The Joy of Six 1258

"The middle-income professionals in the seats we have just won will take a lot of persuading to pay more for better prisons, probation officers and children’s services, even if told that alienated teenagers turn into rioters, and criminals without rehabilitation reoffend. Those saving to send their children to private schools will be reluctant to pay more tax for the state sector. Getting comfortably-off taxpayers in the home counties to contribute to regeneration of the north will be very difficult." William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats need to have a clear position on public spending.

Alex Krasodomski argues that the UK riots have forced Western democracies to confront their reliance on technology giants.

"The Peak District and Exmoor were found to have concentrations of antibiotics at a level that could be of concern for human health as they were beyond the threshold that can contribute to antimicrobial resistance. This could affect anyone entering the water for swimming or water sports, the researchers said." Lucie Heath on new research into pharmaceutical pollution of English rivers.

Charlotte Llewellyn celebrates the very English anarchist Colin Ward, who "put people, especially those most marginalised by society, at the centre of his work. He recognised the creativity, knowledge, and talent of ordinary people and their ability to make change happen, as well as emphasising the importance of working co-operatively towards a better future."

Ingrid Skeels explores the history and benefits of 'playing out', where children enjoy informal sport for free in the community where they live, and She how 'play streets' are revitalising communities across the UK and further afield. And she does it on the England and Wales Cricket Board site too.

"We could ask if Yoda's Theme would be Yoda’s Theme without Yoda. Or, does Jaws' theme need a shark to be frightening? Do we need to see E.T. fly across the moon in order to be moved by the film’s soaring theme? Does the Close Encounter’s five-note motif only work if we see Richard Dreyfus playing with mashed potatoes?" Edwardo Pérez discusses the film music of John Williams.

Two quotations in defence of Baden Powell

Embed from Getty Images

This is an extract from a blog post - The generation gap and reinventing bob-a-job week - that I wrote back in 2011.

I have never bought the idea that Scouting is a sinister, right-wing movement. That view misses the essential strangeness of Scouting.

This is brought out in this passage from Tony Gould's Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes from 1983:

Colin always defended the scouts against leftish accusations of incipient fascism and the like. How could be not be loyal when the "prophetic book" was none other than Cousin Roddy's Kim?

He describes the ideology of the movement as "the weirdest blend of ritual, non-sectarian religiosity, nature and beast worship, and a passion for peoples (Red Indian, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen) whom Christian imperialism had tried for centuries to destroy."

He makes a distinction between militarism - useless to deny, he argues, what it is for which the scout should chiefly "be prepared" - and the para-militarism of the Boys' Brigade. The true military heir to Baden Powell (he writes in 1961) is Dayan. Fascist and Communist countries alike usually end up suppressing the scouts.

MacInnes, the author of Absolute Beginners, is an impeccably left-wing figure, even if (as this passage hints) he was a kinsman of Rudyard Kipling, who gave the Scouting movement its mythology.

And even if you think Baden Powell would have liked, at least in certain moods, to have founded a paramilitary movement, it didn’t turn out like that. 

Here are Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy writing in their Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp in 1986:

When Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was published in serial form groups of boys all over the country set up their own groups before any central organisation had been formed. 

Leslie Paul recalls how “With an astonishing perception they leapt at Scouting as at something for which they had been waiting, divining that this was a movement which took the side of the natural inquisitive, adventuring boy against the repressive schoolmaster, the moralising parson and the coddling parent.

Before the leaders knew what was happening groups were springing up spontaneously and everywhere bands of boys, with bare knees, and armed with broomsticks, began foraging through the countryside.

It seems Baden-Powell was not so much scouting for boys as chasing after them.

Living the town and country life

"We live the town and country life," went the song in an old television commercial for the Town and Country Building Society. That society has long since merged with the Woolwich (and thus Barclays Bank), but maybe it was on to something.

I have been reading the opening chapter of The Child in the Country by my favourite modern anarchist Colin Ward. In it, Ward looks at the consensus among so many theorists that city life was unhealthy for children and that the country was the place for them to grow up:

Not only public schools and preparatory schools but borstals, reformatories and approved schools were deliberately situated in the country, far from the temptations and stimulations of the city, for rural childhood was especially valued. 

"Rousseau's 'Emile,' wrote Herbert Read, "seems to have been taught in a well-furnished country house, surrounded by a well-cultivated garden with all variety of natural phenomena within easy reach. That may be the ideal environment for the unfolding sensibility of the child - personally I believe that it is.

That may be what thinkers of the right and left have said about childhood - particularly in the early twentieth century with its eugenicist concern for national efficiency - but it is not how they have generally behaved.

As Ward points out:

The rich, in bringing up their children, have always been able to mingle urban and rural experiences. The possession of a town house as well as a rural estate, whether we are thinking of Imperial Rome, eighteenth-century England or nineteenth-century Russia, ensured that the children of the family gained experience of both, as well as of the drama of the transition between the two. 

It was expedient for the patricians that their children, or at least their sons, should gain the experience of negotiating with gamekeeper and bailiff as well as with gaming-house keeper and tailor. It was expedient that their daughters should achieve marriageability and the avoid the attributes of hoydens or tomboys by being 'finished' in town before 'coming out'.

I remember falling into conversation with a retired architect in a pub in Rye. (Rye is the kind of town where you find yourself falling into conversation with retired architects.) He pointed out that the terraces of Bath, which we so admire today, were inhabitable in part because the owners had a place in the country to go to as well. So we should not draw easy conclusions from them about the degree of urban density that is compatible with pleasant living.

We cannot all live like eighteenth-century gentlemen, but we can avoid adopting an unthinking polarity between town life and country life.

GUEST POST A beginner's guide to anarchism

Ruth Kinna is the author of A Beginner's Guide to Anarchism (Oneworld Publications, 2009).

Anarchism is often said to have a sporadic history: defeat in Spain in 1939 marks the end of the international movement which had its origins in the First International; 1968 was a year of resurgence, sparked by student protest and the rise of the new left; and the Battle for Seattle in 1999, the global justice movement’s coming out party, was anarchism’s most recent manifestation.

Though each wave generates a good deal of enthusiasm and some affection, a negative image of the anarchist still prevails. The alter-globalisation movement and organisations like Reclaim the Streets encouraged an association with party-going carnival "fluffies," but the bearded, bomb-throwing terrorist remains a powerful trope (witness the character "V" in V for Vendetta), and the balaclava of urban youth, the punk and the eco-warrior are modern takes on it - search for ‘anarchist’ on Google image search and see what appears.

In different ways, each speaks to the suspicion and unease that the idea of "anarchy" stirs. Anarchism might be interesting and, compared to other currents of radical and socialist thought, an attractive "libertarian" alternative, but anarchism is still linked with violence, utopianism and rebellion in equal measure. Do either graffiti artists or their audiences realise that the circle scrawled around the A is actually an O and that the symbol stands for "anarchy is order"?

The answer is probably very few and too many still confuse ‘anarchy’ with the Hobbesian mess that anarchists associate with the state. How, then, should anarchism be understood and what do its recent manifestations have to do with the politics of Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin or P.-J. Proudhon, to name three of the anarchist movements leading thinkers?

The Beginner’s Guide was written with a number of aims in mind: to provide an accessible account of anarchist politics; to highlight the diversity of the movement and unpack some of the myths attached to it. As importantly, it has been designed to introduce anarchist ideas without adopting prescriptive definitions. In keeping with the diversity at the heart of anarchist politics, it neither presents a check-list of core beliefs nor a supposed set of essential theoretical assumptions (for example, an "anarchist conception of human nature").

Anarchism is linked to anti-statism, but this can be and is understood in myriad ways: in relation to capitalism, as a form of anti-authoritarianism, as a rejection of institutionalised power, as a set of social relations, a combination of any of these, and so on.

The first chapter of the book discusses three different approaches to anarchism: the canonical, which identifies the founding fathers and key thinkers; the categorical - an approach which groups anarchists into schools (for example "philosophical", "communist", "individualist") - and which spawned a movement that demands ‘anarchism without adjectives’; and the historical, which traces the emergence of the political and labour movements which sprang up across the world in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.

Each has something to tell us about anarchism, but it is through an appreciation of their interrelationship that we learn the most about the perennial concerns of self-identifying anarchists and the ways in which these concerns translate into theory, into ideas about political practice and organisational ideals. This is a rich tradition of political thought and action, innovative, passionate and creative, and it embraces late, great revolutionaries like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy and contemporary activists like Bob Black and John Zerzan. Class struggle anarchists, anarcha-feminists, anti-civilisation anarchists are all part of the mix.

Subsequent chapters focus on particular themes: conceptions of the state; ideas of anarchy and approaches to action. The rejection of centralised power is a strong theme in anarchist writing, but so too is the state’s hypnotic authority which leads us to adopt roles that militate against individual reflection and conscience. In the state, Fredy Perlman argued, we wear masks; and even if we agree with the decisions that we are charged to take, we are infantalised by Leviathan and the processes which structure daily life.

The book explores a number of ideas of anarchy. Amongst these is the practical utopianism of Colin Ward and Paul Goodman, two inventive, creative subversives whose reflections on education, squatting, urban design, gardening and a whole host of other issues continues to inspire community-action groups. Ward, in particular, took his lead from Kropotkin, whose critique of the state (in The State its Historic Role and Mutual Aid) pointed to the possibilities of co-operation, local initiative and the development of non-hierarchical organisations. Not quite the big society. Practical anarchy not only by-passes government, it also develops its own moral rules and it challenges market-capitalism.

The anarchists’ understanding of the intimate relationship between ends and means is one of the themes of the final chapter. This has led both to a principled rejection of parliamentary politics and the aspiration to take power in the state – for benevolent or other purposes.

Anarchists stand against vanguardism. They are advocates of direct action, though they understand this in a variety of ways and adopt very different attitudes to questions of violence, disobedience and protest. Because they reject institutional politics, anarchists are often dismissed as hopeless idealists. Anyone prepared to engage with the order that anarchists see at the heart of anarchy will find this a strange reversal.

If you want to find out more, the book is available at Housemans online shop.

Colin Ward on the state

Writing on Crooked Timber, Maria cites a favorite quotation of Colin Ward. It comes from the German anarchist Gustav Landauer:

The State 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 differently.

Colin Ward 1924-2010

I was sad to hear of the death of the anarchist thinker Colin Ward. As I said last year, he managed to "make anarchism sound a) common sense and b) thoroughly British".

Next Left has a good appreciation of him by Stuart White:

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.

National Allotment Week and Prince Kropotkin

Birkdale Focus has a superb post by Iain Brodie Brown that starts by noting that this is National Allotment Week, goes on to quote Peter Kropotkin and ends by reminiscing about the glory days of the Young Liberals:

For our generation it was not only Kropotkin's ideas around "Mutual Aid" that we found attractive but his 'green' ideas especially in his book "Factory Fields and Workshops". This publication did impact on Liberals at the times especially those like Howard developing the idea of 'garden suburbs'.

The book was republished in 1974 with a commentary by Colin Ward. In the book-and this is where we get back to allotments-Kropotkin argued that if food production was small scale "allotment-like" then the level of production would dramatically expand. His ideas influenced Gandhi and Tolstoy as well as the Dig for Victory campaign.

Colin Ward is a favourite of mine. He manages to make anarchism sound a) common sense and b) thoroughly British. There was a good article on him in the Guardian a few years ago.