“Like a seed beneath the snow, with the power to push back.” Why we need Colin Ward’s gentle anarchism again
Colin Ward
The “A”-word - yes alternative, but also anarchism - keeps opening up before us, as a tradition and theory of power that actually helps communities to make better decisions about the power and resources they need.
To distinguish against the moustache-twirled stereotypes, we have often given voice to the “social anarchist” tradition of the American activist Murray Bookchin in these pages, as well as other self-identified as anarchists (see this keyword search for our archive).
But we are going to start including someone who, in the UK context, is a massive resource for localist, autonomous action, and whose time (amidst the mutual aids incited by Covid) is surely back. That’s the anarchist writer and activist Colin Ward.
We have to start embarking on our own Ward reading (and looking at this embedded tweet and its thread, we see that some of our peers already are - it’s Ward’s Anarchy In Action on Immy’s lap), but to open up this headspace we’re going to collage together some excerpts from pieces out on the web, along with links.
We invite you to make your own connections, and if you’re well-versed in Ward’s work, to respond in comments below.
The Wikipedia entry kicks things off:
LIFE
Ward was born in Wanstead, Essex. He became an anarchist while in the British Army during World War II. As a subscriber to War Commentary, the war-time equivalent of Freedom, he was called in 1945 from Orkney, where he was serving, to give evidence at the London trial of the editors for publishing an article allegedly intended to seduce soldiers from their duty or allegiance.
Ward robustly repudiated any seduction, but the three editors (Philip Sansom, Vernon Richards and John Hewetson) were convicted and sentenced to nine months imprisonment.
He was an editor of the British anarchist newspaper Freedom from 1947 to 1960, and the founder and editor of the monthly anarchist journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970.
From 1952 to 1961, Ward worked as an architect. In 1971, he became the Education Officer for the Town and Country Planning Association. He published widely on education, architecture and town planning. His most influential book was The Child in the City (1978), about children's street culture. From 1995 to 1996, Ward was Centennial Professor of Housing and Social Policy at the London School of Economics.
In 2001, Ward was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University.
THOUGHT
Ward's philosophy aimed at removing authoritarian forms of social organisation and replacing them with self-managed, non-hierarchical forms. This is based upon the principle that, as Ward put it, "in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop".
He particularly admired the Swiss system of direct democracy and cantons whereby each canton is run by its members who have control on the laws placed upon them, although he disapproved of many the policies this system enacted.
"I believe that the social ideas of anarchism: autonomous groups, spontaneous order, workers' control, the federative principle, add up to a coherent theory of social organisation which is a valid and realistic alternative to the authoritarian, hierarchical and institutional social philosophy which we see in application all around us.
“Man will be compelled, Kropotkin declared, 'to find new forms of organisation for the social functions which the State fulfils through the bureaucracy' and he insisted that 'as long as this is not done nothing will be done. I think we have discovered what these new forms of organisation should be. We have now to make the opportunities for putting them into practice".
Anarchism for Ward is "a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society".
In contrast to many anarchist philosophers and practitioners, Ward holds that "anarchism in all its guises is an assertion of human dignity and responsibility. It is not a programme for political change but an act of social self-determination".
Interested already? Jumping into the archive, we find this overview on Ward from Paul Barker in Prospect magazine, 1999:
Colin Ward is the anarchist as optimist. The anarchist who seeks out corners of self-help and mutual aid in the here and now, and tries to help it evolve into something more valuable.
He has unlikely admirers. In the Times Literary Supplement, Ferdinand Mount called him “the indispensable anarchist.” The Spectator once profiled him as an unacknowledged hero of our time. He has written, most often about architecture and planning, and the destructive impact that grandiose, centralised schemes have on individual happiness.
Essex-born (in 1924), he admires the untidy entrepreneurship of the people who built themselves pre-war shanty towns such as Jaywick Sands, near Clacton. His affectionate history of such places is called Arcadia for All. Long out of print, it should be re-published and made required reading for our new generation of planners who, once again, seem to specialise in knowing what is best for other people.
But his writings about the native vigour of shanty towns (in Britain or the third world), or about the self-help merits of squatter movements, have always been a parable of how the whole of life could be made better. They are underpinned by an unhysterical opposition to the workings of the state, whether in national or local form.
In 1987, he wrote of the “sinister alliance of Fabians and Marxists, both of whom believed implicitly in the state, and assumed they would be the particular elite in control of it.” He was just as hostile to bureaucrats who had an “undisguised contempt for the way ordinary people organised anything.”
One of Ward’s own heroes, Alexander Herzen, wrote: “A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception.” An anarchism which takes this as its slogan is more British than Russian. Like the heretical Welsh monk, Pelagius, Ward adheres to the appealing creed that good works-and not only membership of some tight-knit group of the saved-are the path to paradise.
In response to Immy’s tweet, the philosopher Roman Krznaric posted his library of Ward books, and an obituary he had written:
…Ward came from a different anarchist tradition, one which saw social change emerging not from violence and revolution, but from expanding social cooperation and mutual aid in everyday life. His writings celebrated worker cooperatives, tenant housing associations, allotment holders, children’s adventure playgrounds, Friendly Societies and organisations like the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
This is where he saw ‘anarchy in action’ – people organising themselves on a voluntary, non-hierarchical and decentralised basis – a social model reflecting the anarchism of one of Colin’s major influences, the Russian writer and geographer Peter Kropotkin.
Roman’s bookshelf
Colin believed that an anarchist society was not an imagined future state, but rather something that existed in the here and now, all around us. It was a latent force, ‘like a seed beneath the snow’ as he used to say, that had the power to push back the boundaries of the centralised state and the capitalist system.
Colin was fond of quoting the early-twentieth century German anarchist Gustav Landauer, who wrote:
The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.
Here was the idea that social change was not about new laws, governments, or policies, but about creating a revolution of human relationships from the bottom up, and shifting the way individuals treated one another. It was an approach that had a profound impact on my own thinking, drawing me away from my early interest in traditional party politics and state power (I used to be a university politics lecturer) and towards developing my ideas about empathy as a force for social change.
Colin’s writings on the social philosophy of Martin Buber in his book Influences (1991) introduced me to another thinker who has deeply shaped my beliefs about the power of empathy.
In the true anarchist spirit, we finally share with you some freely available texts of Ward’s from The Anarchist Library. But there is a clear opportunity for a publisher to recover and reprint many of Ward’s books. We feel that his interests, and his friendly, human-centric, highly localist tone, make Ward ripe for this Covid recovery moment.