On learning of Colin Ward’s death (on 2-11, no less) via Roderick Long (whose blog I finally checked out [it's rad], drawn thither by a post on the forthcoming Barsoom movie), I recalled attending, a year or so past, an agora at the Roboto Project (also, in its current form anyhow, recently deceased) at which I rejoiced to snag a gnarly old copy of Anarchy in Action (aside from netstuff, the only Ward I’ve read). Having since laid it on a pal, I’ll pull some quotes from the ether.
First, Ward’s take on two perennial sources of contention (presumably, whoever transcribed this forgot to close parentheses and will have some explaining to do when the punctuation police come knockin’, but whatevs):
Power and privilege have never been known to abdicate. This is why anarchism is bound to be a call to revolution. But what kind of revolution? Nothing has been said in this book about the two great irrelevancies of discussion about anarchism: the false antitheses between violence and nonviolence and between revolution and reform. The most violent institution in our society is the state and its reacts violently to efforts to take away its power. (‘As Malatesta used to say, you try to do your thing and they intervene, and then you are to blame for the fight that happens.’ Does this mean that the effort should not be made? A distinction has to be made between the violence of the oppressor and the resistance of the oppressed.
Similarly, there is a distinction not between revolution and reform but on the one hand between the kind of revolution which installs a different gang of rulers or the kind of reform which makes oppression more palatable or more efficient, and on the other those social changes, whether revolutionary or reformist, through which people enlarge their autonomy and reduce their subjection to external authority.
Anarchism in all its guises is an assertion of human dignity and responsibility. It is not a programme for political change but an act of social self-determination.
from Anarchy in Action, via Revolution by the Book
This next bit I remember finding on the net in 2000, the year I came of age to franchise it up. I was in my first, and penultimate, semester at a conservatory and my violin teacher (at length, in no uncertain terms, and in lieu of musical instruction) insisted it was my duty to vote for Bore/against Gush and that I was a Bad Person for not participating. Had it not been for her obnoxiousness and our little disagreement, I might be a wretched liberal concert violinist today.
Seasoned non-voters take a different and longer-term view of history. They know that the similarities between the present government and both its predecessors and successors far outweigh the differences. They realise the truth of Kropotkin’s observation, 75 years ago, that ‘The state organisation, having been the force to which the minorities resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges.’ In urging the need for more popular, more decentralised, forms of social administration, he stressed that we will be compelled to find new forms of self-organisation for the social functions that the state fulfills through the bureaucracy, and that ‘as long as this is not done, nothing will be done.’
The non-voters will watch cynically as the politicians’ lies and promises mount and the government good-news machine rolls into action, quietly repeating the anarchist slogan :
‘If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.’
from “The Case Against Voting” via Takver
Many of the man’s short works can be found here and there around the net (I keep finding more – this rad pdf includes Ward’s take on, among other things, Bey’s TAZ concept), tributes everywhere from The New Statesman to C4SS, Next Left to Reason. Could be wrong, but I suspect, dear reader, that you haven’t read enough Colin Ward.
I know I haven’t.
Have fun and cuídate.
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