There is a vital distinction, stressed by anarchists, between society and the state. It has been obvious for centuries, and although many political thinkers have ignored this distinction, it was as clear, for example, to such 20th-century academics as Isaiah Berlin or G. D. H. Cole as it was in the 18th century to Thomas Paine, cited in the previous chapter. However, accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Empire there has been a rediscovery by political enquirers of ‘civil society’.

The philosopher Martin Buber was the friend and executor of the German anarchist Gustav Landauer, whose observation about the nature of the state as a mode of human behavior is discussed in Chapter 1. In his capacity as a professor of sociology, Buber provided a striking polarization of the two principles of human behavior involved: the political and the social. He saw the characteristics of the political principle to be power, authority, hierarchy, and dominion, while the social principle was visible to him in all spontaneous human associations built around a common need or common interest. The problem that arose was that of identifying the reason for the continual ascendancy of the political principle. Buber’s answer suggested that

the fact that every people feels itself threatened by the others gives the state its definite unifying power; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises . . . All forms of government have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the given conditions; in fact, this excess in the capacity for making dispositions is actually what we understand by political power. The measure of this excess . . . represents the exact difference between administration and government.

Buber described this excess, which he admitted could not be computed exactly, as the ‘political surplus’, and observed that

its justification derives from the external and internal instability, from the latent state of crisis between nations and within every nation. The political principle is always stronger in relation to the social principle than the given conditions require. The result is a continuous diminution in social spontaneity.

Social spontaneity is highly valued by anarchists but is not on the agenda of the politicians involved in dismantling the British postwar welfare state, and recommending the virtues of profit-making private enterprise. Anarchists are frequently told that their antipathy to the state is historically outmoded, since a main function of the modern state is the provision of social welfare. They respond by stressing that social welfare in Britain did not originate from government, nor from the postwar National Insurance laws, nor with the initiation of the National Health Service in 1948. It evolved from the vast network of friendly societies and mutual aid organizations that had sprung up through working-class self-help in the 19th century.

The founding father of the NHS was the then member of parliament for Tredegar in South Wales, Aneurin Bevan, the Labor Government’s Minister of Health. His constituency was the home of the Tredegar Medical Society, founded in 1870 and surviving until 1995. It provided medical care for the local employed workers, who were mostly miners and steelworkers, but also (unlike the pre-1948 National Health Insurance) for the needs of dependents, children, the old, and the non-employed: everyone living in the district.

It was

sustained through the years by voluntary contributions of three old pennies in the pound from the wage-packets of miners and steelworkers . . . At one time the society employed five doctors, a dentist, a chiropodist and a physiotherapist to care for the health of about 25,000 people.

A retired miner told Peter Hennessy that when Bevan initiated the National Health Service, ‘We thought he was turning the whole country into one big Tredegar.’ In practice, the Health Service has been in a state of continuous reorganization ever since its foundation, but has never been submitted to a local and federalized approach to medical care. A second reflection on the story of Tredegar is that when every employed worker in that town paid a voluntary levy to extend the local medical service to every resident, the earnings of even highly skilled industrial workers were below the liability to income tax. But ever since full employment and the system of PAYE (automatic deduction of tax as a duty of employers) was introduced during the Second World War, the central government’s Treasury has creamed off the cash that once supported local initiatives. If the pattern of local self-taxation on the Tredegar model had become the general pattern for health provision, this permanent daily need would not have become the plaything of central government financial policy.

Anarchists cite this little, local example of an alternative approach to the provision of health care to indicate that a different style of social organization could have evolved. In British experience, another variety was to be found in the 1930s and 1950s in what became known as the Peckham Experiment in south London, which was essentially a family health club where medical care was a feature of a social club providing sporting and swimming facilities. These and much more recent attempts to change the relationships in meeting universal social needs exemplify the urgency of the search for alternatives to the dreary polarity of public bureaucracy on the one hand and private profit on the other. I have myself heard the former chief architect to the Ministry of Health admit that the advice he gave for years on hospital design was misguided, and have heard similar confessions from management consultants, expensively hired to solve the NHS’s organizational problems.

A century ago, Kropotkin noted the endless variety of ‘friendly societies, the unities of odd fellows, the village and town clubs organized for meeting the doctor’s bills’ built up by working-class self-help; as part of his evidence for Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, and in a later book, Modern Science and Anarchism, he declared that ‘the economic and political liberation of man will have to create new forms for its expression in life, instead of those established by the State’. For he saw it as self-evident that ‘this new form will have to be more popular, more decentralized, and nearer to the folk-mote self-government than representative government can ever be’. He reiterated that we will be compelled to find new forms of organization for the social functions that the state fulfills through the bureaucracy, and that ‘as long as this is not done, nothing will be done’.

It is often suggested that as a result of modern personal mobility and instant communications, we all live in a series of global villages and that consequently the concept of local control of local services is obsolete. But there is confusion here between the concepts of communities of propinquity and communities of interest. We may share concerns with people on the other side of the world, and not even know our neighbors. But the picture is transformed at different stages in our personal or family history when we have shared interests with other users of the local primary school or health center, and the local shop or post office. Here there is, as every parent will confirm, an intense concern with very local issues.

Alternative patterns of social control of local facilities could have emerged, but for the fact that centralized government imposed national uniformity, while popular disillusionment with the bureaucratic welfare state coincided with the rise of the all-party gospel of managerial capitalism. Anarchists claim that after the inevitable disappointment, an alternative concept of socialism will be rediscovered. They argue that the identification of social welfare with bureaucratic managerialism is one of the factors that has delayed the exploration of other approaches for half a century. The private sector, as it is called, is happy to take over the health needs of those citizens who can pay its bills. Other citizens would either have to suffer the minimal services that remain for them, or to re-create the institutions that they built up in the 19th century. The anarchists see their methods as more relevant than ever, waiting to be reinvented, precisely because modern society has learned the limitations of both socialist and capitalist alternatives.

A once-famous book, James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, traced a shift in power in companies from shareholders to managers. But another more recent change in the power structure of public services of every kind has been felt, for example, all through the education system. It is the rise to dominance of professional managers who are the new unassailable masters of every kind of institution. Middle-class professionals in, say, public health, environmental planning, schools and universities, and the social services have found themselves subjected to the same kind of managerial Newspeak that used to outrage working-class trade unionists. Mastery of its grotesque jargon has become the prerequisite for appointment and promotion throughout the job market, except in the submerged economy of hard repetitive work, where the old assumptions of insecurity, long hours, and low pay remain true.

The new managerialism has such insubstantial foundations and has aroused such resentment among people proud of their professional skills (as was also true of skilled workers displaced by globalization) that it is bound to be challenged by a new breed of advocates of workplace democracy. Already the authors of alternative textbooks of management are borrowing the language, if not the intentions, of the anarchists, for example with a manual entitled Managing Without Management, and another called Action and Existence: Anarchism for Business Administration.

It seems inevitable that anarchist concepts will be reinvented or rediscovered continually, in fields never envisaged by the propagandists of the past, as people in so many areas of human activity search for alternatives to the crudities and injustices of both free-market capitalism and bureaucratic managerial socialism. It is possible to discern four principles that would shape an anarchist theory of organizations: that they should be (1) voluntary, (2) functional, (3) temporary, and (4) small.

They should be voluntary and functional for obvious reasons. There is no point in advocating individual freedom and responsibility if we go on to set up organizations in which membership is mandatory, or which have no purpose. There is a tendency for bodies to continue to exist after having outlived their functions. They should be temporary precisely because permanence is one of those factors that hardens the arteries of any organization, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, or in serving the interests of its office-holders rather than performing its ostensible functions. Finally, they should be small because in small, face-to-face groups the bureaucratizing and hierarchical tendencies inherent in all organizations have least opportunity to develop.

The 20th century experienced or witnessed every variety of state socialism, and learned that if its rulers are ruthless enough, they can impose, for a while, the most bizarre regimes and describe them as socialism. As socialism has been grossly misrepresented, so anarchism suffers from the widely held view that it is simply another variety of millenarianism, the belief in the eventual arrival, ‘after the revolution’, of a period of ultimate happiness when all the problems that beset humanity will have been solved, permanently.

The 19th-century anarchist propaganda, in common with other varieties of socialist propaganda, frequently implied this, but I have seldom met 20th-century anarchists who admitted to this simple faith. As for the great 20th-century tragedy of the Soviet Union, promising earthly paradise for future generations earned by today’s sacrifice, the anarchist inquest on it was written as long ago as 1847 by Bakunin’s friend, the Russian populist Alexander Herzen:

If progress is the goal, for whom then are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back, and as a consolation to the exhausted multitudes shouting, ‘We, who are about to die, salute thee!’, can only give the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you really wish to condemn human beings alive today to the mere sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others one day to dance upon? Of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge with the humble words ‘Future Progress’ on its flag?

A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception. A goal must be closer – at the very least the laborer’s wage or pleasure in the work performed. Each epoch, each generation, each life has had, and has, its own experience, and en route new demands grow, new methods.

Socialism in the 20th century promised ‘jam tomorrow’ so regularly, and the promise remained so often unfulfilled, that as Herzen insisted, new generations will have to evolve their own more immediate social aims, which, the anarchists hope, will be structured around styles of social organization other than the machinery of the state.

But because it is frequently suggested that anarchism is simply inappropriate for the scale of modern society, the concept of federalism is vital for any attempt to build an anarchist theory of organization. Anarchist approaches to federalism are fully discussed in Chapter 9.