Reviews by Peter Marshall of Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Talking Anarchy by Colin Ward and Granny Made Me an Anarchist by Stuart Christie, from The Guardian, Saturday April 9, 2005
With a knapsack full of bombs
Can violence ever be justified? Peter Marshall finds the answers in studies of anarchism by Colin Ward, David Goodway and Stuart Christie
Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
by Colin Ward
199pp, Oxford, £6.99
by Colin Ward and David Goodway
149pp, Five Leaves, £6.99
Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me
by Stuart Christie
423pp, Scribner, £10.99
Anarchy is chaos, anarchy is terror, anarchy is nihilism. This is the widely held view that these lively and thought-provoking books should help to dispel. In fact, far from being nihilistic, anarchism has a rich body of constructive ideas and values that have attracted writers and thinkers as diverse as Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Wilde, Tolstoy, Goldman, Read and Gandhi.
With a knapsack full of bombs
Can violence ever be justified? Peter Marshall finds the answers in studies of anarchism by Colin Ward, David Goodway and Stuart Christie
Saturday April 9, 2005
The Guardian
Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
by Colin Ward
199pp, Oxford, £6.99
Talking Anarchy
by Colin Ward and David Goodway
149pp, Five Leaves, £6.99
Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me
by Stuart Christie
423pp, Scribner, £10.99
Anarchy is chaos, anarchy is terror, anarchy is nihilism. This is the widely held view that these lively and thought-provoking books should help to dispel. In fact, far from being nihilistic, anarchism has a rich body of constructive ideas and values that have attracted writers and thinkers as diverse as Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Wilde, Tolstoy, Goldman, Read and Gandhi.
Article continues
It is true that Bakunin argued in the 19th century that it is necessary to destroy in order to build, and that a few desperados calling themselves anarchists were involved in a spate of assassinations and bombings at the turn of the 20th century, but their outrages were fleabites compared with those perpetrated by monarchists, nationalists and, above all, state-sponsored terrorists. As anarchists have long pointed out, it is the state that is the principal cause of violence in the world.
In Greek, anarchy means "without a ruler". It is clearly in the interests of those in power to argue that without their rule chaos will prevail. Yet for most of their history humans have lived cooperative and peaceful lives without the interference of rulers, generals and politicians. As Godwin long ago observed, the alleged justification for government is to prevent insecurity, but in reality it has only perpetuated inequality and led to countless horrors of violence. By contrast, civil society is invariably a blessing.
These three books reflect two faces of British anarchism in the second half of the 20th century and show its relevance to the 21st. Both Colin Ward and Stuart Christie left school young and are largely self-taught, but the comparison ends there. Ward was a child of the 1940s, the son of an Essex schoolteacher. As he makes clear in the wide-ranging Talking Anarchy with the historian David Goodway, it was Ward's experience as a soldier in Scotland during the second world war and his association with Freedom Press that led him to anarchism. He worked subsequently in architecture and town planning, edited the journal Anarchy and was a regular fifth columnist on New Society. In a previous series of incisive books, covering such topics as schooling, transport and allotments, he has quietly shown the constructive side of what he calls "anarchist applications".
These concerns come through in his excellent introduction to Anarchism. Despite a history of defeat, he insists that it "continually re-emerges in a new guise or in a new country". He argues that the desire of the libertarian right "to roll back the frontiers of the state" is an excuse to erode community services and open up the market for exploitation: "Freedom for the pike means death for the minnow." At the end, he makes a strong case for a "Europe of regions" based on the twin pillars of federalism and decentralisation.
Unlike Ward, Stuart Christie is a man of the 1960s who grew up as a Presbytarian in a working-class district of Glasgow. Radical miners, fiery open-air speakers, disillusion with the Labour party, and the free-thinking nature of his granny led him to anarchism. "If you want something doing," she used to say, "do it yourself." This first part of his autobiography, originally self-published, offers fascinating insights into the mind of an angry young man who was thrown into prison twice. The first occasion was in Spain when he was arrested in 1964 at the age of 18 for carrying plastic explosives in his knapsack as part of a plot to blow up Franco. He admits that Franco's "unhindered existence became the dominant obsession in my life". Christie should have been garrotted, but because of the public outcry, which included the support of Jean-Paul Sartre, he was jailed for three years.
The second imprisonment was in 1972 when he was arrested - by false association - with members of the Angry Brigade who had blown up several London embassies and military targets. Christie was the only one arrested to be acquitted by jury.
Christie's entertaining autobiography shows an idealistic youth caught up in social movements and events way beyond his control. He adroitly interweaves his own personal story with developments on the left. A thread that runs throughout is a concern with the issue of violence. Can it ever be justified? Yes, he suggests, when there is no other alternative to opposing tyrants like Franco who massacre their opponents. But he observes that violence has no part in promoting anarchism since one of its main planks is "the removal of coercion and violence from all human relations".
For those unfamiliar with anarchism, these books are a good start. Christie shows vividly what it is like to be an anarchist activist harassed constantly by the agents of the state. Ward's work is a more thoughtful account of the principal concerns of anarchism and its relevance to the new millennium. In their different ways, they show that there is a third way between the Scylla of free-market capitalism and the Charybdis of authoritarian socialism.
· Peter Marshall's Demanding the Impossible is published by Fontana.
From http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1455060,00.html
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