اللاسلطوية: مقدمة قصيرة جداً

Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain's most famous anarchist for nearly half a ¬century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action (1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the "father of -Russian socialism", Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be ¬discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening ¬co-operative ¬relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.

… their rejection of external authority, whether that of the state, the employer, of the hierarchies of administration and of established institutions like the school and the church. The same is true of more recently emerging varieties of anarchist propaganda, green anarchism and anarcha-feminism.

Every European, North American, Latin American, and Asian society has had its anarchist publicists, journals, circles of adherents, imprisoned activists, and martyrs. Whenever an authoritarian and repressive political regime collapses, the anarchists are there, a minority urging their fellow citizens to absorb the lessons of the sheer horror and irresponsibility of government.

(beginning) For a century, anarchists have used the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist’, both as a noun and as an adjective … However, much more recently the word has been appropriated [he could have said “usurped”] by various American free marker philosophers … so it is necessary to examine the modern individualist ‘libertarian’ response from the standpoint of the anarchist tradition.
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(at the end) The American ‘libertarians’ of the 20th century are academics rather than social activists, and their inventiveness seems to be limited to providing an ideology for untrammeled market capitalism.

In the great tide of nationalism in the 19th century there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging the alternative of federalism. It is interesting, at least, that those whose names survive were the three best-known anarchist thinkers of that century …
[and, several pages later]
After every kind of disastrous experience in the 20th century, the rulers of the nation states of Europe have directed policy towards several kinds of supranational entities. The crucial issue that faces them is whether to conceive of a Europe of States or a Europe of Regions.

A resolution has been adopted by the council of Europe, calling for national governments to adopt its Charter for Local Self-Government, ‘to formalize commitment to the principle that government functions should be carried out at the lowest level possible and only transferred to higher government by consent.’

This precept is an extraordinary tribute to Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and the ideas that they were alone in voicing (apart from some interesting Spanish thinkers like Pi y Margall or Joaquin Costa).

A comforting thought for anarchists is the reflection that a society advanced enough to accept the environmental imperatives of the 21st century will be obliged to reinvent anarchism as a response to them.

For a very strong case has been made by such authors as Murray and Bookchin and Alan Carter that anarchism is the only political ideology capable of addressing the challenges posed by our new green consciousness to the accepted range of political ideas. Anarchism becomes more and more relevant for the new century.