Chapter 16. IN CONCLUSION: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT

The anarchist movement did not cease circa 1930. Anarchism was to enjoy something of a resurgence in the later 1930s, largely inspired by the activity of the anarchists in Spain during the Civil War and Revolution of 1936–1939. The younger militants of that time, or at least some of them, are still active in the movement, and the events of that time and the years since then are still live issues and matters of polemic. (It would be a brave historian who tried to argue too much with the living, particularly since the tone of voice of history is one which implies that the events it describes are past and done with. My comrades would not relish that.) The anarchists have since shown the same astonishing ability to suddenly come from nowhere when everybody had assumed that they were finished with as they did in the years before World War One, though perhaps on a smaller scale. The movement of the 1930s and 1940s died away. A new movement emerged out of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.) and the Committee of 100 and too dispersed. The student movement of the late 1960s again showed strong libertarian proclivities. And that too seems to have largely disappeared. I do not propose to talk about these movements in this book for the same reason that I do not want to talk about the movement of the late 1930s. A bare mention, however, is sufficient to bear out the general thesis that has emerged throughout the book that the anarchist movement grows in times of popular self-activity, feeds it and feeds off it, and declines when that self-activity declines.

The anarchists have preached direct action, spontaneity and self-activity and evidently grow on what they preach. But they have also been consistent utopians. By that I mean that they have placed the possible forms of a non-authoritarian society at the forefront of their propaganda, desperately concerned to demonstrate their practicality. In times of popular self-activity they seem to be able to convince people. This combination of utopian aspiration and immediate tactical creativeness seems to be distinctively anarchist. Up to now, however, we have stressed the positive aspect, the moments of upsurge and self-confidence. What of the periods in between, the periods of depression and even despair? Periods like 1896–1909 or 1921–1936 seem to have been able to wipe out, almost without trace, movements that two years before looked healthy and even indestructible. So much of the movement seems to have depended on the mood of the moment, on action in the receptive here and now, that when the mood changed the movement collapsed like a house of cards. Of course a few die hards keep up a propaganda; of course people drift off into issue politics, and revolutionary energy is applied to reformist ends. But for the most part the wider sense of possibility is lost. This is a conclusion drawn as much from my own experience of the movement in recent years as it is from my work on the movement historically.

Quite often the lack of organization is blamed by anarchists and others for the anarchist failure to survive beyond periods of great excitement. It is quite true that the more hierarchical political groups and parties have a higher survival rate in times of depression, which has been the subject of some anarchist jealousy. (It is worth pointing out, however, that their ability to level off the troughs means that they level off the peaks too: in periods of intense activity they often act as a brake on events.) Yet when this jealousy in its extreme form inspires anarchists, most un-anarchistically, to form some kind of party structure (as has happened) the result has always been failure. For ‘organization’ in itself is not an answer: the differences between hierarchical groups on the left with their ‘successes’ and anarchist groups with their ‘failures’ is not just a question of hierarchy. Organizations do not exist for the sake of it, they exist to do something. The party structures of the authoritarian left are rehearsals for their version of the future, they are governments in preparation. For the authoritarian left, day-to-day activity and the hoped-for future are linked in the actual form of the party. Their strategic aim is the growth in size and influence of the party, an aim quite consistent with their eventual goal of seizing power. For anarchists such a logic of development is the grossest contradiction.

As we have seen, the anarchists in England have paid for the gap between their day-to-day activities and their utopian aspirations. This gap consists basically of a lack of strategy, a lack of sense of how various activities fit together to form a whole, a lack of ability to assess a general situation and initiate a general project which is consistent with the anarchist utopia, and which is not only consistent with anarchist tactics but inspires them. Such general anarchist projects have existed, perhaps the best examples being the anarcho-syndicalist trades unions of Spain and France. Leaving aside questions that have been raised as to bureaucratic developments within them, it is clear that daily bread and butter questions were solved with tactics derived from anarchist politics. Their organizational structures were decentralized, encouraging local initiative, yet coordinated on a national scale.

The anarchist movement in England has shown itself capable of a progression of initiatives taken according to circumstance. Take, for example, the beginnings of the squatters’ movement in London. Here a group of anarchists, after a campaign over conditions in a hostel for the homeless, cast around for a solution for these people’s housing problem. A campaign was started which first demonstrated against long-term empty housing, progressed to symbolic occupations of empty property and finally moved homeless families into houses. They then fought the local Borough Council to a standstill. This, unfortunately, was as far as advanced thinking seems to have gone, because splits developed as to whether confrontation or cooperation with local councils was the better policy. Nevertheless their campaign was directly responsible for inspiring large numbers of homeless or badly housed people to do likewise to the tune of some 20,000 properties in London alone. For all that, the squatters’ movement as a whole is without a strategy for the future and will degenerate unless some serious thought — and action — is taken. Another significant step has been taken in the shape of projects designed to ‘serve the struggle’ (if Chairman Mao is not too out of place here). Here the development of printing facilities, local newspapers, meeting room facilities, information services, etc. are seen as part of a coherent whole which expedites local struggles without attempting to control them.

Yet this kind of activity has not developed beyond such linked tactics. They are an advance upon sporadic one-off actions, but they do not begin to develop a wider strategy and rely too much on the vulnerable activity of a few people. Meanwhile the mass of the people work at boring, frustrating jobs, producing shoddy and often useless things. They live in inhuman housing in an increasingly alienated environment. The decisions that control their lives are made by an elite without consultation or control, except of the most symbolic kind. And it is only when anarchist strategies develop that move from pin prick defiance and piecemeal defense to confront and change all this that the anarchist movement will make history instead of being dependent on it. The ebb and flow of self-activity will ensure that the anarchists are among those “ye have always with you, both in sickness and in health.” But only if the British anarchist movement goes beyond the involvement with the immediate it has been so good at will it escape the fate its history seems to have determined for it.