Colin Ward, the leading anarchist thinker and writer of post-war Britain, died on February 11. Born in 1924 in London, Colin gravitated to the anarchist movement while serving in the army during WW2. Towards the end of the war, the anarchist newspaperFreedom (or War Commentary as it was then) published an article which called on British solidiers to hold on to their guns (implication: so we can make a revolution...) The editors were prosecuted and Colin was called as a witness, testifying that although he had received the newspaper in question, it had not dissuaded him from his duty as a soldier. (One suspects that Colin had already determined for himself what the limits of his duty were.) This didn't stop most of the editors being sent to prison. Maria Luisa Berneri escaped prison only because she was the wife of one of the other editors and, as such, could not in sexist law be guilty of a charge of 'conspiracy'.
Following the war, Colin moved closer to the Freedom group, becoming a regular contributor to the weekly newspaper. Some of his earliest journalism covered the squatters' movement in 1940s Britain. Much to the consternation of the Labour government, many thousands of working-class people responded to acute housing shortage by taking over and adapting disused military bases. While his comrades in the anarchist movement struggled to see the point, Colin saw this as an example of what he would later call 'anarchy in action': direct and cooperative self-help.
From 1961-70, Colin edited Anarchy, easily the most interesting anarchist theoretical journal published in the UK and one of the most interesting of any political stripe in that interesting decade. Through the journal, Colin laid out the ideas that would culminate in his 1973 book, Anarchy in Action.
All societies, Colin argued, are pluralistic. They solve problems, meet needs, using a variety of mechanisms. They use commercial, market-based techniques. They use authority and directive and bureaucratic techniques. And they also use techniques of mutuality: techniques of mutual aid and cooperative self-help.
'Anarchy', for Colin, is simply any social space in which the techniques of mutuality predominate. It is a social space which people enter (and leave) freely; relate as equals; and do something creative, to solve a problem, meet a need, or just enjoy creativity for its own sake. And the aim of anarchism is to try to push and shove society in the direction of greater anarchy in this sense.
Thus, Colin emphasised that anarchy is, in fact, already very much part of our social world. Anarchy is there in the meeting of a 12-step group, whose members grapple together with a shared problem of addiction. It is there in the adventure playground, the Friendly Society, the RNLI, and in thousands upon thousands of other free, egalitarian and cooperative social spaces. And his propaganda - not a word he was ashamed of - was frequently aimed at showing how some outstanding social problem could be better addressed by techniques of free, cooperative self-help.
To: Retort
From: IB
Colin Ward, antinomian architect, humane advocate of spaces for children, champion of the vernacular, the self-managed and the self-built, scourge of state planners of right and left, New Society journalist, has died at the age of 85. Over a very long lunch at the Angel Inn in Debenham, Suffolk in the 1980s, when told of our plans to revive Retort, the non-sectarian 1940s journal of art, culture and politics (which he had admired) and having been asked to contribute something to the inaugural issue, Ward the wise old editor gently cautioned against the project. "Do you understand how much life energy you will be expending on this? You seem to have plenty else to do." We heard him, and kept Retort as a metaphor for other purposes.
His writing had a directness and lucidity that mirrored the man. It was typical that, where others would have been tempted to polemic, Ward quietly demolished the case for the Thatcherite privatization of water, drawing on deep historical wells of knowledge about the commons when composing Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility. His ear was finely tuned to the politics of nomenclature: "When we compare the Victorian antecedents of our public institutions with the organs of working-class mutual aid in the same period the very names speak volumes. On the one side the Workhouse, the Poor Law Infirmary, the National Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church; and, on the other, the Friendly Society, the Sick Club, the Cooperative Society, the Trade Union. One represents the tradition of fraternal and autonomous association springing up from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above."
Colin Ward was unwilling to wait for blueprints of the future. "Utopia", he wrote in his 1973 classic Anarchy in Action, is "already here, apart from a few little, local difficulties like exploitation, war, dictatorship and starvation." He argued that spontaneous, voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation is all around us, in the interstices of statist society, working around authority to get things done. Asked to comment on fashionable talk of "temporary autonomous zones", he recognized an affinity with those "fleeting pockets of anarchy that occur in daily life" which were Ward's own abiding inspiration, akin to "golden moments" of the kind that used to overtake Augustus John, sitting in the Cafe des Varietes, with "the apparition of a face or part of a face, a gesture or conjunction of forms which I recognize as belonging to a more real and harmonious world that that to which we are accustomed."
Roderick Long described Ward's book Talking Houses as "a detailed history of the unconventional, self-built housing — frequently built on land of dubious title and more often than not illegal — that the working poor created throughout the twentieth century." Based on lectures delivered at the LSE, after it had become largely a Blairite stronghold, Social Policy: An Anarchist Response is a powerful recovery of the history of the working class’s self-organized welfare provision, and the war of suppression
that both employers and state often fought against it. What Colin Ward himself favored, in a much-quoted summa, was "a society which organises itself without authority,
is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the
weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste,
privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties,
religious differences and their superstitious separatism."
Colin was an old friend of Retort and we shall miss him.
IB
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Colin Ward: Obituary
Ken Worpole
The Guardian
22 February 2010
Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain's most famous anarchist for nearly half a century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action (1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening co-operative relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.
One of Colin's favourite metaphors – adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone – was the image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over. He was fond of contrasting the vocabulary of self-organisation, with its friendly societies, mutuals, co-operatives and voluntary associations, with the nomenclature of the state and private sectors with their directorates, corporations, boards and executives.
Colin was the author of almost 30 books on subjects that ranged from allotments, architecture, self-build housing, children's play, education, postcards and town planning to water distribution and anarchist theory, many of which gained him an international following. His book The Child in the City (1978), frequently reprinted, influenced planners and teachers from Liverpool to Latin America. Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984), written with planner Dennis Hardy, opened up a whole new field in 20th-century social history around self-organised communities and the Lockeian belief in the democratic importance of experiments in living. Another book, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988), with David Crouch, held the line for this uniquely friendly form of local self-sufficiency during the barren years of centralised land use planning, making Colin a hero of today's environmental activists, including the young George Monbiot.
Colin was born in Wanstead, Essex, the son of a teacher and a shorthand typist. Both were Labour supporters and Colin remembered hearing the anarchist Emma Goldman speak at a 1938 London May Day rally, and attending the 1939 Festival of Music for the People, in aid of the International Brigades, featuring Benjamin Britten's Ballad of Heroes. On leaving school aged 15, Colin went to work for the architect Sidney Caulfield. Conscripted in 1942, Colin was posted to Glasgow, where he fell in with the city's lively anarchist movement. He was then transferred to Orkney and Shetland for the remainder of the war. In 1945, as a subscriber to the radical newspaper War Commentary, Colin was summoned as a witness at the Old Bailey trial of the paper's editors, John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom, who were accused of promoting disaffection and received prison sentences.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, while working for the architect Peter Shepheard, he wrote and edited articles for Freedom, the anarchist newspaper, where he developed the abiding themes of his life. He subsequently edited the journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970.
In his editorial and political work, he befriended and cultivated younger activists and writers such as Hugh Brody, Stan Cohen, Ray Gosling, Tony Gould, Richard Mabey, Carole Pateman, Kate Soper, Laurie Taylor and Jock Young. Many of these went on to write for the newly established weekly, New Society, an intellectual home that came ready-furnished as a result of Colin's widening influence at this time.
In 1966, he had married Harriet Unwin, a young widow with two children, Tom and Barney, and in 1968 they had a son together, Ben. Colin also acted as a guardian to two other boys, Alan and Doug Balfour, after the Balfours' mother died. This companionable, happy marriage of kindred spirits was longlasting. Colin and Harriet subsequently established a network of international friendships, first from their home in London and, latterly, in Suffolk – Colin spent a small fortune on photocopying in the local public library – as well as by telephone.
While working as an education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association between 1971 and 1979 he wrote Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973), with Tony Fyson, and established the Bulletin for Environmental Education. The point of both initiatives was to help get children out of school and into their communities, to talk to local people, and explore their neighbourhood, its amenities and utilities, and understand how buildings, streets, landscapes and social life interact. This led to Colin's focus on the unique world of childhood which, in the end, may prove to have been his – and anarchism's – most enduring contribution to social policy.
There were many other collaborations. With the novelist Ruth Rendell, Colin wrote a Counterblast pamphlet in 1989, Undermining the Central Line, in favour of a revitalised local democracy; in 1998 he produced Sociable Cities: Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, with the urbanist Peter Hall, to commemorate the centenary of Howard's seminal work on garden cities. In 2003, the film-maker Mike Dibb recorded Colin in conversation with the writer Roger Deakin, at the Wards' home in Debenham. This is available on DVD. To see Deakin (who died in 2006) and Colin together, talking freely of the delights of the natural world and the varied people in it, is to be reminded of a politics of life and possibility that stubbornly refuses to go away.
Colin is survived by Harriet, his son, stepchildren and wards.
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Colin Ward, Pioneer of Mutualism
Next Left
Colin was a formidible and dedicated opponent of what is often understood as the Fabian tradition. This comes across very clearly in his work on housing where he was always highly critical of state-heavy efforts, led by middle-class housing professionals, to provide housing for the working-classes. In this context, he argued for the alternative left tradition of cooperative self-help in the form of tenant cooperatives, self-build projects and squatting. He pointed repeatedly to the illogicality of local governments - often Labour-controlled - who would rather destroy unused council housing stock than allow it to be occupied by squatters.
He was strongly opposed to anarchist perfectionism, the view that anarchy should be 'all or nothing at all'. His conception of anarchy and anarchism enabled him to present anarchy not as 'all or nothing' but in terms of 'more or less'. This opened up a more incrementalist take on anarchy and anarchism.
Second, Colin was always deeply interested, and concerned to ground his own work, in empirical social science. The availability of anarchist techniques for tackling social problems was, for Colin, a working hypothesis. But it could not be just asserted as a dogma. It had to be tested by looking to, and doing, relevant research.
His own research gradually took on an increasingly historical character as he sought to document and explore the way ordinary people have made 'unofficial' uses of their environment. As well as a history of squatting, he co-wrote a wonderful social history of that great social institution - at once anarchistic and social democratic - the allotment. Perhaps his most influential, widely-read book is The Child in the City, which lovingly explores the way children make their own creative uses of the urban environments they are confronted with. (I have a particular fondness for this book because the original photography by Ann Golzen for the Penguin edition was done in the mid-1970s, and consequently takes me right back to my own childhood, shaping little worlds of my own in the nooks and crannies of Bedworth's Miners' Welfare Park and its environs.)
Colin really stood at the confluence of two traditions (as did the post-war Freedom group more generally). On the one hand, he was of course shaped profoundly by the theoretical tradition of anarchism. He knew his anarchist classics - especially Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops - and he drew on them. On the other, Colin was also animated by the diffuse traditions of working-class and popular self-help - resolutely practical traditions concerned to get things done, to make the world better in some simple but important and measurable way, and which have little time for theoretical niceties. He sought to bring the traditions into dialogue, for their mutual benefit.
The idea of mutualism has undergone a revival of late, on left and right. Some in Labour claim it as a key theme for the future. Red Toryism also seeks to occupy some of this terrain. All those interested in this topic, who want to understand what mutualism really entails, would do well to engage with Colin's work. Not least, as an anarchist, Colin reminds us that if we want mutualism we don't have to wait for benign politicians to legislate it. In certain respects, we can enact it now just by (in the words of Colin's hero, Gustav Landauer) 'contracting other relationships'.
He was strongly opposed to anarchist perfectionism, the view that anarchy should be 'all or nothing at all'. His conception of anarchy and anarchism enabled him to present anarchy not as 'all or nothing' but in terms of 'more or less'. This opened up a more incrementalist take on anarchy and anarchism.
Second, Colin was always deeply interested, and concerned to ground his own work, in empirical social science. The availability of anarchist techniques for tackling social problems was, for Colin, a working hypothesis. But it could not be just asserted as a dogma. It had to be tested by looking to, and doing, relevant research.
His own research gradually took on an increasingly historical character as he sought to document and explore the way ordinary people have made 'unofficial' uses of their environment. As well as a history of squatting, he co-wrote a wonderful social history of that great social institution - at once anarchistic and social democratic - the allotment. Perhaps his most influential, widely-read book is The Child in the City, which lovingly explores the way children make their own creative uses of the urban environments they are confronted with. (I have a particular fondness for this book because the original photography by Ann Golzen for the Penguin edition was done in the mid-1970s, and consequently takes me right back to my own childhood, shaping little worlds of my own in the nooks and crannies of Bedworth's Miners' Welfare Park and its environs.)
Colin really stood at the confluence of two traditions (as did the post-war Freedom group more generally). On the one hand, he was of course shaped profoundly by the theoretical tradition of anarchism. He knew his anarchist classics - especially Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops - and he drew on them. On the other, Colin was also animated by the diffuse traditions of working-class and popular self-help - resolutely practical traditions concerned to get things done, to make the world better in some simple but important and measurable way, and which have little time for theoretical niceties. He sought to bring the traditions into dialogue, for their mutual benefit.
The idea of mutualism has undergone a revival of late, on left and right. Some in Labour claim it as a key theme for the future. Red Toryism also seeks to occupy some of this terrain. All those interested in this topic, who want to understand what mutualism really entails, would do well to engage with Colin's work. Not least, as an anarchist, Colin reminds us that if we want mutualism we don't have to wait for benign politicians to legislate it. In certain respects, we can enact it now just by (in the words of Colin's hero, Gustav Landauer) 'contracting other relationships'.
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Five Leaves Press blog:
The anarchist writer Colin Ward, who died on the night of 11th February, was indirectly responsible for the existence of Five Leaves. We’d met years before, and like several people I later met, I’d been vaguely collecting Colin’s Anarchy (first series), still the best anarchist magazine produced in this country. A small group of us in Nottingham, publishing as Old Hammond Press, brought out a couple of pamphlets by Colin, one on housing, one on William Morris’s ideas of work. But in 1994 I got so fed up waiting for Faber to bring out the paperback of The Allotment: its landscape and culture that I offered to buy the rights. Colin said that as long as his co-writer, David Crouch, was in agreement he’d be pleased if Faber were to hand them over, and if it helped, the co-authors would do without royalties as they were simply pleased to have the book available in paperback.
Well, thousands of copies later Colin never regretted his generosity, and as well being the first book published by Five Leaves (though initially, for the sake of any bibliographers reading, Mushroom Bookshop), for years The Allotment kept the press afloat. We went on to publish Colin’s Arcadia for All (co-written with Dennis Hardy), Talking Anarchy (with David Goodway) and Cotters and Squatters. Colin also wrote the introduction to our edition of The London Years by Rudolf Rocker, who of course he knew. Rocker in turn knew Peter Kropotkin, whose Mutual Aid had such an influence on Colin as a political thinker. I’d hoped that we’d manage to fit in an edition of Colin’s Goodnight Campers! (on the social history of the holiday camp) while he was still with us, and his wonderful book on Chartres that was only ever published for Folio Society members. They will appear.
Five Leaves was not his only publisher by any means. Freedom Press brought out - and kept in print - his classic Anarchy in Action and other books on housing, social policy and - in advance of his time - a book on ecological transport. Housing, environment, transport, architecture, unofficial uses of the landscape, the education of children - Colin’s subjects were always full of positive examples of the way some people live now, and the way we could all live later. He had no time for what he called tittle-tattle. Colin developed a kind of Wardite politics and a close and loyal following ranging from George Mombiot to young libertarians who saw that there was more to life than permanent protest.
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The good life of a gentle anarchist
Boyd Tonkin
The Independent
February 19 2010
This week I heard David Cameron extol the virtues of mutual aid and co-operative work with feelings so mixed that they zigzagged between exasperation and exultation. A few days ago, one of Britain's most original thinkers and writers died aged 85. You may not have heard of him, for Colin Ward was a lifelong anarchist – of the sweetest, gentlest kind. He spent more than 60 years helping to foster the cheerful, co-dependent, self-help society that every tribal politician now promotes.
Colin stood as far from big-state Labourism as he did from big-money Toryism. His early struggles – as a young ex-soldier from Essex, back in the late 1940s – saw him defending the squatters who took over military bases during a postwar housing crisis. Over decades, in a series of path-breaking books, he sought out and celebrated bottom-up solutions to finding decent shelter, doing worthwhile work, growing up happy, and getting on with others in town and country. The Whitehall-knows-best apparatchiks of the Labour tradition distrusted his brand of autonomous action; while it goes without saying that this (peaceable) disciple of Kropotkin would have greeted the "Red Toryism" now endorsed by the heirs of large landowners and rich financiers with a genial chuckle.
Forgive a little detour into memory. Long ago, when Colin already enjoyed a huge semi-underground reputation as a fountainhead of fresh ideas, I went to run a section of the New Statesman that enfolded the remnants of New Society. As a chronicler and analyst of postwar change, that journal had done a bolder, brighter job of showing us new times than any media outlet today. And, every week, I found myself editing a column that took me into the scrap-screwn, mutt-friendly, off-the-books heart of another Britain.
In Colin Ward's Utopian junkyard, scruffy, unrespectable people and places survived and thrived on the edge of wealth, influence – even legality. As far as mainstream journalism went, these marginals and mavericks might as well have lived on Pluto. Often taking as his subjects people in or near his own Suffolk village, he championed the twilight world of allotment-diggers, unofficial smallholders, prefab dwellers, caravan habitués, rural squatters, estate children, multi-tasking traders, DIY artisans and house-builders, most as remote from the trim land of planning applications as they were from tax demands. If you needed to reclaim a bad word, you might even want to say that Colin opened the gates of Pikey Paradise and praised all its delights.
Alternatively, you might argue that he wrote social theory to justify the convivial rule-flouting of HE Bates's Pop Larkin and The Darling Buds of May – while reminding us that the meddling over-mighty state always commits the biggest scams of all. Now the metropolitan intelligentsia has - via Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem – snatched a faint glimpse of the terrain Colin cultivated with such humanity and charm. His Britain was never broken, because it knew how to mend itself.
Thankfully, he left a long shelf-full of invigorating books. They include the classic Anarchy in Action; a history of The Allotment (with David Crouch); The Child in the City; and a study of the free-style co-op home-making that often inspires his work, Cotters and Squatters. Localism, mutualism, voluntarism: Colin gave a smiling face to all the windy words our masters now invoke.
However, in spite of sterling work by the Five Leaves imprint in Nottingham, too few of his landmark texts exist in a form that non-specialists can reach. As every pundit and politician gestures towards a more congenial, more self-organising nation, and so few have the slightest notion of how to get there without grandiose top-down schemes, we need a handy volume of the Selected Colin Ward in every bookshop, or on every screen. Then the millions of eager fugitives from greed and fear can really get down to digging for victory.