The trouble with pacifists is that they’ll punch you on the nose, without a second thought!” But for people who see modern pacifism as a naïve or simplistic approach, I would recommend the book by my friend Michael Randle, on Civil Resistance (London: Fontana, 1994), discussing the potentialities and the limitations of pacifist action.

I am sure that George Orwell, who devoted plenty of time in the Second World War to attacking the pacifist standpoint of his friends like Alex Comfort and George Woodcock, observed, in spite of this, that the people who most readily attack the ideology of non-violence are those with little experience of the ugliness, squalidness, and arbitrary nature of violence.

For all your adult life you have been associated with the Freedom Press in London. Would you tell me something of its history?

The first issue of Freedom was produced in October 1886 by a remarkable woman, Charlotte Wilson, who had corresponded with Kropotkin and his wife, Sophie, urging them to come to England after his release from prison in France in January 1886. His fame and her organizational ability resulted in a journal based on the model of Kropotkin’s experience with Le Révolté from Geneva in 1878 and La Révolte in Paris in 1885.

The paper they started survived despite police raids and imprisonments in the First World War until, in 1928, Tom Keell, who had been the self-effacing editor since 1907, retired from London with his companion Lilian Wolfe to Whiteway Colony, a Tolstoyan commune in the West of England, that had been a refuge for anarchists since it was founded in 1898.

While issuing a Freedom Bulletin for the surviving subscribers, Keell was watching for signs of a renewal of anarchist propaganda. This came in 1936 when he was approached by Vernon Richards, the son of a veteran London Italian anarchist, Emidio Recchioni (1864–1934), who had a famous grocery shop, “King Bomba,” at 37 Old Compton Street in Soho. Vero, his original name which all his friends used, started a journal, Free Italy, superseded after the events of July 1936 by Spain and the World, and Tom Keell rejoiced that there was a new home for the ideas and the old pamphlets he was storing. As the struggle in Spain dwindled to its end in 1939, the journal’s name was changed, first to Revolt! and then to War Commentary: for Anarchism, its title reverting to Freedom in 1945. In 1943, Lilian Wolfe, who had been running a food shop in Stroud, Gloucestershire, abandoned it at the age of sixty-seven, in order to manage the office of Freedom Press in London. She died at ninety-eight in 1974, and Nicolas Walter explained how “For more than twenty-five years Lilian Wolfe was the centre of the administration of Freedom Press at its various premises in London. She was the person on whom every organization depends—the completely reliable worker who runs the office, opening and closing the shop, answering the telephone and the post, doing accounts and keeping people in touch. She maintained personal contact with the thousands of people who read the paper …” This was certainly true in my case. When I wrote, obscurely, from a military address, she would reply and would send me copies of journals from overseas, like La Protesta from Buenos Aires and L’Adunata from New York.

Am I right in thinking, however, that you first actually met the Freedom Press Group when they were in the dock at the Central Criminal Court in London, and you were in the witness box as a witness for the prosecution?

Yes, this is true. Of all the European countries involved in the Second World War, Britain was the one in which it was easiest for opponents of the war to survive. When, after the war I met anarchists from France, the Netherlands, and Italy, they expressed amazement at the tolerance, in Britain, of dissent. As someone who had submitted to conscription into the army, I had no experience of this, although I later met people whose evasion of military service resulted in continual persecution and imprisonment. There were few journals who were totally opposed to the war aims of all the combatant nations, so War Commentary was an obvious candidate for the attention of the Special Branch (the name then given to the British Government’s secret police), but it was not until the last year of the war that serious persecution began.

In November 1944, John Olday, the paper’s cartoonist, was arrested and, after a protracted trial, was sent to prison for twelve months for “stealing by finding an identity card.” He declined to give evidence and consequently had to be imprisoned on a technicality. A reader called T.W. Brown had been jailed earlier for distributing “seditious” leaflets. When he was sentenced at the Central Criminal Court, the government prosecutor had drawn attention to the fact that his penalty could have been fourteen years.

On 12 December 1944, officers of the Special Branch raided the Freedom Press office and the homes of editors and sympathisers. They were acting under Defence Regulation 38b, which declared that “no person ...