Anarchism
Anarchism and anarchists and anything associated with the thinking, the people, or the history generally get a raw deal from the media and even mainstream historians. It is true that anarchism is profoundly anti-authoritarian, but its popular association with violence (wild-eyed bearded men throwing bombs) is exaggerated, even fictionalized by the very forces threatened by it, namely governments and the media with vested interests in things as they are.
As with any subversive political and economic movement, some proponents became impatient and felt justified in striking out in vengeance or justice. Thus you have Alexander Berkman and his attempted assassination of Pennsylvanian Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and Leon Czolgosz and his successful assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Berkman, however, served his time in jail, wrote a deep and insightful account of his experience and went on to write more worthwhile books on the subject which possessed his life. (Czolgosz did not have that opportunity, being executed forty-five days after the death of his victim.)
Anarchism survived its dramatic beginnings in the 19th Century, however, and interested readers can find its articulate concern with agricultural reform, labor rights, and prophetic worries about the growth of the surveillance state in many excellent books. Here you will find books and a superb documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti (as well as Woody Guthrie's cd of his investigation into the miscarriage of justice). Here you will find histories, biographies, anthologies, memoirs, and fiction. It is a rich tradition, relevant to this day and to the future.
Autonomy Solidarity Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader
Autonomy Solidarity Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader
Widely regarded as Britain’s most influential anarchist thinker for over half a century, Colin Ward’s work ranges in scope from urban planning to deschooling, from mutualism to geography, from Kropotkin to Buber, to cotters, squatters, and beyond. Drawing inspiration from the everyday creativity of ordinary people, Ward championed a unique social and environmental politics premised on the possibilities of democratic self-organisation and self-management from below. Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility provides a wide-ranging overview of Ward’s earliest journalism and his later work, including seminal essays and extracts from his most important books.
Praise for Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility:
“Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility gives us the concentrated flavour of Colin Ward’s observations about daily life, looked at through the lens of the anarchist critique of authority and what he called the propensity for self-organisation. The full range of his interests, presented in essays that are often funny and always clear, are captured here. At once a record of the energy that Ward devoted to acts of ordinary resistance and a celebration of the constancy of his commitment to anarchist re-enchantment, this anthology is a valuable reminder of the persuasiveness and humility of his work.” —Ruth Kinna, Loughborough University
“An astonishing golden treasury of the works of Britain’s most original and brilliant twentieth-century writer on housing, architecture and planning. It deserves to become standard reading in every architecture and planning school in the world—much as the author would have hated it.” —Sir Peter Hall, University College London
“This long overdue reader is an admirably fresh selection of extracts drawn from the full range of Colin Ward’s writings. After his death, one of Ward’s former editors concluded that ‘we need a handy volume of the Selected Colin Ward in every bookshop, or on every screen.’ Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility will be such a volume and it is to be hoped it attracts the wide readership, both anarchist and non-anarchist, that it deserves.” —David Goodway, co-author, with Colin Ward, of Talking Anarchy
About the author:
Colin Ward (1924–2010) was a member of the editorial committee of London’s celebrated anarchist newspaper Freedom from 1947 to 1960, and the founder and editor of the monthly journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970. An architect by training, he authored or co-authored over thirty books, including Anarchy in Action, The Child in the City, Cotters and Squatters, The Allotment, and Arcadia for All.
Chris Wilbert is a lecturer in geography and tourism at Anglia Ruskin University.
Damian F. White is associate professor of sociology at the Rhode Island School of Design.