Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Introduction 5
such features as autonomy, direct democracy, self-management and workers’ control,
decentralization, opposition to war, sustainability and environmentalism. So in 1960,
at the height of the British New Left, Edward Thompson stressed the need ‘to break
through our present political conventions, and help people to think of socialism as
something done by people and not for or to people, by pressing in new ways on the
ground’, believing:
One socialist youth club of quite a new kind … one determined municipal council,
probing the possibility of new kinds of municipal ownership in the face of Government
opposition; one tenants’ association with a new dynamic, pioneering on its own
account new patterns of social welfare – play-centres, nursery facilities, community
services for and by the women – involving people in the discussion and solution of
problems of town planning, racial intercourse, leisure facilities; one pit, factory, or
sector of nationalized industry where new forms of workers’ control can actually
be forced upon management … would immediately help in precipitating a diffuse
aspiration into a positive movement…
This was a thoroughly libertarian programme, but since Thompson never advocated
the abolition of the State and parliamentary institutions it fell significantly short of
being anarchist. 10
The historic anarchist movement was a workers’ movement which flourished
from the 1860s down to the close of the 1930s. On the other hand, there has been
a consensus that anarchist precursors can be traced back to Chinese Taoism and
Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu as well as to Classical Greece and Zeno of Citium. Most
recently, it has been argued convincingly that the Mu’tazilite and Najdite Muslims of
ninth-century Basra were anarchists. 11 Examples begin to multiply in Europe from the
Reformation of the sixteenth century and its forebears (for example, the Bohemian
Taborites and German Anabaptists), and the Renaissance (Rabelais and Etienne de
la Boétie) and English Revolution (not only the Diggers and Gerrard Winstanley
but also the Ranters) in the sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries respectively. 12
Some eighteenth-century figures are even more obviously anarchist: the Rousseau of
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), William Blake (1757–1827) throughout
his oeuvre and William Godwin in his great Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793)
and the essays of The Enquirer (1797). Unlike Blake, whose ideas made no impact
on his contemporaries, Godwin exerted considerable influence, most markedly
10 E.P. Thompson, ‘Revolution Again! Or Shut Your Ears and Run’, New Left Review, no. 6
(November-December 1960), p. 31 (Thompson’s emphasis).
11 Patricia Crone, ‘Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists’, Past and Present, no. 167 (May 2000); and also
Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004),
esp. chaps. 4–6.
12 Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, Part 2, provides the most thorough modern discussion of
anarchist genealogy. See also George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and
Movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1986), chap. 2. There is also a discussion of anarchist
antecedents in traditional Chinese thought in Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), chap. 1.