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Colin Ward
Anarchism as a Teory of Organization
1966
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Anarcism as a Teory of
Organization
Colin Ward
1966
You may think in describing anarchism as a theory of organ-
isation I am propounding a deliberate paradox: anarchy you
may consider to be, by defnition, the opposite of organisation.
In fact, however, anarchy means the absence of government,
the absence of authority. Can there be social organisation with-
out authority, without government? Te anarchists claim that
there can be, and they also claim that it is desirable that there
should be. Tey claimthat, at the basis of our social problems is
the principle of government. It is, afer all, governments which
prepare for war and wage war, even though you are obliged
to fght in them and pay for them; the bombs you are worried
about are not the bombs which cartoonists atribute to the an-
archists, but the bombs which governments have perfected, at
your expense. It is, afer all, governments which make and en-
force the laws which enable the haves to retain control over
social assets rather than share them with the have-nots. It is,
afer all, the principle of authority which ensures that people
will work for someone else for the greater part of their lives,
not because they enjoy it or have any control over their work,
but because they see it as their only means of livelihood.
I said that it is governments which make wars and pre-
pare for wars, but obviously it is not governments alone
1
the power of a government, even the most absolute dictator-
ship, depends on the tacit assent of the governed. Why do
people consent to be governed? It isnt only fear: what have
millions of people to fear from a small group of politicians?
It is because they subscribe to the same values as their gov-
ernors. Rulers and ruled alike believe in the principle of au-
thority, of hierarchy, of power. Tese are the characteristics
of the political principle. Te anarchists, who have always dis-
tinguished between the state and society, adhere to the social
principle, which can be seen where-ever men link themselves
in an association based on a common need or a common in-
terest. Te State said the German anarchist Gustav Landauer,
is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but
is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a
mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other
relationships, by behaving diferently.
Anyone can see that there are at least two kinds of organisa-
tion. Tere is the kind which is forced on you, the kind which is
run from above, and there is the kind which is run from below,
which cant force you to do anything, and which you are free to
join or free to leave alone. We could say that the anarchists are
people who want to transform all kinds of human organisation
into the kind of purely voluntary association where people can
pull out and start one of their own if they dont like it. I once,
in reviewing that frivolous but useful litle book Parkinsons
Law, atempted to enunciate four principles behind an anar-
chist theory of organisation: that they should be (1) voluntary,
(2) functional, (3) temporary, and (4) small.
Tey should be voluntary for obvious reasons. Tere is no
point in our advocating individual freedom and responsibility
if we are going to advocate organisations for which member-
ship is mandatory.
Tey should be functional and temporary precisely because
permanence is one of those factors which harden the arteries
of an organisation, giving it a vested interest in its own sur-
2
vival, in serving the interests of ofce-holders rather than its
function.
Tey should be small precisely because in small face-to-face
groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inher-
ent in organisations have least opportunity to develop. But it
is from this fnal point that our difculties arise. If we take it
for granted that a small group can function anarchically, we
are still faced with the problem of all those social functions
for which organisation is necessary, but which require it on a
much bigger scale. Well, we might reply, as some anarchists
have, if big organisations are necessary, count us out. We will
get by as well as we can without them. We can say this all right,
but if we are propagating anarchism as a social philosophy we
must take into account, and not evade, social facts. Beter to
say Let us fnd ways in which the large-scale functions can
be broken down into functions capable of being organised by
small functional groups and then link these groups in a fed-
eral manner. Te classical anarchist thinkers, envisaging the
future organisation of society, thought in terms of two kinds of
social institution: as the territorial unit, the commune, a French
word which you might consider as the equivalent of the word
parish or the Russian word soviet in its original meaning,
but which also has overtones of the ancient village institutions
for cultivating the land in common; and the syndicate, another
French word from trade union terminology, the syndicate or
workers council as the unit of industrial organisation. Both
were envisaged as small local units which would federate with
each other for the larger afairs of life, while retaining their
own autonomy, the one federating territorially and the other
industrially.
Te nearest thing in ordinary political experience, to the
federative principle propounded by Proudhon and Kropotkin
would be the Swiss, rather than the American, federal system.
And without wishing to sing a song of praise for the Swiss po-
litical system, we can see that the 22 independent cantons of
3
Switzerland are a successful federation. It is a federation of like
units, of small cells, and the cantonal boundaries cut across
linguistic and ethnic boundaries so that, unlike the many un-
successful federations, the confederation is not dominated by
one or a few powerful units. For the problem of federation, as
Leopold Kohr puts it in Te Breakdown of Nations, is one of
division, not of union. Herbert Luethy writes of his countrys
political system:
Every Sunday, the inhabitants of scores of com-
munes go to the polling booths to elect their civil
servants, ratify such and such an item of expendi-
ture, or decide whether a road or a school should
be built; afer setling the business of the com-
mune, they deal with cantonal elections and vot-
ing on cantonal issues; lastly come the decisions
on federal issues. In some cantons, the sovereign
people still meet in Rousseau-like fashion to dis-
cuss questions of common interest. It may be
thought that this ancient form of assembly is no
more than a pious tradition with a certain value as
a tourist atraction. If so, it is worth looking at the
results of local democracy.
Te simplest example is the Swiss railway system,
which is the densest network in the world. At great
cost and with great trouble, it has been made to
serve the needs of the smallest localities and most
remote valleys, not as a paying proposition but be-
cause such was the will of the people. It is the out-
come of ferce political struggles. In the 19
th
cen-
tury, the democratic railway movement brought
the small Swiss communities into confict with the
big towns, which had plans for centralisation
And if we compare the Swiss system with the
French which, with admirable geometrical regular-
4
Tere are trends, observable in these occasional experiments
in industrial organisation, in new approaches to problems of
delinquency and addiction, in education and community or-
ganisation, and in the de-institutionalisation of hospitals, asy-
lums, childrens homes and so on, which have much in com-
mon with each other, and which run counter to the gener-
ally accepted ideas about organisation, authority and govern-
ment. Cybernetic theory with its emphasis on self-organising
systems, and speculation about the ultimate social efects of
automation, leads in a similar revolutionary direction. George
and Louise Crowley, for example, in their comments on the
report of the Ad Hoc Commitee on the Triple Revolution,
(Monthly Review, Nov. 1964) remark that, We fnd it no less
reasonable to postulate a functioning society without author-
ity than to postulate an orderly universe without a god. Tere-
fore the word anarchy is not for us freighted with connota-
tions of disorder, chaos, or confusion. For humane men, liv-
ing in non-competitive conditions of freedom from toil and of
universal afuence, anarchy is simply the appropriate state of
society. In Britain, Professor Richard Titmuss remarks that so-
cial ideas may well be as important in the next half-century
as technical innovation. I believe that the social ideas of anar-
chism: autonomous groups, spontaneous order, workers con-
trol, the federative principle, add up to a coherent theory of
social organisation which is a valid and realistic alternative to
the authoritarian, hierarchical and institutional social philos-
ophy which we see in application all around us. Man will be
compelled, Kropotkin declared, to fnd new forms of organisa-
tion for the social functions which the State fulfls through the
bureaucracy and he insisted that as long as this is not done
nothing will be done. I think we have discovered what these
new forms of organisation should be. We have now to make
the opportunities for puting them into practice.
13
ber of the group has a fxed workrole. Instead, the
men deploy themselves, depending on the require-
ments of the on-going group task. Within the lim-
its of technological and safety requirements they
are free to evolve their own way of organising and
carrying out their task. Tey are not subject to
any external authority in this respect, nor is there
within the group itself any member who takes over
a formal directive leadership function. Whereas in
conventional long-wall working the coal-geting
task is split into four to eight separate work roles,
carried out by diferent teams, each paid at a dif-
ferent rate, in the composite group members are
no longer paid directly for any of the tasks carried
out. Te all-in wage agreement is, instead, based
on the negotiated price per ton of coal produced by
the team. Te income obtained is divided equally
among team members.
Te works I have been quoting were writen for specialists
in productivity and industrial organisation, but their lessons
are clear for people who are interested in the idea of workers
control. Faced with the objection that even though it can be
shown that autonomous groups can organise themselves on a
large scale and for complex tasks, it has not been shown that
they can successfully co-ordinate, we resort once again to the
federative principle. Tere is nothing outlandish about the idea
that large numbers of autonomous industrial units can feder-
ate and co-ordinate their activities. If you travel across Europe
you go over the lines of a dozen railway systems capitalist
and communist co-ordinated by freely arrived at agreement
between the various undertakings, with no central authority.
You can post a leter to anywhere in the world, but there is no
world postal authority, representatives of diferent postal au-
thorities simply have a congress every fve years or so.
12
ity, is entirely centred on Paris so that the pros-
perity or the decline, the life or death of whole
regions has depended on the quality of the link
with the capital, we see the diference between a
centralised state and a federal alliance. Te rail-
way map is the easiest to read at a glance, but
let us now superimpose on it another showing
economic activity and the movement of popula-
tion. Te distribution of industrial activity all over
Switzerland, even in the outlying areas, accounts
for the strength and stability of the social struc-
ture of the country and prevented those horrible
19
th
century concentrations of industry, with their
slums and rootless proletariat.
I quote all this, as I said, not to praise Swiss democracy, but
to indicate that the federal principle which is at the heart of
anarchist social theory, is worth much more atention than
it is given in the textbooks on political science. Even in the
context of ordinary political institutions its adoption has a far-
reaching efect. Another anarchist theory of organisation is
what we might call the theory of spontaneous order: that given
a common need, a collection of people will, by trial and error,
by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of chaos
this order being more durable and more closely related to their
needs than any kind of externally imposed order.
Kropotkin derived this theory from the observations of the
history of human society and of social biology which led to
his book Mutual Aid, and it has been observed in most revo-
lutionary situations, in the ad hoc organisations which spring
up afer natural catastrophes, or in any activity where there is
no existing organisational form or hierarchical authority. Tis
concept was given the name Social Control in the book of that ti-
tle by Edward Allsworth Ross, who cited instances of frontier
societies where, through unorganised or informal measures, or-
5
der is efectively maintained without beneft of constituted au-
thority: Sympathy, sociability, the sense of justice and resent-
ment are competent, under favourable circumstances, to work
out by themselves a true, natural order, that is to say, an order
without design or art.
An interesting example of the working-out of this theory
was the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham, London, started in
the decade before the war by a group of physicians and biolo-
gists who wanted to study the nature of health and healthy be-
haviour instead of studying ill-health like the rest of their pro-
fession. Tey decided that the way to do this was to start a so-
cial club whose members joined as families and could use a va-
riety of facilities including a swimming bath, theatre, nursery
and cafeteria, in return for a family membership subscription
and for agreeing to periodic medical examinations. Advice, but
not treatment, was given. In order to be able to draw valid con-
clusions the Peckham biologists thought it necessary that they
should be able to observe human beings who were free free
to act as they wished and to give expression to their desires. So
there were no rules and no leaders. I was the only person with
authority, said Dr. Scot Williamson, the founder, and I used
it to stop anyone exerting any authority. For the frst eight
months there was chaos. With the frst member-families, says
one observer, there arrived a horde of undisciplined children
who used the whole building as they might have used one vast
London street. Screaming and running like hooligans through
all the rooms, breaking equipment and furniture, they made
life intolerable for everyone. Scot Williamson, however, in-
sisted that peace should be restored only by the response of
the children to the variety of stimuli that was placed in their
way, and, in less than a year the chaos was reduced to an or-
der in which groups of children could daily be seen swimming,
skating, riding bicycles, using the gymnasium or playing some
game, occasionally reading a book in the library the running
and screaming were things of the past.
6
most characteristic feature of the decision-formulating process
is that of mutuality in decision-making with fnal authority re-
siding in the hands of the grouped workers themselves. Te
gang system as he described it is very like the collective con-
tract systemadvocated by G. D. H. Cole, who claimed that Te
efect would be to link the members of the working group to-
gether in a common enterprise under their joint auspices and
control, and to emancipate them from an externally imposed
discipline in respect of their method of geting the work done.
My second example again derives from a comparative study
of diferent methods of work organisation, made by the Tavis-
tock Institute in the late 1950s, reported in E. L. Trists Organi-
sational Choice, and P. Herbsts Autonomous Group Functioning.
Its importance can be seen from the opening words of the frst
of these: Tis study concerns a group of miners who came to-
gether to evolve a new way of working together, planning the
type of change they wanted to put through, and testing it in
practice. Te new type of work organisation which has come
to be known in the industry as composite working, has in re-
cent years emerged spontaneously in a number of diferent pits
in the north-west Durham coal feld. Its roots go back to an
earlier tradition which had been almost completely displaced
in the course of the last century by the introduction of work
techniques based on task segmentation, diferential status and
payment, and extrinsic hierarchical control. Te other report
notes how the study showed the ability of quite large primary
work groups of 4050 members to act as self-regulating, self-
developing social organisms able to maintain themselves in a
steady state of high productivity. Te authors describe the sys-
tem in a way which shows its relation to anarchists thought:
Te composite work organisation may be de-
scribed as one in which the group takes over com-
plete responsibility for the total cycle of opera-
tions involved in mining the coal-face. No mem-
11
changing methods of production make the concentration of
vast numbers of people unnecessary, perhaps the best method
of persuading people that workers control is a feasible propo-
sition in large-scale industry is through pointing to successful
examples of what the guild socialists called encroaching con-
trol. Tey are partial and limited in efect, as they are bound to
be, since they operate within the conventional industrial struc-
ture, but they do indicate that workers have an organisational
capacity on the shop foor, which most people deny that they
possess.
Let me illustrate this from two recent instances in mod-
ern large-scale industry . Te frst, the gang system worked
in Coventry, was described by an American professor of in-
dustrial and management engineering, Seymour Melman, in
his book Decision-Making and Productivity. He sought, by a
detailed comparison of the manufacture of a similar product,
the Ferguson tractor, in Detroit and in Coventry, England, to
demonstrate that there are realistic alternatives to managerial
rule over production. His account of the operation of the gang
system was confrmed by a Coventry engineering worker, Reg
Wright, in two articles in Anarchy.
Of Standards tractor factory in the period up to 1956 when
it was sold, Melman writes: In this frm we will show that at
the same time: thousands of workers operated virtully without
supervision as conventionally understood, and at high produc-
tivity; the highest wage in British industry was paid; high qual-
ity products were produced at acceptable prices in extensively
mechanised plants; the management conducted its afairs at
unusually low costs; also, organised workers had a substantial
role in production decision-making.
From the standpoint of the production workers, the gang
system leads to keeping track of goods instead of keeping
track of people. Melman contrasts the predatory competi-
tion which characterises the managerial decision-making sys-
tem with the workers decision-making system in which Te
10
More dramatic examples of the same kind of phenomenon
are reported by those people who have been brave enough, or
confdent enough to institute self-governing non-punitive com-
munities of delinquents or maladjusted children: August Aich-
horn and Homer Lane are examples. Aichhorn ran that famous
institution in Vienna, described in his book Wayward Youth.
Homer Lane was the man who, afer experiments in Amer-
ica started in Britain a community of juvenile delinquents,
boys and girls, called Te Litle Commonwealth. Lane used
to declare that Freedom cannot be given. It is taken by the
child in discovery and invention. True to this principle, re-
marks Howard Jones, he refused to impose upon the children
a system of government copied from the institutions of the
adult world. Te self-governing structure of the Litle Com-
monwealth was evolved by the children themselves, slowly and
painfully to satisfy their own needs.
Anarchists believe in leaderless groups, and if this phrase is fa-
miliar to you it is because of the paradox that what was known
as the leaderless group technique was adopted in the British
and American armies during the war as a means of selecting
leaders. Te military psychiatrists learned that leader or fol-
lower traits are not exhibited in isolation. Tey are, as one of
them wrote, relative to a specifc social situation leadership
varied from situation to situation and from group to group. Or
as the anarchist Michael Bakunin put it a hundred years ago,
I receive and I give such is human life. Each directs and is
directed in his turn. Terefore there is no fxed and constant
authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and,
above all, voluntary authority and subordination.
Tis point about leadership was well put in John Comer-
fords book, Health the Unknown, about the Peckham experi-
ment:
Accustomed as is this age to artifcial leader-
ship it is difcult for it to realise the truth
7
that leaders require no training or appointing, but
emerge spontaneously when conditions require
them. Studying their members in the free-for-all
of the Peckham Centre, the observing scientists
saw over and over again how one member instinc-
tively became, and was instinctively but not of-
cially recognised as, leader to meet the needs of
one particular moment. Such leaders appeared and
disappeared as the fux of the Centre required. Be-
cause they were not consciously appointed, nei-
ther (when they had fulflled their purpose) were
they consciously overthrown. Nor was any par-
ticular gratitude shown by members to a leader
either at the time of his services or afer for ser-
vices rendered. Tey followed his guidance just as
long as his guidance was helpful and what they
wanted. Tey melted away from him without re-
grets when some widening of experience beck-
oned them on to some fresh adventure, which
would in turn throw up its spontaneous leader, or
when their self-confdence was such that any form
of constrained leadership would have been a re-
straint to them. A society, therefore, if lef to itself
in suitable circumstances to express itself sponta-
neously works out its own salvation and achieves
a harmony of action which superimposed leader-
ship cannot emulate.
Dont be deceived by the sweet reasonableness of all this.
Tis anarchist concept of leadership is quite revolutionary in
its implications as you can see if you look around, for you
see everywhere in operation the opposite concept: that of hi-
erarchical, authoritarian, privileged and permanent leadership.
Tere are very few comparative studies available of the efects
of these two opposite approaches to the organisation of work.
8
Two of them I will mention later; another, about the organisa-
tion of architects ofces was produced in 1962 for the Institute
of British Architects under the title Te Architect and His Ofice.
Te team which prepared this report found two diferent ap-
proaches to the design process, which gave rise to diferent
ways of working and methods of organisation. One they cat-
egorised as centralised, which was characterised by autocratic
forms of control, and the other they called dispersed, which
promoted what they called an informal atmosphere of free-
fowing ideas. Tis is a very live issue among architects. Mr.
W. D. Pile, who in an ofcial capacity helped to sponsor the
outstanding success of postwar British architecture, the school-
building programme, specifes among the things he looks for
in a member of the building team that: He must have a belief
in what I call the non-hierarchical organisation of the work.
Te work has got to be organised not on the star system, but
on the repertory system. Te team leader may ofen be junior
to a team member. Tat will only be accepted if it is commonly
accepted that primacy lies with the best idea and not with the
senior man.
And one of our greatest architects, Walter Gropius, pro-
claims what he calls the technique of collaboration among
men, which would release the creative instincts of the individ-
ual instead of smothering them. Te essence of such technique
should be to emphasise individual freedomof initiative, instead
of authoritarian direction by a boss synchronizing individual
efort by a continuous give and take of its members
Tis leads us to another corner-stone of anarchist theory,
the idea of workers control of industry. A great many peo-
ple think that workers control is an atractive idea, but one
which is incapable of realisation (and consequently not worth
fghting for) because of the scale and complexity of modern
industry. How can we convince them otherwise? Apart from
pointing out how changing sources of motive power make
the geographical concentration of industry obsolete, and how
9