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strategies for change 143
never worked on the basis of this assumption. For others, however,
the adoption of practical anarchism represented a change in view.
During the Second World War British anarchists like Herbert Read
thought that the ‘war would inevitably lead to revolution – that it
would be neither won nor lost without social upheaval’. By the end
of the War, he called on comrades to ‘repent their mistake’ and admit
‘[t]here will be no revolution – just yet’. 39 By the 1960s anarchists
who accepted this judgement identified the evolutionary aspect of
practical anarchism as its chief advantage over competitors. For
example, George Woodcock recommended the strategy because it
was non-violent and because it represented a break from the romantic
utopianism of ‘old anarchism’. Against the ‘bellicose barricaders’
of the 1940s he argued:
The kind of mass movement at whose head Bakunin challenged Marx
in the First International, and which reached its apogee in the Spanish
CNT, has not reappeared … Except for a few dedicated militants,
anarchists no longer tend to see the future in terms of conflagratory
insurrection that will destroy the state and all the establishments of
authority and will immediately usher in the free society … Instead of
preparing for an apocalyptic revolution, contemporary anarchists
tend to be concerned far more with trying to create, in society as it is,
the infrastructure of a better and freer society. 40
Woodcock believed that practical anarchism was relatively
unambitious. The strategy was not designed to create ‘an anarchist
utopia’ but a more participatory, less bureaucratic, more decentralized
and open society. Yet for Ward the strategy is no less revolutionary
than the insurrectionary doctrines it replaces. Indeed, in his
view, the commitment to create a self-organizing society, ‘a network
of autonomous free associations for the satisfaction of human
needs’, is a struggle against capitalism, bureaucracy and monopoly
and it ‘inevitably makes anarchists advocates of social revolution’. 41
Paul Goodman argued that practical anarchism had a utopian aspect
and that it was radical in its focus, if not its scope. Its proposals
appeared to be ‘simple-minded’ but they forced individuals who felt
well-off and at ease in democratic society to confront their real
powerlessness in the face of capitalist production and the increasingly
complex social systems that controlled their lives. 42 The idea was to
create an environment in which these people could recreate themselves
as fully rounded, equal citizens.