The gulf between anarchist aspirations and the actual history of the 20th century could be seen as an indication of the folly of impossible hopes, but for the concurrent failure of other political ideologies of the Left. Which of us was not profoundly relieved by the collapse of Soviet communism, even though we have had little reason to rejoice in subsequent regimes? As the penal settlements slowly emptied of their survivors, the true believers were obliged to question their assumptions.

Many years ago, the American journalist Dwight Macdonald wrote an article on ‘Politics Past’ which included a long footnote that he later told me was the most-quoted paragraph he had ever written. His footnote said:

The revolutionary alternative to the status quo today is not collectivized property administered by a ‘workers’ state’ whatever that means, but some kind of anarchist decentralization that will break up mass society into small communities where individuals can live together as variegated human beings instead of as impersonal units in the mass sum. The shallowness of the New Deal and the British Labor Party’s postwar regime is shown by their failure to improve any of the important things in people’s lives – the actual relationships on the job, the way they spend their leisure, and child- rearing and sex and art. It is mass living that vitiates all these today, and the State that holds together the status quo. Marxism glorifies ‘the masses’ and endorses the State. Anarchism leads back to the individual and the community, which is ‘impractical’ but necessary – that is to say, it is revolutionary.

In a partial, incomplete, but visible way, several of the revolutions he sought have already transformed the surface of life. To take an example that is by definition superficial, one that is obvious and visible but seldom discussed, consider the revolution in dress in the second half of the 20th century. Fifty years ago in Britain, the social class of men, women, and children could be recognized from their clothing. Today this is no longer true, except for the tiny minority who can read the signs of expensive and exclusive dress. This is usually attributed to the growth of mass production and the fact that the garment trade is the first route to the global economy for a low-paid workforce in the ‘developing’ world. But it has more to do with the relaxation of dress codes, pioneered all through the 20th century by the radical nonconformists’ rejection of fashion.

The ignoring of dress codes based on occupation or social class was a small and personal rebuff to convention. But of course a far more significant revolution, gaining ground all through the century, has been the women’s movement, rejecting the universal convention of male dominance. Among its anarchist pioneers was Emma Goldman, with her trenchant pamphlet on The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation, arguing that the vote, which had failed to liberate men, was not likely to free women. Emancipation, she argued, must come from the woman herself,

First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set women free . . .

It was among the anarchists that the habit began of what were called ‘free unions’ as opposed to marriages licensed by church or state. Today these are almost as common as regular marriages, with the result that the stigma once associated with illegitimacy has, during the century, disappeared. This change was, of course, accelerated by the pharmacological revolution of the contraceptive pill.

Alex Comfort (1920–2000) was a physician, novelist, poet, and anarchist. His lectures to meetings of the London Anarchist Group in the late 1940s gave rise to his book Barbarism and Sexual Freedom, published by Freedom Press in 1948 at a time when no ‘respectable’ publisher would issue such a book. This in turn led to his Sexual Behavior in Society and to his phenomenally successful manuals on sex. In his book More Joy: A Lovemaking Companion to The Joy of Sex (1973), he included an anarchist account of the connection between sexuality and politics. He asserted that

acquiring the awareness and the attitudes which can come from good sexual experience does not make for selfish withdrawal: it is more inclined to radicalize people. The anti-sexualism of authoritarian societies and the people who run them does not spring from conviction (they themselves have sex), but from the vague perception that freedom here might lead to a liking for freedom elsewhere. People who have eroticized their experience of themselves and the world are, on the one hand, inconveniently unwarlike, and on the other, violently combative in resisting political salesmen and racists who threaten the personal freedom they have attained and want to see others share.

Comfort hoped that his books would provide both reassurance and liberation, and that they would be a contribution to another 20th-century revolution: that of the relationships between parents and children. It is hard to imagine in today’s Western Europe the punitive behavior of parents towards children that was taken for granted a century ago.

The same is true of the relationships between teachers and children. The recollections of people who were schoolchildren in the first decade of the 20th century are full of accounts of the physical punishment they received or that they continually feared. In the century’s last decade a law in Britain banned corporal punishment in schools. This was not a sudden legal decision. It reflected the influence of a handful of ‘progressive’ schools on general educational thinking.

Many observers claim that the school system has failed to prepare for the dilemmas that came in the wake of the abandonment of physical punishment. The teacher is deprived of the weapon that was seen as the ultimate sanction of the school. This has resulted in increased numbers of children being excluded from school because teachers have declined to have them in the class. Anyone who has observed how one disruptive member of the class can make learning impossible for the whole group has no criticism to make of those teachers (especially since their employers put pressure on them not to upset statistics).

In the 1960s and 1970s an intriguing situation arose in several British cities: London, Liverpool, Leeds, and Glasgow. Groups of enthusiasts found empty buildings and set up ‘free schools’ to provide an informal education for children who were either excluded from school or had excluded themselves through truancy. (One of them, White Lion Free School in London, lasted from 1972 to 1990.) The regime of these schools was consciously modeled on the experience of the progressive school movement. I asked a veteran of those experiments why the idea had not been revived among the new generation of excluded children at the start of the new century. She gave me two reasons: first, the legal requirement in Britain for all schools to teach the National Curriculum introduced during the Thatcher regime and retained by its successors; and second, the difficulty of finding premises that would meet the safety and sanitary regulations prescribed for schools. However, it is hard to imagine returning to the regime of fear that governed schools a century ago. The quiet revolution in education can only move forward.

Two other changes in Britain from the 1960s also seem irreversible. One is the removal of the fear of criminal prosecution for homosexuality. This had been recommended in a government report commissioned from John Wolfenden and published in 1957, but years of argument and agitation were needed to engineer a change in the law. The other was the ending of capital punishment in 1965. On the eve of the debate that brought this change, the anarchist publishers Freedom Press presented every Member of Parliament with a copy of their edition of Charles Duff’s devastating book, A Handbook on Hanging, which took the form of an enthusiastic manual for executioners. Only very humorless observers would complain that support for campaigns to end barbaric laws was a contradiction of the anarchist anti-parliamentary stance.

Taken together, the social changes in Britain that I have listed are an indication that while the anarchists have made little progress towards the large-scale changes in society that they hoped to bring about, they have contributed to a long series of small liberations that have lifted a huge load of human misery.

Several anarchist groups sought to link together these struggles for human liberation into a conscious campaign with a wider relevance. In the Netherlands, the Provos introduced games and playful alternatives to ridicule the official city management. Their most famous ploy was to litter Amsterdam with white bicycles for public use, to demonstrate that cars were unnecessary. They were followed by the Kabouters, or gnomes, forerunners of the Green movement. One of them, Roel van Duyn, made the same links between anarchism and cybernetics, the science of control and communication systems, that had been suggested by the founder of cybernetics, the neurologist Gray Walter. He had pointed out that

We find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big Brother. Within our heads our very lives depend on equality of opportunity, on specialization with versatility, on free communication and just restraint, a freedom without interference. Here too, local minorities can and do control their own means of production and expression in free and equal intercourse with their neighbors.

Among French attempts to sharpen the widespread vaguely libertarian trends were the Situationists, notably Raoul Vaneigem with his manifesto on The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967). As Peter Marshall puts it:

The way out for the Situationists was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent daily life here and now. To transform the perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the same thing. By liberating oneself, one changed power relations and therefore transformed society . . .

The Situationists, like the Kabouters, have passed into history without managing to transform society, but France and the Netherlands, like Britain, have seen a series of modest gains in civilization.

Then the quiet revolution became noisier as, thanks to the Internet, the anarchists were linked to a variety of anti-capitalist protesters in a series of large-scale demonstrations whenever global bodies met to advance their interests. George Monbiot, in his book Captive State, describes how

In April 1998, a ragged band of protesters inflicted the first of a series of defeats on a coalition of the most powerful interests on earth. The 29 richest nations had joined forces with the world’s biggest multinational companies to write ‘the constitution of a single global economy’. Proposed and drafted by businessmen, secretly discussed by governments, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment would, had it succeeded, have granted corporations the right to sue any country whose laws restricted their ability to make money. The treaty was, its opponents claimed, a charter for the corporate takeover of the world.

Monbiot explains how the leaking of this secret treaty in 1997 led to objectors posting the details on the Web, guaranteeing demonstrations wherever the governmental negotiators might meet. Public pressure and internal disputes obliged the global leaders to abandon their negotiations, only to revive them under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Its negotiators met in Seattle in November 1999, but the talks there collapsed as tens of thousands of people from around the world protested outside, in the name of the poor countries and the planet’s environment.

In the string of demonstrations that began at Seattle, the techniques adopted by the Provos and Kabouters were used to ridicule the forces of law and order. Sean Sheehan, in his account of contemporary anarchism, describes the scene in Prague, a year after Seattle, where in demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund,

mini armies of protesters came dressed as fairies and armed with feather dusters to tickle the ranks of heavily clothed, armed police. At such protests, lines of transport tend to be blocked not so much by burning barricades and street battles but by giant contraptions like the Liberation Puppet, capable of snarling up a major highway.

But after five days of protest had brought a World Trade Organization conference close to collapse, the heavily armed police responded. As Sheehan reports,

That the size and organization of the protests spooked the police into frenzied and blatantly illegal behavior was confirmed by the fact that of the 631 arrests, only 14 ever went to trial.

Having started gently and humorously, the big international demonstrations of opposition to global capitalism are no longer quiet revolutions. There seems to have been a pact between the world’s police forces to escalate the violence of their response to demonstrators. Sean Sheehan goes on to record that

‘Normal’ police violence at Seattle escalated at the anti-capitalism protest in Gothenburg in June 2001 to the issuing of live ammunition to the police with three people shot. When another anti-capitalist protest was mounted in Genoa in July, the event turned into a violent riot, with armored vans driving at speed into crowds of protesters and a late-night, cold-blooded and very violent assault by the police on a building where media activists and their material were lodged.

One young anarchist was killed at Genoa, and his death prompted a renewed discussion of strategies of protest. Maybe there are subtler ways of undermining global capitalism? The quiet revolutionaries who transformed the culture of Western countries in the 20th century have not yet discovered them.