Some conclusions

on Anarchism

(These are the final paragraphs of George Woodcock's Anarchism published this month by Penguin Books, now available from Freedom Bookshop at 8s. including postage.)

If human values are to survive, a counter-ideal must be posed to the totalitarian goal of a uniform world, and that counter-ideal exists precisely in the vision of pure liberty that has inspired the anarchist and near-anarchist writers from Winstanley in the 17th century. Obviously it is not immediately realizable, and, since it is an ideal, it will probably never be realized. But the very presence of such a concept of pure liberty can help us to judge our condition and see our aims; it can help us to safeguard what liberties we still retain against the further encroachments of the centralizing state; it can help us to conserve and even enlarge those areas in which personal values still operate; it can help in the urgent task of mere survival, of living out the critical decades ahead until the movement of world centralization loses its impetus like all historical movements, and the moral forces that depend on individual choice and judgment can reassert themselves in the midst of its corruption.

The anarchist ideal may best fulfil this purpose, as its first exponents would have agreed, by the impact of its truths on receptive minds rather than by the re-creation of obsolete forms of organization or by the imitation of insurrectional methods that failed even in the past. The heritage that anarchism has left to the modern world is to be found in a few inspiring lives of self-sacrifice and devotion like those of Malatesta and Louise Michel, but most of all in the incitement to return to a moral and natural view of society which we find in the writings of Godwin and Tolstoy, of Proudhon and Kropotkin, and in the stimulation such writers give to that very taste for free choice and free judgment which modern society has so insidiously induced the majority of men to barter for material goods and the illusion of security. The great anarchists call on us to stand on our own moral feet like a generation of princes, to become aware of justice as an inner fire, and to learn that the still, small voices of our own hearts speak more truly than the choruses of propaganda that daily assault our outer ears.

"Look into the depths of your own beings", said Peter Arshinov, the friend of Makhno. "Seek out the truth and realize it yourselves. You will find it nowhere else." In this insistence that freedom and moral self-realization are interdependent, and one cannot live without the other, lies the ultimate lesson of true anarchism.

Letter to Readers • . .

{continued from inside front cover)

ANARCHY is not a literary magazine, and we resolutely decline to publish "creative writing" (by what possible criterion could you select poems and stories for a propagandist monthly of only 32 small pages?), but it is worth finding room for articles on writers whose work has anarchist implications, and among these, we shall have in the next few months Charles Radclifte on Kenneth Patchen and Dachine Rainer on E. E. Cummings.

We also want to publish symposia on Anarchism and Indian Thought and Anarchism and Greek Thought, and another idea worth trying is a study of a particular city—we thought of Nottingham.

Topics on which issues of ANARCHY have long been projected are Strikes, Science Fiction, Transport, problems of industrial and workers' control, studies of particular industries, and of the implications for anarchists of political theories about pressure groups.

Our biggest need, as always, is more readers and more distributors. We want, in the Autumn, to have an agent in every university, and we want agents too in colleges of technology and training colleges. Wherever ideas are disseminated we want anarchist ideas to be on the agenda.

Other issues of ANARCHY

1. Sex-and-Violence; Galbraith; the New Wave, Education,

2. Workers' Control.

3. What does anarchism mean today?; Africa; the Long Revolution;

4. De-instituttonalisation; Conflicting strains in anarchism.

5. 1936: the Spanish Revolution.

6. Anarchy and the Cinema.

(out of print)

7. Adventure Playgrounds.

8. Anarchists and Fabians; Action Anthropology; Eroding Capitalism;

9. Prison.

10. Sillitoe's Key to the Door; Maclnnes on Crime; Augustus John's Utopia; Committee of 100

11. Paul Goodman; Neill on Education; the Character-Builders.

12. Who are the anarchists?

13. Direct Action.

(out of print)

14. Disobedience.

15. The work of David Wills

16. Ethics of anarchism; Africa; Anthropology; Poetry of Dissent.

17. Towards a lumpenproletariat: Education vs. the working class; Freedom of access; Benevolent bureaucracy; CD and CND.

18. Comprehensive Schools.

19. Theatre: anger and anarchy.

20. Non-violence as a reading of history; Freud, anarchism and experiments in living.

21. Secondary modern

22. Cranston's Dialogue on anarchy.

23. Housing; Squatters; Do it yourself.

24. The Community of Scholars

25. Technology, science, anarchism.

26. CND; Salesmanship; Thoreau.

27. Talking about youth.

28. The future of anarchism.

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