Fortnight Publications Ltd.

The Practising AnarchistAuthor(s): Robert JohnstoneSource: Fortnight, No. 129 (Jun. 18, 1976), pp. 13, 19Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25545880 .

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FRIDAY 18th JUNE 1976/13 ^"B5^f

The Practising Anarchist

ROBERT JOHNSTONE argues that, while revolutionary anarchism

is now redundant, the philosophy of anarchism can be put to

practical use.

As George Woodcock points out in Anarchism (Pelican 75p), libertarian ideas can have an important role in an

increasingly centralised society. It is

gradualist or non-violent anarchist* who are likely to be most useful in the

struggle to promote individual liberty, and while it would be foolish to

pretend that anarchism has not been associated with violence, there is

nothing in it that makes violence a

prerequisite. Quite the opposite. Anarchists have always been anti

militarist, a tradition carried on by Pat Arrowsmith in her attempts to "dis affect" soldiers on their way to Northern Ireland. "Propaganda by deed"?and here come the bearded men in black cloaks carrying Christmas puddings with smoking fuses?it is even more pointless nowadays than it was in nineteenth

century Italy. The Angry Brigade, the

Tupamaros and the Bader-Meinhof

group have each demonstrated in

varying degrees that terrorism in a

modern state only promotes police activity.

It was the militantly non-violent

Gandhi, a reader of Tolstoi and

Kropotkin, who made the most sub stantial contribution to Indian inde

pendence and bequeathed the notion of autonomous village communes.

A Dead Tradition The antics ofthe violent anarchists,

and of Noel and Maire Murray, who were recently sentenced in Dublin to

hang for their murder of a Garda, are

the posthumous twitches of a tradition which even in its heyday never estab lished itself west of the English

Channel. Despite the dramatic

material exploited by Joseph Conrad, libertarianism in the British Isles has owed more to the pacifist William Godwin and to Robert Owen's

syndicalist trade unions than to

Bakunin the revolutionary. Around the time of William Morris

it was the stamping ground of artists and intellectuals, whose most

aggressive exploit was to fire a shot at

the Houses of Parliament. Indeed, Oscar Wildes The Soul of Man Under

Socialism, was perhaps the only notable contribution to theoretical

anarchist literature in English since

Godwins Political Justice (1793). These artists and theorists, from the

time of Shelley to the present day, have shared the belief that the road to

anarchism is a process of education, an evolution of the soul.

I feel that the prevailing conception of what anarchists do blinds people to

a whole area of thought that could be

of use to them. For those who see the

shortcomings of a Unionist Ulster but

find little attraction in the United

Ireland envisaged by militaot Repub licans?or in the wider context, for

those who hope for social justice but

fear the loss of personal liberty likely to result from wholesale socialism?

the works of anarchists and near

anarchists show an alternative. I'm constantly surprised by how

many people I meet who share my interest in anarchism, and frustrated

by how few see any prospect of putting it into practice. Because it is a view of

man, it can have an everyday use, not

just a political one. So to leave the

general and be specific, I'd like to

spend the rest of this article talking about my personal experience of

trying to find one of its everyday uses.

Coming to teaching for the first

time showed me that anarchism

provides a valid and workable set of

principles for behaviour and thinking about others. Although I had not

realised that Herbert Read had contri

buted so much to modern teaching methods, I had heard of A S Neill, and

I discovered that my tentative

acceptance of anarchism helped me to

work out what I wanted to do when

teaching, how I wanted to do it, and

why other methods were wrong.

Critique Anarchism is idealistic in the sense

that it suggests a state of affairs in

which people can develop all their

qualities as fully as possible. Its

underlying assumption is that the

natural and most desirable life is one

in which the individual makes his own

decisions and is responsible only for

himself. It becomes practical when

you try to achieve that. When you stand up in the classroom like a

dictator, the pupils are at best being subsumed in your hierarchy of ideas,

losing parts of themselves so that other

smaller parts can be developed which

will help them pass exams. Why are

most people so interesting at primary schools and so boring at university?

Surely they should be more interest

ing. Something must have happened

1

to repress what I think is natural viva

city. A girl in one of my classes had

responded to my arrival with an

improvement in her work. Then it

deteriorated and she became bolshy and resentful. I couldn't understand

why until I met her parents. They told

me?quite spontaneously?that I had

to be "strict" with her, I had to "keep her head down", she needed "discip line". I realised that their daughter had come to connect affection with

authority. She could only respect me if

she was afraid of me. Since I wasn't

going to beat her over the head, since I was interested in her ideas, I was weak

and contemptible. And since she wanted to be told what to do, she made herself weak and incapable of

doing things on her own. Isn't this a

dismal way to bring up children?

Methods Of course I was working within a

system from whose principles I

differed, and my classes were not

totally free. I had to compromise. But I'm glad that I didn't punish anyone

with the usual keepings-in and extra

homework. This didn't lead to chaos.

Everybody was happier and more

lively without threats. (I like to think even the girl I mentioned came round

in the end.) The school judged your standard of

teaching by exam results. But the

concept of the exam?which I disagree with?means that when an entire class

gets A's, the result is wrong. It has more to do with how good the teacher

is at exam technique than how

uniformly brilliant all the pupils are.

Incidentally, my results were about

average. The clever but bored pupils did slightly better, while some of the dull sloggers did slightly worse than

before.

Goal The most exciting thing in teaching

is to see young people actually

Continued on Page 19

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FRIDAY 18th JUNfc 1976/19

Sidelines

Business as Usual Dept. Those of you who take pride in

keeping a stiff upper lip and

pretending that there's really nothing at all to this terrorism the media keep going on about will be pleased to hear that the judges are in there with you.

They go to quite a lot of trouble to

keep up the traditional formalities, or so I'm told. Especially in Derry, where the business of meting out justice is

more than usually dangerous. Tha

judge has to be flown in to the Assize Court by helicopter and the whole area

is surrounded by barbed wire and the

military. But they still play their little

legal games according to the book:

oyer and terminer and gaol delivery and so on. So just as the judge steps out of the helicopter, up steps the sheriff or whoever it is to greet him and then the judge asks him if there are any prisoners to deliver. All very proper. I'm not sure whether this is

part of Merlyn's 'they are all just ordinary criminals and must be treated as such' campaign. If it is I am even less convinced than usual that it

helps.

++++++ I've been right often enough on the

Great British-Irish Strasbourg Saga to chance my arm on an outsider?that

the report of the Commission on Human Rights will be published next week?on Tuesday 21st to be precise. How do I know? Well one James Fawcett who is a well known lawyer not a hundred miles from Strasbourg is giving a talk on the British-Irish case at Chatham House in London that afternoon. There wouldn't be

much for him to say if the case is not

public by then. And I have enough respect for the skill of the right

wingers of this world to suspect them of trying to line up some prime media

coverage for their side of the case. But don't worry. Your trusty sideliner will be there?at least in spirit?to see that no fast ones are pulled.

++++++ Bad joke of the week must be about the little old lady who said she was so

pleased that they'd started a bus service from Belfast to London because she had always hated going to London by boat.

I'm indebted to a regular correspon dent for pointing out one of the more bizarre projects undertaken in this American bicentennial year. The wizards of the money market in

London, he claims, backed by the Bank of England, are making a deter mined effort to make the exchange rate for the pound fall to 1.776 dollars on July 4th. He further surmises,

bearing in mind the unique link between Ulster and the old colonies that the pound might get down to 1.690 dollars on July 12th.

++++++ I have yet to work out an Ulster model for attitudes to racial questions. The

only pieces of evidence I have are that the IRA kill Pakistani grocers and that an Ulster friend returned from his first visit to London after three days because he was terrified of the black men who operated the London

Underground system. Since the same

young man is now working for the

sophisticated periodical The Sunday Times, I can only conclude that these racial problems can be overcome

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THE PRACTISING ANARCHIST Continued from Page 13

thinking for themselves. We seem to nave forgotten that the academic dis

ciplines are pursued because they are

methods of thought and self-improve ment. But if they require no more than

memory, if they don't benefit from the

development of the whole person mental and emotional, if they aren't the tools of a critical, or independent

mind, then all one's fit for is the

bandying about of obscure Shakes

pearean cruxes over tea in Oxford. And here worried parents will tell

me that "a good education" means

getting their offspring into a "good" job and a comfortable life. This is

quite reasonable. Nevertheless, I believe education should help people to be better, not just exam/apprentice fodder, just as I believe society should be organised to allow people to be

fully-formed individuals, not merely quiescent consumers and producers of useless articles. (The true Free Schools seem to appeal either to the lower

working class, as with the Leeds Free

School, or to the upper class, as with

Summerhill, rather than to the middle

class, which has, as it seems, the most to lose.) This is one ofthe reasons why I'm an anarchist. I call myself that?when I feel equal to the inevit able ensuing argument?to suggest that anarchists do not necessarily share the urge to run round in wide brimmed hats firing off pistols at the Houses of Parliament, and that, after

all, we might be missing something.

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