Revolution and white bikes – John Schubert

One of the problems which faces anarchists, or at least, which faces those anarchists who really want to change the authoritarian structure of the society in which we live, is that of being an apparently permanent and minute minority. What exactly do you do in such circumstances? The nineteenth-century anarchists, like the adherents of most other ideologies of the time, thought that "the day" was imminent, and that popular revolutions would usher in the society envisaged by their particular panacea. But in our particular time and place, to anticipate that kind of revolution, however much we may think it desirable, indicates a certain lack of contact with social and political realities. It is an article of faith, like the Second Coming for Christians, or the Withering Away of the State for Marxists rather than a reasonable prediction of what is likely to happen.

On a personal level we all have our own solutions to this difference between "ought" and "is", but what kind of social action do we take? Far and away the most significant answers to this question to emerge in the anarchist movements of Western Europe, have been the Committee of 100 in Britain and the Provo movement in Holland. The significance for anarchists of the Committee of 100 and the lessons of its rise and decline have been discussed at length in ANARCHY, and ever since hearing about the "White Bikes", we had been planning to have an issue of this journal about Provo. But events caught up with us, and the riots in Amsterdam on June 13th to 16th made front page news all over the world while bewildering Provo's sympathisers. The documents, manifestos and impressions gathered together in this issue may not change your attitude to the Provo movement, but will probably make it more explicable. But not altogether so. What about Roel van Duyn's manifesto from the first issue of Provo, with its mixture of anarchism and nihilism and flamboyant nonsense? What about the moral issue raised by Charles Radcliffe?

Provo is obviously a number of quite different trends of discontent, rather than one movement. This is perfectly explicable if you think of the variety of factions in the Committee of 100 or in the ban-the-bomb movement generally, or of the head-shakings and heart-searchings displayed in the columns of FREEDOM and Peace News each year after the Aldermaston March. When Bernhard de Vries talked in London about Provo he remarked that "It appears from the outside to be a jolly crowd of like-minded souls, but to insiders it is a heterogeneous collection with at least four types of people in it." These he categorised as

(1) the artists, the people who organised Happenings. "Art and authority have always been enemies, and because of the attitude of the police, these art-orientated happenings have turned into political happenings."
(2) Beatniks and hipsters of various types, "self-confessed escapists, seeking the means to their own personal world".
(3) Thinkers and philosophers, like the group around the publication Provo.
(4) Activists, the direct action Provos, organising demonstrations, sit-downs, teach-ins, platform. discussions and legal and illegal activities.

Many Provos, de Vries remarked, belong to more than one of these categories. But it is not surprising that a common and consistent "line" has not emerged from them. The situation is much the same as it was in the Committee of 100, in which, just as Irene van de Weetering explained last month about Provo, "When someone doesn't agree with a plan he doesn't take part."

Of the various Provo projects and plans, by far the most interesting and creative so far has been the White Bikes scheme. The first account of this that we read, in FREEDOM, described it as a protest against "the tyranny of car traffic" in Amsterdam, and went on,

"Thirty comrades painted their bicycles white and let it be known that anybody can use them. All they asked was that people should leave the bicycles in the street after they finished their journey for use by the next person. This idea spread very quickly until the bicycle manufacturers, the insurance companies and the police stepped in. The police confiscated the bicycles under the pretext that they were `liable to be stolen'."

But the project was more subtle than this. Barnaby Martin explained in a letter to Peace News:

"The bike scheme is perhaps the most constructive part of the Provos' demonstrations, in which they sought to clarify the results of attempts to improve human relationships through law. Bicycles are far more numerous in Amsterdam than in London, and closer to the hearts of the people. There is a law which says that if you leave your bicycle on the street, you must lock it. The reason is probably quite genuine on the part of the police—'we have to spend a lot of time tracking down people's stolen bicycles and therefore we must force people to protect their machines so as to save our time and public expense.' Very reasonable in its context; but the context is not a loving one,

"The result is that one must assume that others will steal one's bike; it is illegal to trust your fellow men (even though you know that this trust will sometimes be broken), By declaring that their bicycles would be left unlocked, the Provos provocatively asserted their belief in founding social relationships on trust and responsibility, and by painting their machines distinctively, told police and potential thieves alike where their principles lay.

"I don't think the idea of letting these bikes be used generally will come into practice, until perhaps the number of white bicycles is much larger. But clearly if a white bicycle is 'stolen', the Provos will not call on the police to institute a search that may end, not so much with the finding of a bicycle, but with the diminution of human personality in court and, perhaps, in prison."

The White Bikes project is thus a "happening" or improvised drama or a morality play, acted out in the streets of Amsterdam to inculcate a moral lesson, with a beautiful economy of means. But it is also a practical solution to an existing problem. Amsterdam is a beautiful city which is being destroyed by private motor transport—just as London and New York are. As Professor Buchanan says, "It is not a traffic problem we are faced with, as much as a social situation." And the White Bikes plan is exactly the kind of campaign for citizen action "to defend the city against erosion by automobiles" that Robert Swann recommended in his article "Direct Action and the Urban Environment" in ANARCHY 41.

Here, at least, the Provos have something to teach us, The answer to the question of what can a handful of people with revolutionary ideas do in a profoundly non-revolutionary situation, is to find imaginative direct action solutions to immediate, close at hand, problems of daily life. Paul Goodman, whose thinking is in this respect very much like that of the Provos, says that "on problems great and small, I try to think up direct expedients that do not follow the usual procedures". For as David Wieck put it, in ANARCHY 13:

"Proceeding with the belief that in every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of some direct action on some level of generality, we may discover much that has been unrecognised, and the importance of much that has been under-rated. So politicalised is our thinking, so focused to the motions of governmental institutions, that the effects of direct action to modify one's environment are unexplored. The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being a free man, prepared to live responsibly in a free society. Saying this, one recognises that just this moment, just this issue, is not likely to be the occasion when we all come of age. All true. The question is, when will we begin?"