Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (117 page)

Read also accepted that liberty is always relative to man’s control over natural forces. In his opinion, the ideal of anarchy can best be realized through the practical organization of anarcho-syndicalism. As an anarcho-communist, he further argued that we should surrender all our material rights and put our property into a common fund. Only this way could a classless society be realized – ‘society without a bureaucracy, without an army, without any closed grade or profession, without functionless components’.
¹⁷
This can only be achieved by federal devolution, by decentralizing the economy.

There might be the need, Read admits, for a kind ‘parliament of industry’ to adjust relations between the various collectives and to decide on general questions of policy, but it would in no sense form an administrative, legislative or executive body. Work in general should be subordinated to the enjoyment of life and be considered no more than a necessary interval in the day’s leisure. Anarchism thus implies a ‘universal decentralization of authority, and a universal simplification of life’.
¹⁸

Read sketched his social ideal in more detail in
The Politics of the Unpolitical
(1943), in which he argued that society must begin with the family and then with the guild. Among the essential features of what he calls ‘natural society’ are:

Clearly not all these principles, especially the seventh, are strictly anarchist, and Read is prepared to allow an independent judiciary to exist merely as ‘the arbiter, to decide, in the interests of the whole, the conflicts which emerge in the parts’.
¹⁹

Read is not a complete egalitarian in calling for equal shares and work. He believes that a hierarchy of talent and the division of labour would always exist in a free society. Although no special powers would be enjoyed by an elite, there would probably be an aristocracy of the intellect. Since there is no uniformity of desires, society would not be reduced to the dull mediocrity of a common level. An anarchist society however would give everyone the full opportunity to develop their minds and imaginations. For Read lust for power and fear of death are the original sins and his final aim is neither to suffer nor renounce but ‘to accept, to enjoy, to realize the anarchy of life in the midst of the order of living’.
²⁰

Read’s interest in psychology and philosophy led him to draw on the insights of many thinkers to support his anarchist philosophy. Within a Freudian context, he defined the anarchist as ‘the man who, in his manhood, dares to resist the authority of the father’.
²¹
At the same time, he rejected the psychological need for leadership, particularly denouncing the leader of the group. The only alternative to leadership is the principle of co-operation and mutual aid; not the father — son relationship, but the relationship of brotherhood. Read also drew on Jung’s description of the individuation process to support his view of the gradual emancipation of the individual from the group.

Read valued freedom above all else, and his treatment of the concept, a concept often lazily abused by other anarchists, is suggestive. He recognized that freedom implies freedom from some kind of control, but in its positive condition it means the freedom to create, ‘freedom to become what one
is
’. It is not therefore a state of rest, but ‘a state of action, of projection, of self-realization’. It is a positive self-regulating form of responsibility. He also contrasted perceptively the use of the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in English: ‘A man
is
free: he is given his liberty’.
²²
The latter is abstract and
essential; the former concrete and existential. Liberty is a political ideal and is expressed in social organization. Freedom is the condition in which the ‘spirit of man’ achieves spontaneity and creativity.
²³

From the anarchist point of view, Read thought that it is not good enough merely to control ourselves and external nature, a view subscribed to by most doctrinaire Marxists who see freedom as the knowledge of necessity. On the contrary, we must allow for ‘spontaneous developments’. Whereas Marxism is based on economics, Read argued that anarchism is based on biology, in the sense that it insists on ‘the consciousness of an overriding human solidarity’. Unlike the ideologies of Marxism and existentialism, anarchism, for Read, is the only political philosophy that combines ‘an essentially revolutionary and contingent attitude with a philosophy of freedom. It is the only militant libertarian doctrine left in the world, and on its diffusion depends the progressive evolution of human consciousness and of humanity itself.’
²⁴

Read was no original thinker and the philosophical foundations of his anarchism are eclectic. Like Kropotkin he discerns a natural order which predates the birth of society, and he celebrates mutual aid and human solidarity. Like Godwin, he believes in universal truth – ‘a universal order of thought, which is the order of the real world’. Like Proudhon, he argues that we should discover the true laws of nature and live in accordance with them, especially ‘the principles of equality and fairness inherent in the natural order of the universe’.
²⁵
And like Tolstoy, he maintains that when we follow reason, we listen to the voice of God: ‘we discover God’s order, which is the Kingdom of Heaven’.
²⁶

All this sounds extremely rational, yet for all his stress on reason, Read believed that a new religion is a necessary element in a free and organic society; he admired the Spanish anarchists during the Civil War precisely because they had a ‘religious intensity’.
²⁷

As for the means to realize a free society, Read argued that anarchism naturally implies pacifism. It should not entail, as it does with Huxley, a fight against one’s instincts, but should work through reason and persuasion. He accepted Wilhelm Reich’s view that all forms of aggressive behaviour may be explained in terms of ‘prior frustrations’.
²⁸
Even if the will to power is a biological factor, it is offset by the drive to mutual aid. Moreover, any ‘aggressive instinct’ as the basis of the will to power can be turned into creative instead of destructive channels.
²⁹
There is therefore no insurmountable biological or psychological obstacle to peace. It is nationalism and collectivism which encourage war, and war increases in intensity as society develops a central organization. War will exist as long as States exist, whereas ‘Peace is anarchy’.
³⁰

But this does not mean that Read remained quiescent. He developed
Stirner’s distinction between revolution and insurrection and Camus’s between revolution and rebellion to argue that we should aim to get rid of political institutions by rebellion or insurrection. Guided by instinct rather than reason, insurrection and rebellion act like shock therapy on the body of society and may change human nature, ‘in the sense of creating a new morality, or new metaphysical values’.
³¹
On a practical level, he also advocated a General Strike of the entire community against the State to bring about a spontaneous and universal insurrection. Until this happens, we can try and persuade each other by reason and set an example to emulate within a ‘cell of good living’. But whatever means the anarchist employs, Read insisted that revolutionary realism in an age of atoms bombs is necessarily pacific: ‘the bomb is now the symbol, not of anarchy, but of totalitarian power’.
³²

Read once remarked that ‘it is perfectly possible, even normal, to live a life of contradictions’.
³³
He certainly exemplified the sentiment in his own life. A virulent anti-Catholic, he left his first wife and married a Catholic convert who brought up their children in the faith he had profoundly despised. Although a professed pacifist, he fought in the First World War, and was decorated with the DSO and MC for bravery. Later in life he left the Committee of 100 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) because its policy of non-violence he found ‘too provocative’. Despite his attack on the prevailing political and artistic culture and his description of the House of Commons as descending ‘below mediocrity to some absolute zero of vulgarity and ineptitude’, he was honoured by the Establishment with a knighthood in 1952.
³⁴
Read wrote perceptively about the paradox of anarchism, but he is remembered by many anarchists as that great paradox, an anarchist knight. For all his revolutionary views of culture and his call for social rebellion, he remained deeply conservative in many respects. Towards the end of his life, he lost his faith in the goodness of humanity and felt that the only possible protest was to establish one’s individuality.
³⁵

Yet despite his paradoxical position, Read remained all his life on the side of organic growth in freedom, culture and community against the artificial organization of liberty, civilization and the State. While he did not advance anarchist philosophy to any great extent, he gave fresh and vital expression to the traditional themes of anarchism. He was the most prominent British anarchist intellectual of his day, and he reached a wide audience. With his peasant roots, his careful dress, his country retreat and his anarchist ideals, Read was part of that romantic movement which seeks ‘the application of a total “metaphysical sensibility”, exploring without fear the confines of man’s fate and destiny’.
³⁶
Many were dismayed by his apparent arrogance and opportunism, but he undoubtedly affirmed the irreducible freedom of humanity.

Amongst British anarchist writers, Alex Comfort has been one of the most prolific as poet, novelist and biologist. Like Read, he has remained on the margins of the organized anarchist movement, but like Kropotkin, he has used modern science to back up his arguments for anarchism. He has approached gerontology and sexology from a libertarian point of view, emphasizing the dignity of the old and the need for personal responsibility in sex.

In the forties and early fifties Comfort was particularly active as an anarchist and wrote pamphlets for the Freedom Press. In
Barbarism and Sexual Freedom
(1948), originally a series of lectures on the sociology of sex from the standpoint of anarchism, he insisted that a free society consists of ‘politically, a form of society without central or other governmental power, and without extra-personal forms of coercion, and sociologically, one based on mutually-accepted obligations maintained solely by the existence of a social group ethic’.
³⁷
As a pacifist, he also wrote at the time pamphlets for
Peace News
calling for
Peace and Disobedience
(1946) and
Social Responsibility in Science and Art
(1952).

In
Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State
(1950), Comfort’s most important book from an anarchist point of view, he argued that the modern State is a haven for delinquents since power attracts the maladjusted — a neat reversal of the familiar claim that left-wing politics, and especially anarchism, is an infantile disorder. The scope of crime, Comfort points out, depends directly on legislation, but delinquency in the sense of ‘action and attitude prejudicial to the welfare of others’ is a psychiatric condition.
³⁸

According to this definition, he maintains that centralized societies with established governments have put delinquents in power, notably in the law enforcement agencies of police, army and prison. Their main preoccupation is a desire for authority, for powers of control and direction over others. Party politics also attracts aggressive personalities in search of power as an end in itself, ‘psychopathic persons or groups who will exhibit delinquent behaviour’.
³⁹

In a lecture on delinquency given at the anarchist summer school organized by the Freedom Press in 1950, Comfort went even further to declare:

In his analysis of the sociology of power, Comfort draws on the insights of social anthropology and psychoanalysis. He makes the interesting observation
that organized government first appears in history at the same time as anti-social patterns of behaviour: ‘at the point in any culture when it ceases to be capable of absorbing its own abnormal members, the demand for coercion appears hand in hand with the emergence of individuals who desire to coerce.’
⁴¹
He suggests that ‘power-centred’ cultures are found in ‘patriform’ societies, those based upon jealousy of the father, which emphasize command, prohibition and coercion. ‘Life-centred’ cultures on the other hand develop in ‘matriform’ societies, where co-operation, production and creation are more important. Among the components for the desire for power he suggests is self-identification with the coercive father and power as a sexual substitute, or as a form of compensation for failure to secure status and affection. As social animals, humans desire the approval and affection of others, and prohibition may well be a substitute for participation and recognition.