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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
park and recreational space to ‘restore leisure to a place that is notorious
for its nervousness’. Goodman confines business and industry
mostly to a central strip running up the Island and flanked by two
major highways. Central Park disappears but residences are built in
the extended parkland areas stretching out beyond these arterial
roads. 47 In a revised plan, Goodman proposed banning traffic
altogether in New York City.
The appeal of Goodman and Ward’s work is its ability to integrate
anarchist projects ‘within the world of the practically possible’. 48 This
approach has inspired a younger generation of anarchists to similarly
engage in lived experience and to provide support and advice to
those seeking practical routes to emancipation. Yet Goodman and
Ward admit that there is an inherent conservatism in their strategy.
Goodman endorsed the ideas of Edmund Burke, the eighteenthcentury
philosopher and so-called father of conservatism, to the
effect that the legitimacy of government turned on its ability to
protect community. His work was an attempt to restore a condition
of life he believed capitalism and the modern state had undermined.
For his part, Ward acknowledges that there is a certain similarity
between his ideas of mutual aid and those propounded by writers
like David Green, who embrace self-help as a means to improve
‘consumer control’ of public services. 49 Moreover, in the context of
the capitalist welfare state both also acknowledge the obstacles to
their strategy. Goodman claimed that his ideas were ‘common sense’
but that they also made people ‘feel foolish and timid’. And he could
not show how or why individuals would be persuaded to make the
changes that would allow them to overcome their psychological
repression. Ward’s answer, that individuals are in the process of
making these changes and that they have only to adopt the best
practices highlighted in his work, runs up against the realities of state
provision. Ward admits that there is a problem:
The positive feature of welfare legislation is that contrary to the
capitalist ethic, it is a testament to human solidarity. The negative
feature is precisely that it is an arm of the state. I continually find
myself quoting the conclusion of Kropotkin in Modern Science and
Anarchism that ‘the economic and political liberation of man will
have to create new forms for its expression in life, instead of those
established by the State’ and that ‘we will be compelled to find new
forms of organisation for the social functions that the state fulfils
through the bureaucracy’. 50