Why I am an anarchist: insights into British anarchist thought and politics

Summary

Podcast Summary

Overview

Episode Title: Why I am an Anarchist: Insights into British Anarchist Thought and Politics
Podcast: LSE: Public lectures and events
Host: London School of Economics and Political Science (Chair: Robin Archer)
Speaker: Dr. Sophie Scott-Brown (Research Fellow, Institute of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews)
Date: December 2, 2025

Theme:
Dr. Sophie Scott-Brown provides a lively, nuanced exploration of anarchist thought, focusing on its historical roots, key debates, and its relevance to present-day political challenges. Drawing on her new book, The Radical Fifties, she highlights British anarchism, especially its role in postwar politics, and considers how anarchist principles might respond to current and future crises.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. What is Anarchism? (03:04 – 09:45)

• Definition and Etymology:
  • “Anarchy comes from the Greek an, meaning ‘no’, and arche, meaning ‘rulers’. So: ‘no rulers.’” – Sophie Scott-Brown [03:45]
• Distinction Between Rulers and Leaders:
  • Rulers are institutionalized figures (monarch, president, manager); anarchists object to permanent authority that becomes symbolic and abstract.
• Anti-Permanence Principle:
  • “Anarchists object to forms of permanent authority, believing them to be neither necessary nor desirable for human security and well-being.” [05:14]
• Anarchism’s Ubiquity and Protean Nature:
  • Threads through world religions, various forms of liberalism, socialism, and even conservatism.
  • Cautions against over-broad definitions: seeing anarchism everywhere risks defining it as nothing.

---

2. Anarchism in 1950s Britain – Why the ’50s Matter (09:45 – 21:01)

• The Paradox of the Fifties:
  • Contrary to cliché, the 1950s were a period of contradiction, not just consensus and conformity.
    • “It was a period of intense and almost continuous contradictions…” [11:31]
    • Examples: austerity-to-affluence, proclaimed ‘freedom’ vs growing bureaucracy and compulsory conscription, classlessness vs new stratifications, decolonization vs violent colonial clampdowns, gendered home ideals vs shifting labor realities, peace vs the existential threat of the Cold War.
• Sense of Contradiction and Collective Dissonance:
  • “Nothing meant what it said and nothing that was said was what it meant. Everything became electrified and subject to question…” [16:07]
• Collapse of Integrative Ideologies:
  • Reference to the ‘end of ideology’ (Daniel Bell, Judith Shklar), and Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism; impossibility of unifying systems.
  • “There seems no way they can be reintegrated… It’s very hard to know where to go and what to do next.” [18:03]

---

3. Case Studies: British Anarchist Politics in Practice (21:01 – 29:19)

Three Key Groups Explored:

• Freedom Press Anarchists
  • Reclaimed broader anarchist traditions, including liberal/ethical/individualist strains, against dominant class-struggle anarchism.
• Direct Action Committee (Anti–Nuclear Peace Activists)
  • Pioneered new forms of activism – pluralistic, focused on the process and ethical basis of action, not requiring shared ideology.
  • “We wouldn’t have Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil if it hadn’t been for some of the pioneering efforts of these people.” [24:21]
• First British New Left (Universities and Left Review Group, New Left Review)
  • Emphasized inquiry and local activism, treating activism as a form of social research.
  • “Turned activism into a form of social inquiry. It was unsystematic, yes, but… undertook bold investigations into what people were actually experiencing.” [25:44]

---

4. Features of ‘Anarcho-Activism’ (29:19 – 32:31)

• Process over Outcome: Emphasis on meaningful participation, autonomy, and small, context-specific actions.
• Anti-Permanence Applied:
  • Projects should be limited, temporary, and not aspire to permanence or hierarchy – even on the Left.
• Ordinary People, Everywhere:
  • Political action should be for and by those outside official institutions, grounded in all domains of life (home, work, community, family).

Notable Quote:

• “This runs so entirely contrary to our conventional sense that social change requires unity, solidarity, and collective effort on a large scale. We are always hearing that factionalism is the left's greatest weakness, but here it is potentially transformed into its greatest virtue.” [29:53]

• ‘Long Revolution’ vs Epic Confrontation (Raymond Williams):

  • Social change occurs as reciprocal, decentralized, connected—but not systematic—cultural shifts (“revolution by contagion, not confrontation”). [31:32]

---

5. Anarchism Today: Problems and Possibilities (32:31 – 35:16)

• Contemporary Challenges:

  • Modern ‘polycrisis’: global capitalism, wars, collapsing democracies, pandemics, climate change.
  • “We remain ensnared amid modernity’s contradictions… we refer to them as polycrisis.” [32:39]

• Practicality and Limits:

  • “Anarcho activism is… the most practical response available to us. But that does not make it unproblematic.”
  • Chief concern: Do we have time for a “long revolution” in crises requiring urgent action?
  • Anarchism increases capacity for adaptability, resilience, and responsible coexistence, rather than offering final ‘solutions’. [34:51]

---

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Anarchism’s Flexibility:

  • “Anarchism is at its most logically consistent when considered as a provocative outlook, capable of generating infinite ideas and practices.” [09:45]

• On Political Action:

  • “It doesn’t always matter if the actual project fails so long as people have had that experience.” [28:04]

• On the Dangers of Power:

  • “This constant centrifugal urge to break power down… runs so contrary to our conventional sense that social change requires unity…” [29:19]

• On Education as Transformation:

  • Drawing on Gandhian inspiration: “Everything you do should not just be for the outcome, but should be for the sort of experience, the way it transforms you as an individual…” [41:24]

---

Key Audience Q&A Highlights

On Democracy and Authority (36:35 – 39:14):

• Anarchism is skeptical of permanent representative democracy but open to radical democracy—widespread, participatory, and anti-permanence.
  • “You can have leaders in anarchy, they just can’t be permanent.” [37:17]

On Anarchism’s (In)Ability to Last—Activism and Failure (39:59 – 43:16):

• Dissipation and dispersal are not necessarily failures.
  • “Their organizations rise and fall… but failure becomes an unexpected source of success… [by creating] training grounds for all these people who go off and do their own activities.” [41:19]

On Human Nature and Permanence (44:34 – 46:33):

• Human nature is malleable; some crave permanence, others adapt to change.
  • “Anarchy really is, like your Swiss knife of a political ideology. It can just sort of lend itself to any problem.” [44:34]

On Presence in Capitalism (47:42 – 51:23):

• There is an ‘anarchist presence’ even within capitalism, especially via mutual exchange and anti-monopoly sentiments—major fault-line among anarchists regarding property and market relations.

On Working Within the System (52:24 – 56:37):

• Participating in parties is a personal tactical choice—purism vs. strategic compromise.

On AI, Technology, and the Future (57:36 – 63:05):

• Skeptical of AI-induced dependency; agency resides in deciding “if we actually like being human.” Anarchism has tools for global issues but faces a scale challenge against “Medusa-like” globalized power.

On Education (81:03 – 83:02):

• Anarchist pedagogy focuses on autonomy, adaptability, and skills relevant to context; critical of competitive, punitive mainstream schooling.

---

Selected Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction of Anarchism: [03:04 – 09:45]
• Contradictions of 1950s Britain: [11:31 – 18:03]
• Pluralist Politics and Academy/Activist Movements: [21:01 – 32:31]
• Traits of Anarcho-Activism: [29:19 – 32:31]
• Modern Polycrisis and Anarchist Responses: [32:31 – 35:16]
• Q&A on Democracy and Authority: [36:35 – 39:14]
• Q&A on Sustainability, Movement ‘Failures’: [39:59 – 43:16]
• Q&A on Human Nature and Capitalism: [44:34 – 51:23]
• Q&A on Voting, Populism, and Participation: [52:24 – 56:37]
• Q&A on AI and Global Challenges: [57:36 – 63:05]
• Q&A on Welfare, Decentralization: [63:58 – 68:53]
• Q&A on Work and Government Response: [70:34 – 78:03]
• Final Q&A: Definition, Education, Sortition: [78:29 – 83:38]

---

Final Thoughts

Dr. Scott-Brown’s tour de force presentation challenges conventional narratives about anarchism, arguing for its central—if often unacknowledged—role in British political history and present-day social movements. Her analysis draws compelling links between the creative, pluralist activism of the 1950s and the dilemmas faced by contemporary radicals, highlighting anarchism’s “anti-permanence principle” as both a strength and a conundrum for organizing meaningful change.

Memorable Takeaway:
“Anarchism is not just a wildly idealistic politics as commonly conceived; it is the most practical response available to us.” – Sophie Scott-Brown [34:47]

A rich and engaging episode, indispensable for anyone interested in British radicalism, “small-p” politics, or the ongoing quest to build a freer, more adaptive society.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Hey.

[B]

Welcome, everyone. Good evening. Welcome, everyone to the lsc. My name's Robin Archer. I'm the director of the Ralph Melband Program here at the London School of Economics. And as some of you will know, the Miliband program often engages with radical and heterodox traditions. And given the name of the program, it's, I guess, unsurprising that quite frequently we deal with the past and the present and the future of socialism. But far more rarely, I think, do we deal with the anarchist tradition. And that's a shame, because from the very beginning of the socialist tradition, as with the liberal tradition, there's been a sometimes fraught dialogue between the anarchist tradition and socialists and liberals. So we thought it would be good to have an event where we could think seriously about that tradition. And no one is in a better place to help us do that than Dr. Sophie Scott Brown. Sophie's a research fellow in the Institute of International Intellectual History in the Institute of Intellectual History at St. Andrews University. She's also worked at the University of East Anglia, at St Anthony's College, Oxford, and at the Australian National University, where she also did her doctoral work. In addition, I think you're an unusual historian. I think you sometimes describe yourself as a historian at large. And where you find radicals, rebels and heretics in the community, there you might find Sophie doing community history and various other forms of population, popular history, in addition to her scholarly works. But her scholarly works are substantial. I won't go through all her numerous articles. She's so far published three monographs. The first is an intellectual biography of the really important British historian Raphael Samuel from the period of the first New Left. She has another, which is a biography of Colin Ward, Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchism. And hot off the press from Oxford University Press, the Radical 50s Activist politics in Cold War Britain, on which she's going to draw tonight. So Sophie's going to talk for about 40, 45 minutes, and then we should. And then there'll be a couple of questions from the chair. That's to say, I'll jump in and ask some questions and then we'll hand it over to you and hopefully we'll have a good half hour for question questions and discussion. But before I ask Sophie to talk, can I ask you to join me in WELCOMING Our speaker, Dr. Sophie Scott Brown?

[A]

Thank you. Good evening. It's a Great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much, Robin, for that extremely kind introduction and for inviting me. And thank you to Melena over there for organizing the event and being just generally great. And thank you to all of you for braving the bleak midwinter and coming along tonight. It's a pleasure to see so many people. So why am I an anarchist? I sort of feel, saying this that I kind of. We ought to be all sitting in a circle while I begin the first of 12 steps on the road to recovery. All right, so let's maybe put it another way. It is perhaps less that I am an anarchist, whatever that means, than that I find in anarchy the most realistic outlook on our contemporary moment and the most practical set of ideas for devising a plausible future out of it. Now, I'm aware that for many people the idea of anarchy as a species of hard political realism may be a little bit surprising. So first of all, let's take a step back and ask, well, what is anarchy? Well, anarchy comes from the Greek an meaning no and arche, meaning rulers. No, rulers. So anarchists oppose rulers. Well, that sounds pretty simple, but this is the little proposition that packs a very big punch. Now, rulers is a very specific term. It means far more than just leaders. Rulership is institutionalized leadership, that is leadership that moves beyond the literal body into the symbolic Persona like monarch, president, manager. And from the particular situation it moves into the abstract conditions. So monarchy, presidency, management. And to sustain itself, rulership develops the state. That is an apparatus that transmits the particular order of life it favors through varying forms of force. Now this includes everything from the military and the police to legal, fiscal, social and cultural systems. So to put it very simply then, anarchists object to forms of permanent authority, believing them to be neither necessary nor desirable for human security and well being. And indeed, by inhibiting other possible patterns of life, permanent authority destroys the very qualities that it claims to uphold. Beyond this, however, it gets a lot harder to say. There are as many different anarchies as there are notions of authority and notions of what could be an alternative to authority. Nevertheless, in general, you would usually find that the common characteristics threading through all these many, many different variations, and you have only to glance at the ever growing anarchist literature and all the numbers of different hyphens that tend to come with anarchism to see that this is true. But generally, the one thing that sort of runs through them, linked them, is this anti permanence principle, so defined. In this way it is possible to appreciate how anarchist ideas have had a much greater impact on and a presence in the history of our political thought than often acknowledged. So we can see anarchic principles operating in, actually, ironically, most major religions, especially dissenting traditions, which resist or challenge authority to demand personal religious freedoms. And as we know, these have always been major drivers of social and political change moving into modern politics. Anarchy pulses through all the various branches of liberalism, given the mutual preoccupation with liberty, whether defined as the absence of coercion or the presence of choice. And at this stage, I will just put up this rather cool cartoon, just because I think it captures a bit more of the spirit of what I'm talking about. So, yes, the. The relationship with liberalism, obviously both preoccupied with liberty and whether that be defined as the absence of coercion or the presence of choice, these two have long been in very, very close dialogue. Arguably, possibly, it's the closest relationship that anarchy has with mainstream politics. And it is possible to see anarchism as the fullest realisation of liberalism, freed from its paradoxical reliance on the state as the arbitrator or facilitator of individual freedom. Instead of the state, anarchy looks for other mechanisms to maintain a balance and distribution of power via a robust civil society, for example, or for many, through the free market. It's a controversial one, but it is worth remembering that just as many anarchists, including Noam Chomsky, have looked to Adam Smith for inspiration as much as they have to Peter Kropotkin. Anarchism was also a vein in socialism pretty much from the start, as Robin mentioned in his introduction, and this is perhaps the version we are most familiar with. One strain of it emerged through utopian socialism, which emphasized domination as the worst possible affront to human dignity. And another was closely entangled with Marxism, sharing the same materialist critique of power and sharing the same confidence in a worker led popular revolution. But of course, it departed from Marxism on the question of relying on a vanguard state. As we know, anarchism even appears in forms of conservatism, especially around the notion of the organic community that evolves in its own shape and form over time and in response to shared experience. Rather than states, markets or even civil society. This locates history, the main arbitrator of human interests. Far from being a minority sect, then, it seems that anarchism, anarchic ideas, or simply anti statism, has been a perennial stream across much more of our political thought than we conventionally acknowledge. But at the same time, it has been argued that oversimplifying anarchism and then seeing it everywhere in exactly the sort of way that I'm doing right now robs it of any substantial meaning and clear direction. Critics argue that historically there was an organized, or let's be honest, semi organized, international anarchist movement that was committed to confronting state power, pursuing total revolution, instigating social transformation, and implementing horizontally structured societies. And it is this that we must call the true anarchism. And it is this that we must seek to resurrect.

Now, while I agree it is very tempting to look out for a more stable set of qualifying terms and conditions, for anarchism, to do so will be to miss the point of what it is, what its limits are, and what kind of futures it could offer us. Anarchism is at its most logically consistent when considered as a provocative outlook, capable of generating infinite ideas and practices. Indeed, it is this very protein quality that makes anarchy so relevant, so pertinent, but also so problematic to our present moment. Now, to fully grasp its contemporary significance, I think we must go back, back to the point when anarchy stepped out of the shadows and began to make sense, precisely at the moment the world it was responding to no longer did. And for me, a pivotal moment in this story was the 1950s. And in this particular instance, I'm going to focus on Britain. And by the 1950s, I technically mean the consecutive Conservative administrations that ran from 1951 to 1964. Essentially a kind of long 1950s, if you will. Now, again, this sounds like I'm being just plain contrary. Surely, if anarchy had a moment in, it was during the late 1960s. How on earth could a decade renowned for consensus, for conformity, for apathy, how could this decade possibly be a crucible for anarchism? Well, largely because it was none of those things. They only masked the paralysis felt in the face of an increasingly complex, volatile environment. I may have played a little bit with the special effects on PowerPoint.

So what is there to say about the 50s? Well, the first thing to say is that it was a period of intense and almost continuous contradictions, and I've listed a few here that are worth remarking on. So the decade starts with rationing still in place, very much in an age of austerity. By the end of the decade, it's the beginnings of affluence starting to make itself felt. But at the same time, the national debt still remains 200% of the GDP. So it's not like austerity has gone away, but it's certainly been displaced. Then there's this notion that we're all free. Now. We fought a War in order to be free. We're opposing Soviet communism in order to be free. But this freedom is largely coming down to consumer choice. And at the same time there's an ever swelling kind of increase in bureaucracy and public sector, sector service and public sector jobs. And of course conscription remains compulsory at this time. Then we've had a decade of state welfare and this is supposed to be the great mechanism for social mobility, what we might now in common parlance or fashionable parlance call leveling up. And you know, to a degree this has made a huge impact, but what it's mostly done is produce more, more layers of social stratification, particularly within the middle class and where the middle class hinges into the upper layers of the working class. And right from the offset, people have been challenging. Whether or not that welfare state is an adequate enough response for the kind of times that Britain is moving into on the subject of class affluence has made it fashionable again to claim that this is a period of classlessness. People are being told there is no more class anymore. But for other people, people, this same classlessness is in fact mass society, which is effectively where everyone becomes proletarianized. Then there is the end of empire. This is supposed to be the period of accelerated decolonization.

But at the same time, it's the period during which some of the most punitive, some of the most violent colonial enterprises take place. I'm thinking particularly Kenya. But there's also Malaya, there's Cyprus, there's of plenty, plenty of others to choose from. There's also increased domestic migration. And interestingly enough, the people doing the calculations for forecasting spending on the welfare state completely underestimate how much migration is going to impact British population, which is sort of strange because it's a government policy. So you'd have thought that the two departments might have spoken to each other. Nevertheless, you are talking about a country that seems very woefully unprepared for what it itself has initiated. Then this is supposed to be the age of the home centered society.

And this is. So the idea is that everyone wants to be in their home, they want to be building their home, they want to be doing DIY in their home. And their home is especially great if a woman can be at the heart of it. But a very famous study that comes out at this time, Alva Merdle and Viola Klein's Women's Two Roles, points out that at the same time that women are told to be in the home, all these new appliances and conveniences that you're supposed to be buying are sort of devaluing the labour that they're doing in that home and they're also forcing them back out into the workplace in order to be able to afford all this stuff. So it's leaving women very confused over where their moral identity or cause should be, or indeed what they want to do with their lives. But I think above all, this is supposed to be the first full decade of peace. And yet from the almost from, from the get go, you've got the ghostly presence of the Cold War, which keeps everything on a permanent war readiness basis. And then of course, you have the nuclear program, which introduces this permanent sense of an existential threat.

So unsurprisingly then, this period has earned a clutch of very contradictory labels. So depending on who you talk to, it's either conformist and conservative, or it's technocratic, managerial, positivistic. People are either exhausted and apathetic, or they're angry and impotent. Clearly then, this is a deeply confusing period to have lived through.

And it is exactly this confusion that makes this period so interesting and indeed so radical, so living amongst all these explicit contradictions revealed to people increasingly the inadequacy of existing social categories and political vocabularies to describe, let alone organize, people's senses of lived reality. Nothing meant what it said and nothing that was said was what it meant. Everything became electrified and subject to question terms that had not been questioned beforehand. Things like class suddenly meant something very different. Values like equality and justice, they were changing too. Things like peace and freedom were not only being used in new and strange ways, but they were often being used to describe things that. That seemed to be the exact opposite of what they were supposed to be. And all this produced a sort of sense of collective dissonance. And this is perhaps most evident if you consider some of the most iconic cultural products of the time. It is no coincidence that this period is associated with satire, for example, and long before the launch of beyond the fringe in 1960, you can see this in the period's literature. From the kind of knockabout, tongue in cheek humor of Lucky Jim and Under the Net to the much darker and angrier irony to be found in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Now, from a political perspective, this seems like we've arrived at a relatively familiar place. It's a point where contradictions can no longer be masked, where everyone has become conscious of them and. And this often precipitates the dawn of a new synthesis. But unfortunately, this neat dialectical model does not happen.

This is not forthcoming in the 1950s.

Now, the American commentators have no qualms about calling this for what it is and describing this situation as either the end of ideology or the period after you turn. And what they mean by this is all those sort of dialectics within late modernity. And by that I mean all the contradictions you can find within globalization or technology, mass production, consumption. The way that they give with one hand, they take with the other. And yes, all these things are happening and they are contradictory and they are fracturing certainty, and they are propelling change, but there seems no way that they can be reasonably reintegrated. And under these conditions, it's not possible to hold a coherent system of ideas for any duration. It's very hard to know where to go and what to do next, in other words. Now, just a slight caveat here. This end of ideology is involved in a much larger debate about whether or not liberalism was triumphant after the Cold War. Arguably, yes, possibly you can see it this way. But what's significant is that neither Daniel Bell nor Judy Shukler ever say that there are not going to be any more differing worldviews. Quite the contrary, they think there are going to be many, many such views. But the difference is none of these views are going to become universal in a way that they might have at different points in history. They're never going to gain the sort of critical mass that at some point they may have been able to do. They're never going to become fully integrated theories of everything that prescribe whole ways of life and that endure for any particular length of time. Now, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, or the British Russian philosopher Isaiah Berlin, comes at a similar sort of problem, but from a slightly different angle. And in Two Concepts of Liberty, which is probably the most famous piece of British political philosophy of this decade, he bases his preference for negative liberty, that's freedom from, as opposed to positive liberty. Freedom too, on the basis of. Of value pluralism. Now, what he means by this is not pluralism as a variety of possible lifestyles, and it's not pluralism as cultural relativity. It's the view that there are equally good values and ends that one can hold and pursue, but that these cannot be reconciled into a single system. So for Berlin, equality and liberty are equally important values, but they are different, and therefore they involve people making very hard choices and compromises. Now, as recent critics have argued, this leaves us in a rather difficult position, because if we value and respect liberty, and of course we do, in the 1950s, as I said before, this is what we are. We feel we fought the war for, it's what we feel we oppose the Soviets for. So if we value those we seem condemned to either political inaction or we're going to commit rank hypocrisy. So what do we do?

So my recent book, the Radical Fifties, was an attempt to try and answer this question. And it did this by reconstructing certain efforts to reimagine a politics that neither evaded the pluralism that Berlin described, nor denied the practical conditions outlined by people like Bell and Shukla. But instead it thought with them and then it thought beyond them. And ultimately this came to assume an anarchic character. But it did not do so easily. The protagonists in my book were three groups, or rather they were groups within groups. And these were the people who thought most consciously and most concretely about what such a pluralist politics meant and how it would work in practice. So the first group, the Freedom Press Anarchists, I believe, supplied the philosophical framework for this project. Now, Freedom Press was started by Peter Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson in 1886, and it declined after Kropotkin's death in 1921. It was restored in the late 1930s by two Italians, Vernon Richards and Marie Louise Benieri, who gathered around them an extraordinary group of writers and thinkers, including the Canadian author George Woodcock, the social journalist Colin Ward, and a very remarkable woman, Rita Milton, who became the movement's finest public speaker, finest orator, and you can see her up there debating in Hyde park in that picture. Now, naturally, these people believed that anarchism had the best intellectual resources to deal with the kind of problems that I've been describing. But first they had to recover and reclaim a much fuller anarchist tradition than they had than they had come into.

This tradition was largely including the more individualist elements, the more liberal sympathetic elements, the elements that were interested in personal well being and the moral or ethical agenda. And these become slightly more sidelined to the more dominant strain of anarchism that had been more inclined to emphasize class struggle. 1 Workers uprising. Revolution at the point of production. Now, for those anarchists, the class struggle anarchists, it was hopeless bourgeois idealism to speak of self fulfillment or personal choice and to think that these had anything meaningful to do with politics.

For the Freedom press anarchists, the 1950s saw them attempting to not only reimagine the ways that the more individualistic, the more leave liberal strains of anarchism could be converted into forms of social structure and action, but it was also A battle to try and persuade their extremely skeptical comrades that this was indeed the case and this could offer a valuable way forward. Now, in a sense, this part of their project was done much better by the Direct Action Committee. Now, this was a group of peace campaigners which included three young activists, Pat Arrowsmith, April Carter and Michael Randall. And these three, through their anti nuclear work, effectively reimagined activism in this country. And I can't stress this enough, we wouldn't have extinction, rebellion or just up oil or anything like that if it hadn't been for some of the pioneering efforts of these people. They really did transform what it meant to do activism in this in Britain.

And the reason that they were much better at this kind of a project than the anarchists were was because they came from the peace movement. The peace movement was ideologically pluralist anyway. It accommodated a vast array of different social, political and cultural backgrounds. People who just happened to intersect on the issue of nuclear disarmament for very, very different reasons. And this meant that the organizers had no choice but to find ways of working that did not depend on everyone having a shared worldview, that did not depend on everyone even agreeing about why they were doing what they were doing. And at the same time, they still believed that peace was a transcendent value and it could be the basis for a comprehensive social transformation. Like the anarchists then, they were invested in inventing forms of organization that promoted rather than curbed individual well being and development. And then finally there was the New Land Left to the first British New Left, or some of it. Now, for those of you who don't know, the first British New Left was a disparate movement, initially clustered around two journals. Well, I say that it depends when you want to start the clock. But the first group of people that consciously called themselves the First New Left were clustered around two journals, the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left to Review. These eventually amalgamated and became what we know today as.

The New Left Review. My focus here was mostly on the Universities and Left Review group, which included some very familiar figures to us all, like Stuart hall, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and the historian Rafael Samuel. And these guys were its main driving forces. And I focused on this group because this cohort proved to be the most malleable and the most experimental. They were also the most committed to finding out what was actually happening in British society and why that mattered. So whilst other of their colleagues sort of were preoccupied with refining the finer points of a particular version of socialist theory, these guys set up the New Left Club network. A network which proliferated across the country and has often been subsequently in historiography dismissed as just largely talking shops. All these guys did was get, get together and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Well, in fact they didn't. What they did was turn activism into a form of social inquiry. It was unsystematic, yes, but nevertheless, these people undertook bold investigations into what people were actually experiencing when they moved into new towns, when they left the slums of London, when they joined teenage gangs, or when they encountered racism on the streets of Notting Hill.

So emerging from all this came the rough shape of a political practice which I term anarcho activist. And the features of this practice include the following. Well, first of all, all the emphasis goes onto the idea of political activity. In some ways this becomes far more important even than the outcome because the, the aim is always, it's a good enough outcome. If you've got a group of people that have acted independently and autonomously and got a taste of, of what it feels like to think for themselves, that's a good win, even if you don't achieve your primary goal. So process and participation, but not just any old participation, the quality of participation becomes really key. This is not just about taking part.

It's got to be much more meaningful than that. It's got to be about the extent you are part of framing the problem as much as the response. It's really aimed at kind of stimulating people's sort of appetite for being more autonomous, for being more independent. Again, it doesn't always matter if the actual project fails so long as people have had that experience.

Limited. Temporary, small actions should always be situational and context specific. You should always work on interpersonal basis and you should never aim to make permanent whatever you are doing ordinary. This is probably the most important one of all. These actions need to be done by ordinary people. I'm using ordinary in a really specific sense. Ordinary means people who do not hold, nor aspire to hold political office, but who act from self interest or personal conviction. And finally, these actions should take place everywhere, along with all the commitments. Conventional, traditional sites of political struggle. So council chambers, town halls, parliaments, protests on the streets, picket lines, etc. It's a recognition that this, that politics is something that should be happening everywhere. It's a whole way of life, essentially. So alongside all these spaces, it's going to happen in your workplace. Well, okay, that's, that's a familiar one. But it's also going to happen in your community. It's going to happen in Your school, your university, and, and it's going to happen in your family. Now obviously we become very familiarized with this later on in the 1960s, but in the 1950s this was really quite.

Quite an unusual proposition for people to be, for the activists to be making. Now again, it is important to note that none of these amount to a blueprint for a new political agenda. Rather, they are all principles that prevent power from accumulating or becoming fixed even within a so called progressive movement. Now if you just pause to think about this for a moment, it really is quite a radical, quite a kind of counterintuitive almost idea, this constant centrifugal urge to break power down and disperse it even on your own side. This runs so entirely contrary to our conventional sense that social change requires unity, solidarity and collective effort on a large scale. We are always hearing that factionalism is the left's greatest weakness, but here it is potentially transformed into its greatest virtue. Mr. Corbyn, Ms. Sultana, take note. For critics, however, this was less a new way of thinking about politics, politics a more retreat from serious revolutionary activity. Now was that their comment? Now, it's true. None of my case study characters ever theorized what this really meant for their concept of revolution explicitly, with one partial exception, Raymond Williams, who was a New Left fellow traveler and whose book the Long revolution, published in 1961, sketched a loose outline of the kind of revolution anarcho activism made possible. Long revolutions, as Williams described them, occur indirectly and unevenly. They are reciprocal and interconnected without necessarily being systematic. In the book, Williams focuses on 18th, 19th and up into the mid 20th century Britain and he traces how the expansion of industry prompts the expansion of education, which then leads back to the the expansion of cultural production consumption, which then feeds into the methods of education and then back to the kinds of industry undertaken. And then the whole process starts again, as it were. In short, this was revolution by contagion, not confrontation. It was a revolution of proliferation, lots of small moves, which at the point of occurrence seemed disparate and disconnected and yet somehow hung together in a larger historical process that was both undetermined but still comprehensible. Now, Long Revolution was fated to be relatively neglected, not least because it was squashed by fellow New Lefter EP Thompson, who in a damning review, a strangely positive but damning review, objected to the lack of struggle. In Williams account, everything happened too cooperatively. In fact, Thompson, Thompson was perfectly right. But this was not to say that Williams concept lacked potential. While the epic confrontation of the classes that Thompson, even now still imagined could be on the cards was certainly not going to be part of Williams's long revolution. Williams could easily have shown him.

How all his points of interconnection depended on localized conflict contestation at every intersection. So that was the 1950s, and since then a lot has changed, but equally a lot hasn't. And many of the problems encountered in embryonic form then remain with us now, only larger and more complex. For example, we remain ensnared amid modernity's contradictions, only now we refer to them as polycrisis, the convergence of global capitalism, nationalistic wars, collapsing democracies, economic precarity, mass pandemics and environmental destruction. Politically, we live in a multi order world, fleeting alliances, increased impact of non state actors who have little to no accountability, and also non human actors such as pandemics and climate change. This makes the political and economic and the literal climate incredibly difficult to model, difficult to forecast, difficult to predict, and therefore difficult to plan for. And we have problems like climate change, which is simultaneously local but also simultaneously global, but also intensely local, and will force on us, continually force on us difficult and imperfect decisions around managing their impact and identifying responsibility. As such, I argue that anarcho activism is not not just a wildly idealistic politics as commonly conceived, it is the most practical response available to us. But that does not make it unproblematic. Perhaps the chief concern is whether or not we have the time for a long revolution. As described by Williams, the urgency of the threats posed to the environment, to our civil freedoms, to our health, are so extreme that we really have to ask ourselves if we can actually risk taking up an approach that resists direction that continually breaks off and disperses? More seriously, can anarcho activism confront, let alone challenge, the nature of contemporary power, especially when, ironically, that too has adopted an increasingly anarchic quality? Now, I don't think that anarchy, or indeed any other ideological stance can or will solve any of these problems, not least because they're not the kind of problems that can be solved. What I do think is that it can increase our capacity to respond to those problems imaginatively, to be resilient and adaptive, and to find ways we can coexist with them and with each other more responsibly. And in today's ever heating climate, these are no small matters. Thank you very much.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do People believe in conspiracy theories or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

[B]

Well, look, thank you very much. Apparently I've got to use this microphone. That was absolutely superb and a wonderful account of an incredible range of thinkers and influencers. I'm just going to start by asking a couple of questions, then let's go to the floor. I wanted to start by taking up the point about democracy which you, you referred to towards the end, but less fully. I mean, you've talked of anarchism as being a kind of extension of liberalism, and democracy is often seen that way as well. It's seen as the way of making authority compatible with liberty. And yet anarchism is skeptical about authority. So is it also skeptical about democracy, which ultimately is a form of exercise of authority? Sure, perhaps I'll just leave it at that.

[A]

Yep, sure. Okay, this is a great question. Representative democracy is always a problem. Some anarchist thinkers, Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin, to some degree have, question, have acknowledged possibly some scope for forms of representation, always framing them as a concession or a common compromise, acknowledging that these are not the dream, as it were, but trying to be pragmatic about it, but feeling that in our complex industrial society, what have you, some degree of representation or at least leadership by relative relevant experts is necessary.

I think actually in some ways anarchism lands really, especially the new anarchism. That is really what I'm talking about here, which is an anarchism that tries to involve much more about the kind of individual and personal liberties and the kind of moral dimension as well as the social and structural one. It does land on radical democracy and which is, you can define this in many, many different ways, but it's the huge extension of democracy, not merely as something that happens in specific and given locations, but something, something that truly does permeate as a way of life. And I think with anarchism there is always this tendency to think it's got to fall in particular ways that are the correct aesthetic, that it looks all nice and horizontal. But actually anarchism, you could have, you can have leaders in anarchy, they just can't be permanent. So it's about, I mean, for an anarchist, radical democracy is really, do we have the ability and the capacity to take on the forms of decision making, leadership, arrangement that we need for the moment that we're in? So again, it's this anti permanence principle. On the other hand, I mean, in some ways to say that anarchism sort of kind of finds, you know, it's a reconciliation of its experiential and its structural elements. In radical democracy, it's kind of to say everything and nothing, because there is still a very, very key tension in this. Should democracy be the defense of difference or should it be the construction of popular consent or popular agreement? And that's still a battle. I mean, like I said, resisting all attempts to resolve or reintegrate everything into any particular form. Anarchists can't, like the rest of us, escape having to make difficult choices about what they're going to do, do and when. But it's about maybe seeking the capacity to make those decisions more freely.

[B]

Okay, thank you very much. I'll just ask you a second question now, which is more to do with sort of modes of organization. So you sort of 2/3 of the way through, you sketched out how the first New Left and the free press and so on were in a way manifesting a kind of, I think you called it an anarcho activist sort of model. Then you went on to say, we need a long revolution and a long revolution needs sustainable activity. And it's often said about the sort of activist element of these new social movements that they have a lot of their land, they have a lot of energy, but they don't have sustainability, they don't have organizational ballast, a bit like Occupy.

[A]

They.

[B]

They tend to dissipate and then get swept away. What do you say about that? There's some sort of tension between the kind of model that you're advocating and the goal that requires a more sustainable organisation.

[A]

Well, the first thing I can say, Robyn, is there again is that cheeky left wing desire to fix and make permanent and think that dissipation or dispersal, that's got to be a bad thing, that these people fail. And actually all of these guys do. They do fail. The first New Left folds and collapses and concedes and becomes the cultural Marxism of Perry Anderson and the peace activists. They kind of fail too. But I mean, that's how she. They fail. But in some ways, failure becomes an unexpected source of success because what, again, this idea that they shift their emphasis to being much more focused on participation and much more focused on what individuals are getting from the experience of doing anarchism and how that's going to feed forward. This becomes possibly the missing piece of the puzzle. So whilst their organizations, you know, rise and fall, they achieve some of their goals, not all of them. Their organization is, you know, great. They're terrible there. Well, they're always thinking about.

This is not just an action, this is also an education.

This is particularly the case in the peace movement. They're very inspired, particularly by Gandhian notions, satyagraha and what have you, which is this idea that everything you do should not just be for the outcome, but should be for the sort of experience, the way it transforms you as an individual too. And it's, I think that's possibly where they're onto something because if their end goal is, you know, we're not going to worry about what the perfect society looks like, that's probably, you know, kind of not a thing that is a sort of sensible, sensible activity to be doing. But we do think that a society where a lot more people are confident, are autonomous, are independent minded. And it's true. What, what actually happens with all of these groups, with the new left groups, with the anarchist groups, with the peace movement groups, is they kind of, they become little kind of training grounds for all these people who go off and do their own activities in different places. The footprint is much wider when you look at what this inspired other people to go on and do. I often work with extinction, rebellion at the moment or do talks with former members of, of that movement who are really upset because they think they failed. They think they failed because they, what, they didn't become an institution. They haven't become a sort of, you know, kind of permanent fixed philosophy or because they didn't agree with each other. But they also gave so many people their first taste of what it was to take action and they inspired so many people to go off and do something for themselves in their own image. And I think not only did they put the environmental crisis on the agenda in a way that was important and was part of their goals, but their secondary goal probably ends up being more important. They've made a lot more people feel much more confident about saying, no, this is not okay. I'm not putting up with this.

[B]

Okay, thanks. I'm going to now turn to the audience. I should just also point out, as I should have said at the beginning, I should have welcomed. We've got an online audience as well, so I'll intermittently take questions from here in the room, but also people from the online audience. So let me just start. If you, when you get called, can you wait till the microphone comes and say who you are and where you're from? So this, this woman here at the front, please.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you. Hello. I find this really, really interesting because my great grandfather was an anarchist and he actually Fought with Trotsky and so got very disillusioned after what happened, creating that system, and then migrated to Brazil, where they created a small anarchist society. They were mostly artists. And so I ask, do you think that the greatest challenge for anarchism is the human condition of being, you know, no leaders, for instance, or is this impermanence, the fact that, you know, humans need something more permanent, need institutions?

[B]

So when did you start with that? Yeah, I think we might end up talking more than one.

[A]

Okay. Oh, the human condition. I mean, anarchists endlessly debate human nature, and they, being anarchists, all have slightly different accounts of it. So we're quite often used to hearing that they're wildly optimistic about human nature and that everyone's really a mutual aider, just waiting to get out. And it's that terrible socialization that is preventing us. On the other hand, you've got someone like Alex Comfort, who's actually incredibly pessimistic about human nature and actually says, well, anarchy can solve that problem because we are naturally suspicious and bellicose and want our own way and don't like sharing and all that sort of thing. And so we need to keep everyone separated and we can't ever let people get into little groups, otherwise it's disaster. So anarchy works for that too. Anarchy really is, like you, kind of your Swiss knife of a political ideology. It can just sort of lend itself to any problem. I think, honestly, I'm going to come down very firmly on the fence on this one and just say, I think that human nature is malleable. I think that there are plenty of people out there in the world who do crave permanence. Whether or not that's because we live in this incredibly uncertain world. Whether or not that's because. I mean, I always say, I started. My background's in drama and theatre, and I often feel people don't do enough improvisation lessons and that actually, if we just spent all our youth learning to improvise, we'd all be much less fearful about things. That sounds trite, but I'm actually quite serious. So there we go. Solved it. Improv lessons for everybody. But, yeah, I think. But it's. It's a good point. I think it's very hard more seriously to shake off the psychology, whether or not it's intrinsic to the human condition or whether it's not just the human condition we have right now. It's very foolish to ignore the kind of psychology. That's why I think the anarchism that works best is the one that takes People where they're at at the time they find them.

[B]

Okay, well I'm going to take another question from audience, the fellow with the glasses in the middle and then I'll go to the online audience and back to the people in the room. So first of all, thank you very much for this wonderful talk. So a French communist economist has this concept of communist presence in capitalism. And I was wondering. So he's called Bernard Frio, a communist present in capitalism. He takes the example of the Social Security regime in France. Would you argue the same thing exists for anarchism, that there is an anarchist presence in modern capitalism? And if yes, where does it exist? Is it in reactions, for example to environmental crisis or in art, for example? What, what would you be a sense on it?

[A]

So I'm, I'm, I'm not sure I caught all of that. Are you asking about the sort of presence that continues to, I mean, communist presence.

[B]

So just, just those words? Yeah, it's. Is there an anarchy existing today in our capitalist system? Is it?

[A]

And if yes, is there anarchy in.

[B]

The capitalism here in our capitalist world today? Is it? And if yes, where does it manifest itself?

[A]

Thank you. Well, have a go. I'm a terrible economist, but I'll have a go.

Again. Anarchism has. It sticks its nose into everything and converts everything to its own purposes. Protean.

It's a real tart of an ideology. And yes, there is an anarchism that does not.

That does not reject capitalism. Now again within the anarchist movement.

It'S even worse than the Labour Party conference, right? There's like no one's a true anarchist.

But again, I'm more ecumenical because I will take ideas wherever they come from. And you do have, like I said in the talk, a lot of anarchist thinkers take as much inspiration from Adam Smith as they do from the kind of anarcho communist position of Peter Kropotkin. I think the key thing here though, because I mean I'm actually working on a new book looking at sort of new anarchist ideas from 45 through to occupy. And one of the figures I've come across is Murray Rothbard, who I never in a million thought in a million years thought I would be looking at because I'm definitely more of the kind of, you know, sort of hippie, dippy, lefty variety. But I've, I've been forced to look at him and take his ideas seriously and trying to imagine why he thinks what he thinks about anarchism or anti statism. And it is, what strikes me is what it Never is, is just this rampant, unfettered kind of capitalism that we come to associate with neoliberalism. It's much more based around this notion that.

Mutual, that free trade is more important than anything else. So the, the idea of exchange and trade and barter and this being a very human activity and they're being actually sh.

Should it be done in this way, sort of actual natural limits that would kick in. And what someone like Rothbard thinks is the problem is that we've destroyed these natural limits or we've distorted them with the current system, particularly the move to kind of monetarist policies, which, I mean that is just odd to me. That is really like, you know, kind of sort of making the tool the end goal all the time. And, and what Rothbard complains about is that actually we think much less about the activity of trade or the concreteness of value and commodity and what these things are. And it's just been allowed to become abstract, beyond all control. This is a very kind of round the houses way of answering your question. But yes, there's an anarchist presence in capitalism and that has sometimes made it hard for anarchists is, I mean that's such a fundamental issue. It really is a dividing line over whether people think you can have genuine freedom with a degree of kind of material inequality, so long as it's limited. And this was obviously Proudhon's great thing. His thing was property is theft. But actually what he really said was excess property is theft. So he did allow private property limited amount. Then there's questions which the communists rightly raise as well. How do you ever control that limit? How do you ensure that it's maintained? Yeah, it's a real dividing line and it has maybe stopped.

Sort of constructive collaboration where it otherwise might have been fruitful.

[B]

Okay, is this one working?

Okay, so I've got a, I want to take a question from the online audience now. Well, there's two that are related. It's I guess to do with this protean quality that you talk about. The first one is Anthony Valian, an alumni from the lsc. Would the new UK political party, your party, fit into the anarchist spectrum? They have a leadership committee rather than any one person leading it. And then there's a second sort of related question where a person says that they're coming from a working class community, they're voting strategically to deal with the rise of populism and fascism and they feel they have to compromise and hold their nose while doing so. But what would be the sort of everyday consequence for Someone in a working class community of this.

[A]

So I'll deal with your party first. Your party is a wonderful mixture of things. I think there is actually strong anarchic spirit in some elements of it. I think possibly more around the people who are supporting it or interested in being members of it. I'm not hugely impressed with what the leadership have been doing, quite frankly. I think in some ways I'll be very open. I think Jeremy Corbyn of all people knows the value of remaining in the leg Labour movement and the very great problems that come when you try and turn a kind of a movement politics into a parliamentary politics. I don't think some of the activities that we've witnessed lately give me much faith that it will remain in that anarchic spirit. On the other hand, I applaud that and I identify with that sort of sense of the desperation we have to do something. And as much as doing all these wonderful independent actions, this is all good and we should keep doing them and they make us feel good and they do have impact, even if it's relatively small. Here's the reality, here's the hard cold reality which will relate to the, to the other questions. We live in a system where these political parties have huge amounts of power and sometimes they are literally the only means by which we could even hope to access some of these huge forces that are shaping and governing and crushing our lives. And yet it's a very unholy alliance and it's a very difficult one. Anarchists have to make this again. This is another constant fault line throughout anarchism. Like should you, you know, uphold your anarchic purity, avoid voting, not sully your hands with the ballot box? Or, or should you actually just, you know, should you interpret anarchism as actually that freedom to make the right choice for the right time in the right moment, which some people would say, okay, well we're back in the anything goes. Does it actually have any meaning? It's kind of up to you. It's up to personal discretion. I think that you can have strong anti statist views but know the very great threat of populism and therefore try and do whatever is in your power to do to act against it. At the same time, I always admire those people that refuse to take part in this system and I have been, and I am one of them. Because even if you manage the populace upright, if you stop reforming, getting into your local area, that's great, but it's not removed the problem, the populism for me, I mean, that's got a weird relationship with anarchism, which is worth dwelling on for a moment. In some ways, populism is sort of like, I always sort of think of it as kind of democracy without responsibility always leads to this kind of demagoguery, basically. So there is something that, you know, and I'm often asked about this, that these populists that they gather together, they self organize, they end up being in some ways much better at it than the left. They can, you know, bring amazing numbers of people out. They are absolutely systematic in their organization. Aren't they anarchists? Aren't they being anarchists? Because they too say, well, you know, we don't want to deal with politics, we want to be unpolitical. We are just ordinary citizens who are outraged at what's happening to our communities. And it's a tough one because, yes, there is an awful lot of autonomy and sort of direct action going on. It's just not the sort I like. But also, more seriously, it's not really democracy when you're not dealing with a problem, when your answer to the problem is it's got to go away or the. That section of the society can't be here and then everything will be fine. That's not democracy because here's the facts. These people, we are all here and we all have to live together. Democracy is working out how we do that. It's not saying you have to go and then we will be happy.

So, yeah, again, I think anarchism's got lots of resources for both thinking about these things, but also making them really much more complicated than they have to be. Okay, thanks.

[B]

Can I just remind you to say who you are and where you're from, because we do have an online audience you can't see. I'm just going to start with this gentleman here. I'm going to take two questions and then the person to the left. Evening. Very interesting talk. James Love, LSE alumni. There's a book from the 19th century called the Right to Be Lazy. What do you think about how AI could lead us to a crossroads where we need to choose between totalitarianism and true anarchy? Thank you. That's an excellent and succinct question. So, and this. Hi, Gabe from London.

So many of the problems that anarchists seek to challenge now exist at a global.

Level.

[A]

They exist on world systems of economic.

[B]

Relationships that transcend the nation state. It feels like, and I'd like you, how is this kind of movement equipped to deal with issues on that scale, with all of the practical and cultural Differences that come along with challenging such.

[A]

Systems at an international level. Great question. Okay. AI. Well, I sort of tempted to go down the, the kind of Bookchin technology route here. I mean, the truth is that's a good point. I mean like AI, unless we all collectively owned it, then the reality is if we start becoming entirely dependent on AI, then we're just giving up more and more and more of our independence. And also, I mean, I just don't understand it really. I mean, I don't mind thinking for myself. I quite enjoy it. I quite like creating my own stuff, even if it's not as good as what some robot, you know, putting different configurations of data into different sequences can do. Well, yeah, but I think actually maybe the one of the first choices we have to make is, well, do we actually like being human? I mean, because if we don't, then really. Yeah, my entire talk is sort of redundant because I was sort of working on the basis that we do and we would like to survive and we would like to enjoy surviving. So there is that, but then there is just the more practical thing of it's hurtling along the track so quickly. And again, which sort of touches on the second question, the extent to which this is so quickly slipping out of our control and being infiltrated into our daily lives. And it's sort of like maybe many of us would kind of like to kind of not be quite so tech dependent as we currently are, but in some ways it's just being forced on us and it's going quicker than we can keep up with. So I mean, what on earth do you do? I mean there is that sort of simple, you know, individual act of refusal. No, I'm not going to use ChatGPT for everything I do. I'm going to try and be mindful of what I use and what I don't. But still doesn't get us around the big problem of the extent to which this technology is going to be forced on us because it's going to become part of the systems that we have to use and we have to, we have to therefore engage with it. I don't have an answer to that. I know that there is a really rich sphere of people who work on cyber anarchism and all that sort of thing who seem to have a talent for disrupting this kind of technology. I'm afraid it's way over my head. All I would say is it's a very good question and it's something I think that we can just start with asking ourselves if we actually Kind of, if that is indeed the future that we want to have on the global issue, this is a really great one. I mean, in some senses anarchism is perfectly equipped for that because it's always been very kind of hostile. I mean, it has worked on the nation state level. There has been national anarchist movements, but actually that's always, that's always been less important. There's always been a strong internationalism or cosmopolitan in anarchy that has sometimes been, as you mentioned in your question, has been a bit self deceptive in the sense that it assumes you can have this kind of universalism that supersedes localized differences and that whenever anarchists get together, I mean frankly, anarchists from different villages struggle to get on, let alone different, kind of entirely different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Nevertheless, I think what is interesting in anarchism is that, you know, all this sort of idea that kind of your cultural identity is all consuming. Yes, that's important. But what anarchists have always been quite good at. Again, we're back to improvisation. When you get a group of people together, they're the group of people you're with. And sooner or later that group is going to form its own identity as well as all the composite identities that are going into it. And anarchism's always been very into that. It's always because it's always given people a license to not be possessed purely by where they're from and what their background is. So it sort of allows you kind of constant scope for reinvention. But really, I mean, so in some senses the kind of small affinity group type model, it can technically, you know, sort of straddle globalization quite comfortably, especially with technology and travel and all that sort of thing. It can do it, I think it's geared up to do. It doesn't always mean it's going to do it well. And again, you know, we're still at the same sort of question. Can all these sort of small intersections and interactions and transnational encounters and all that sort of thing, these are all great, they're all very positive. Do they? Are they substantial enough to stand up to globalization as they the full force that it is, especially as this in itself works in an extraordinarily anarchic way in the sense that it has no clear center. It's constantly moving and changing. It's sort of like the Medusa. You cut one snake head off, another one pops up somewhere else.

But I suppose what I say is there is, I think there is scope and resource in anarchism to kind of work on A global scale, possibly more so than there are in other political systems.

[B]

Okay, I'm just going to take some online questions. So there's two here. One is very general, so don't feel you have to deal with it in all its detail. And the other is more specific. So the general one is from Kathy Edmonds. She says, can you give examples of how politics as a way of life is possible within an anti permanence principle? And the second one is from Breece Springfield, who asks a more specific question. How do you see an anarchist society handling social welfare programs in the absence of a traditional welfare state?

[A]

Okay.

So examples of politics as a way of life following the anti permanence principle. Well, again, I think.

I think one important thing is just to challenge some of our assumptions. We do work very much and I think this was the question earlier. Whether or not this is cultural or whether or not it's more intrinsic, I don't know. But right now we do seem quite hardwired to assume that if it doesn't become permanent, if it doesn't fix everything, if it doesn't explain everything, then it's no good. And actually in some ways, I mean, you could flip this around and it's less a case of applying the anti permanence principle in your life or you know, than actually recognizing that it's already there in the way that we live on an everyday basis, we accept a lot of provisionality, a lot of contingency, we make ad hoc arrangements, we make things up as we go along. Like I'm doing with this other answer right now. We do that, that's completely normal. What we don't do is recognize that as something that's valuable, something that's political, something that's a way of thinking that is intrinsically quite democratic. So maybe my answer to that very good question is that it's less a case of trying to devise a kind of regime that you're then going to apply like, you know, sort of like your new, you know, kind of my new politics workout, as it was, were than just recognizing how you're kind of already doing it, valuing it, and seeing what other spheres or areas of your life you can extend that capacity and that mindset to. And just maybe as simple as starting to think, well, is it always necessary to have a mass in order to get your point across? Is it always necessary to see factionalism or dispersal as intrinsically bad or a failed action and maybe try and sort of think about the values of kind of, or the, the unexpected successes that you can get from, from failure. Now, the social welfare program. I'm going to be very disappointing, I'm afraid. I'm still going to stubbornly insist that I'm not going to sit here and tell everyone what an anarchist society would look like, because if I did, I'd sort of undermine everything I've just previously said. I mean, my, my answer would be I have no idea. But I'd be very happy to sit down and chat with you about how it could work in your particular situation. And if everyone was doing that, that would be getting a little bit closer to what my ideal was.

[B]

Let me just push you on that a bit because I think there's something a bit more fundamental behind that question. And the fundamental thing is that if we want a society in which there's redistribution of economic resources, there has to be a centre through which the redistribution takes place. Now, you've set out an agenda for a whole lot of different agencies, but there's no real centre in your vision. And so it's not clear how redistribution can take place.

[A]

Well, I think, I mean, redistribution for me is a centrifugal move. It's actually taking away from the centre. And, and it's actually, it's less a case of there not being a center than there being lots of different kinds of centers. And I think we're actually seeing right now the limits of what that centralized organization can do. I mean, we constantly hear, name me one of the social kind of services or what have you that aren't stretched to the limit and struggling like hell. The NHS certainly is. Social care is on its knees. Education's breaking. 40% of teachers considering quitting at any given time. The other 60% probably on sick leave. You know, it's not good out there. And tinkering around with strange claims made in a very odd budget is just not touching the sides. Now I'm. I don't think decentralization is a complete magic bullet, but I think it would be really interesting to see what happened if people, and we are seeing there are some models that we could actually look at and see, well, this happened and did the world end sort of thing. Things like the energy communities that are popping up.

Across the eu, this idea that a community, like something is community owned and that's not. Again, it's not a magic bullet. It doesn't mean that you won't be involved in things that are problematic or unfair or tense, but it means that you are part.

You at least have some access to that responsibility of what you're doing with your resources of who on your patch has those resources to engage with. Right now we're just so. We're so paralyzed. All we can do is sort of piss and moan at the ballot box every few years. And so what, I mean, like whoever you vote for, the government always wins, right?

[B]

So there's enthusiasm for that answer. I want to take a few more questions here now from us. Now there's an awful lot of people, so I want to make sure the people over this side and this side have a go too. Can I start with that gentleman with the dark blue? Hello. Thank you. Tell me who you are and where you're from too. Sorry though. I'm Artemis. I'm a student here at the lsc. There are probably lots of students now who are looking for graduate jobs and good luck should they get one. They'll probably work in a corporate space that's very vertical, very hierarchical and I mean let alone anarchist is probably not very democratic. So what would be the anarchists approach to the corporate job market in this day and age? All right, you can dwell on that one. Now, are there any sort of non gentlemen who want to ask a question? Otherwise, I'll take this gentleman with the blue tie. Thank you. My name is Joachim von Halas. I'm the chairman of Tuesday Club geopolitical community and I'm a visitor to public lectures at alse. Thank you for your presentation. You started off tonight looking at the 1950s and you might continue research to anarchist ideas in your forthcoming book to Occupy. Can you give us a brief overview of patterns and your observations from British government response to anarchism from the 1950s up to today? Kate Wilson and spy cop trials come to mind. Thank you.

[A]

Okay, the anarchist job market.

Well, they've got a host of possible answers for you. The one is that you could. This is the one I find possibly least likely that you could go into these places and you know, obviously start the campaign for workers control. As the very lucky one of very few graduates to get to one of these places, I don't fancy the chances. I feel that the balance of power may be very definitely on that side. And I'm not sure how many people you'd get supporting you or how long you'd last, whether you make your probation period. So, okay, that's not an option. But as a general principle, when you're at work, if you can see what your scope is for workers control, you know, it's always worth a shot. Then there's also. That was possibly a little bit glib more seriously, I think what's really interesting is the extent there's been a bit of a quiet revolution in employment patterns. And this is what I really like about Gen Z as they are known. They're very radical but in really idiosyncratic ways. So they have kind of quite major revolutions but completely under the radar. And one of these things has been quiet quitting for example, you know. Now does it solve everything? No, it doesn't, but it makes a clear statement. This is not, this is, I feel I'm doing a bullshit job to quote David Graeber.

Then there's, you know, if there's not sort of quite quitting there's also been quite a lot, lot of digging heels in over things like the four day week which is again, I mean this is not the full glorious spectacular anarchism but this is what freedoms, what liberties are available to me to get where I am today right now. And that has actually been a really impressive consistent push and it's starting to yield results. There is always the option of doing your own thing.

Becoming self employed, starting your own enterprise, all that sort of thing. That's always a very anarchic anarchy response or there are some interesting new developments. I have, I was slightly bizarrely invited to a conference led by this group called the House of of Beautiful Business. And I thought really? I mean have they, how closely have they read my profile? But what these guys want to do is reimagine business. Now I'm not saying I fully agreed with their vision or thought that it was entirely logically consistent, but I really support anyone attempting to imagine things differently. And what these guys want to do is grub together all these different people who just want to make a living but do it differently and do it ethically and do it beautifully. So I think I can't. I'm not sure I've got the perfect answer for you, but I think I'd suggest that there are definitely alternatives. If you've got these incredible skills that you must have done, if you've done your degree here and you've got all these brilliant experiences from lse, you could take them off and take the world and you could redefine what corporate means in your own image. You could try to anyway.

Government responses to anarchism. Well, okay, so I had the pleasure of reading the MI5 files on the Freedom Press anarchists. They are actually freely available on the Freedom Press archive because anarchists are fairly shameless like that. They're all actually really proud of themselves that they managed to get in to the MI5 archives. And they are. Well, to be honest, they're quite funny. So some poor old sod at MI5 got given the short straw and had to watch the Freedom Press Anarchist and had to sit in amongst all their endless quarrels and quickly came to the conclusion, these people are very bright, but I'm not sure they constitute any sort of threat at all. They can barely agree on whose turn it is to make the tea.

So in some senses, the British government and these anarchists, I mean, actually, here's the interesting thing. In 1945, the British government were relatively tolerant to them. I mean, they were the Freedom Press anarchists at the time. They were running a magazine journal called War Commentary. And literally every week this thing came out and it's all available online if you'd like to sort of check it out on the Freedom Press archives. And it was the most virulent sort of blatant, absolutely hostile condemnation of the war from every possible side. Never missed an opportunity to compare Churchill to Hitler and Stalin, which, you know, sort of, even if you are very anti war and a strong pacifist, was possibly, you know, pushing the envelope a bit too far. But. And they maintained this throughout the war, blatantly made special offers for soldiers to buy it, so that they were clearly trying to stir up sort of trouble among soldiers and trying to get the soldiers to hang onto their guns. Kept publishing stories on the Kronstadt Rebellion, which was obviously supposed to be inspiration, I think, and really MI5 let this role throughout the whole of the war. They just. Okay, okay, okay. And then weirdly enough, in about December 1945, they just suddenly had enough and they, they arrested them because they, they raided the officers and they arrested the editors, I think, because some completely trivial reason, but I think they just, they just had reached a point of no longer being tolerant. Since that point, actually, I'd say it's become harder and more dangerous to be involved in activism, to be involved in anarchism. The responses have become far less tolerant, quite frighteningly so. We've all seen about the sort of clampdowns on activism and it's been incredibly disheartening, disappointing that some of the, the most severe ones have come from a Labour government.

And, you know, that sort of leaves you wondering, you know, kind of, does anybody in Westminster take civil liberties as something that they're proud of, as something that they would claim to stand for anymore in any kind of realistic sense of the term? Yes, police infiltration has been common. Possibly not as common as Amongst communists because there was always that assumption, assumption that the communists might actually organize something, whereas the anarchist probably not. So if you low, if your budget's a bit short that, that year you want to kind of push them more to the communists or to CND or something like that.

But yeah, I think it has now become.

And the other thing that was very striking over the past few years, how difficult it was to speak about things like Palestine openly, even if you weren't particularly taking an anarchist stance on that. It became very hard to talk about that in public forums. I literally had to go to Qatar to do it as freely as I wish to. So yeah.

Things have got a lot less liberal and that's saying something right.

[B]

Now we're getting quite close to the end of time. So I think what I'm going to suggest is if we could just have really short sharp questions and if you just perhaps shorten the answers or just choose the answers maybe because we have to stop in a few minutes. Can we have this person here? But just. I'll just see who else wants to ask.

[A]

Hi, I'm Delilah. I wanted to ask about why you use such a broad definition of anarchism because I know a lot of people would not include like anarcho capitalism within their definitions.

[B]

Okay, so just hold that thought. Why is it so broad? And this woman on the side here.

[A]

Yeah, thank you for the talk. My name is Sarah, I'm a LSE student. I have a question about what an anarchist pedagogy looks like, what anarchist education looks like. Like obviously observing that schooling and education in our current systems is a disciplining controlling process. How do we raise children up to be anarchists or at the very least independent minds.

[B]

Okay, so education is the second point. And just lastly, this man here with the Puma.

Just on the anti permanent.

[A]

Principle, do you see something like you mentioned your party is something. You know, there was talk of sortition as an idea in, in running a democratic idea.

[B]

Can you see anarchism sort of getting.

[A]

Behind the idea of a permanent impermanence.

[B]

If that makes sense of sortition. So you're constantly changing, but there's a.

[A]

Permanent system behind it.

[B]

Okay, thanks. So two, three quite distinct ideas, the broadness, the education and the lottery system.

[A]

Sure. I use. Sorry, I would look at you but I have to stay near the mic, so I'm sort of looking in your direction. I use a broad definition because I think it's the most logically consistent with the concept. I know that a lot of people feel that it's diluting it to the point of lack of use. But those people also have very clear views about what they think anarchism is. And I've never been. I sort of think.

I take a broad definition because I'm quite greedy and I want to be open to as many possible ideas as I can be. And I think right now we're living in such strange and confusing times that to get any more of a fixed definition won't help me. But it is a personal preference which I back up by saying I think it's most logical with the concept. I certainly wouldn't dismiss anyone else's anarchisms if they want to be more specific or particular about it.

Education.

Anarchists have been involved in a lot of educational experiments. These have taken actually quite vastly different forms from the kind of modern schools by Farrar in Spain to the kind of as Neil doing as you please read when you want kind of thing in Scotland. I think the underlying thing. So, you know, in essence, anarchists. Anarchist education does not settle in one particular form. It adapts in whatever situation it finds itself in. But the principle running through that is it wants people to become again independent, autonomous, to have not just an appetite, appetite for being involved in their life in the world around them, but also a capacity and whatever the skills that their particular situational context needs. That's what anarchy is going to get on board with. I think you make an incredibly important point about the current education system. I think this is another example of something that's got increasingly worse and worse and worse to the point where I'm actually astonished anyone's tolerating it at all. But of course they're not. They because we now have the highest number of children who don't want to be at school, who are either permanently excluded or just refusing to go, who are sort of professional druids if you like. We've had to then develop an incredibly punitive system to try and force parents by fines, by court orders, by prison sentences to make their children go into these incredibly hostile spaces. We claim to be a democracy and yet what happens, you know, in this place where we're supposed to be learning the nuts and bolts of socialization. We're simply taught to compete and to be kind of in fear of failure the whole time. It is possibly, I'd say the site where we most. Where I would say we most need. We most need to be political at right now. And finally a permanent anti. Permanent.

I think I could get on board with that. I think if you had just the bone structure of something which continually was able to evolve and adapt and change. I think that sounds fantastic because that does, again, reconcile some of that sense of. Well, if you have no consistency at all, then you never. You kind of, you know, it's hard to get any kind of political movement off the ground. That said, it is. Whilst that will be desirable, I'd be very interested to see if it's achievable, people being what they are and tending to like power once they've got hold of it.

[B]

Well, listen, thank you very much. Thank you to all our questioners. There's more questions, but we can't do them. There's more online, but we can't do all of them either. I think what's striking about your talk and your response to this range of questions is that it runs from the very general, where you've tried to sketch out this protean quality of this whole tradition, to a quite detailed grasp of a specific period and a specific movement, especially in the 1950s. And you've brought to bear a sort of wonderful, deep understanding of the intellectual history of that time. There's nothing to be sure about after these things, but one thing we can be sure about is that it's a very volatile time, so we should look for inspiration in a range of different places. And you've given us some further food for thought in that respect. So can you join me in thanking our speaker, Sophie Scott Brown?

[A]

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners to see Discover us by leaving a review. Visit LSE AC UK Events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.