Chapter 9 : 
The Federalist Agenda
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20042004

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Author : Colin Ward

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A frequent criticism of anarchism is that it is an ideology that fits a
world of isolated villages, small enough to be self-governing entities,
but not the global, multi-national society that we all inhabit in real
life. But in fact the major anarchist thinkers of the past: Proudhon,
Bakunin, and Kropotkin, had a federalist agenda that was a
foretaste of modern debates on European unity.

That minority of children in any European country who were given
the opportunity of studying the history of Europe as well as that of
their own nations learned that there were two great events in the
19th century: the unification of Germany, achieved by Bismarck and
the Emperor Wilhelm I; and the unification of Italy, won by Cavour,
Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Vittorio Emanuale II. These triumphs had
been welcomed by the whole world (which in those days meant the
European world) because Germany and Italy had left behind all
those silly little principalities, republics, papal provinces, and city
states, to become nation states, empires, and, of course, conquerors.

They had become like France, whose little local despots were finally
unified by force, first by Louis XIV with his majestic slogan ‘L’État
c’est moi’, and then by Napoleon, heir to the Grande Revolution, just
like Stalin in the 20th century, who built up the administrative
machinery of terror to ensure that the slogan was true. Or they had
become like England, whose kings (and its one republican ruler,
Oliver Cromwell) had conquered the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, and
sought to dominate the rest of the world outside Europe. The
same thing was happening at the other end of Europe. Ivan IV,
appropriately named ‘The Terrible’, conquered central Asia as far as
the Pacific, and Peter I, known as ‘The Great’, using the techniques
he had learned in France and Britain, took over the Baltic, most of
Poland, and the west of Ukraine.

Advanced opinion throughout Europe welcomed Germany and
Italy to the gentleman’s club of national and imperial powers. The
eventual results in the 20th century were appalling adventures in
conquest, with the devastating loss of life among young men from
the villages of Europe in the two world wars, and the rise of populist
demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini, as well as their endless
imitators to this day, who claim L’État c’est moi. Consequently,
although we have had all too few politicians arguing for the
breakdown of nations, we have a host of them of every persuasion
who have sought European unity: economic, social, administrative,
or, of course, political.

Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians
we have a multitude of administrators in Brussels issuing
edicts about which varieties of vegetable seeds, or what
constituents of beefburgers or ice cream, may be sold in the
shops of member nations. The newspapers joyfully report all
this trivia. The press gives far less attention to another undercurrent
of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views expressed in
Strasbourg from people of every political hue, claiming the
existence of a ‘Europe of the Regions’, and daring to argue that
the nation state was a phenomenon of the 16th to 19th centuries,
which will not have any useful future in the 21st century. The
forthcoming pattern of administration in the federated Europe
that they are struggling to discover is a link between, let us say,
Calabria, Wales, Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia, or Saxony, as
regions, rather than as nations, seeking their regional identity,
economically and culturally, which has been lost in their
incorporation in nation states, where the center of gravity is
elsewhere.

In the great tide of nationalism in the 19th century there was a
handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging the alternative of
federalism. It is interesting, at least, that those whose names survive
were the three best-known anarchist thinkers of that century. The
political Left as it evolved in the 20th century has dismissed their
legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the Left, since the debate
is now monopolized by the political Right, which has its own
agenda in opposing both federalism and regionalism.

First among these anarchist precursors was Proudhon, who devoted
two of his books to the idea of federation in opposition to that of the
nation state. They were La Fédération et l’Unité en Italie of 1862,
and in the following year his Du Principe Fédératif. Proudhon was
French, a citizen of a unified, centralized nation state, with the
result that he was obliged to become a refugee in Belgium. And he
feared the unification of Italy on several different levels. In his book
De la Justice of 1858, he had forecast that the creation of the
German Empire would bring only trouble both to the Germans
and to the rest of Europe, and he pursued this argument into the
political history of Italy.

On the bottom level was history, where natural factors like geology
and climate had shaped local customs and attitudes. ‘Italy’, he claimed,



is federal by the constitution of her territory; by the diversity of her
inhabitants; in the nature of her genius; in her mores; in her history.
She is federal in all her being and has been since all eternity . . . And
by federation you will make her as many times free as you give her
independent states.



It was therefore unnatural for Italy to become a nation state.

He understood that Cavour and Napoleon III had agreed to make a
federal Italy, but he knew they would rely on a vainglorious
princeling from the House of Savoy who would settle for nothing
less than a centralized constitutional monarchy. And beyond this,
he profoundly mistrusted the liberal anti-clericalism of Mazzini,
not through any love of the Papacy but because he recognized that
Mazzini’s slogan ‘Dio e popolo’ could be exploited by any demagogue
who could seize the machinery of a centralized state. He saw that
the existence of this administrative machinery was an absolute
threat to personal and local liberty. Proudhon was almost alone
among 19th-century political theorists to perceive this:



Liberal today under a liberal government, it will tomorrow become
the formidable engine of a usurping despot. It is a perpetual
temptation to the executive power, a perpetual threat to the people’s
liberties. No rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future.
Centralization might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for
the profit of its government . . .



Everything we now know about the 20th-century history of Europe,
Asia, Latin America, or Africa supports this perception. Nor does
the North American style of federalism, so lovingly conceived by
Thomas Jefferson and his friends, guarantee the removal of this
threat. One of Proudhon’s English biographers, Edward Hyams,
comments that



it has become apparent since the Second World War that United
States Presidents can and do make use of the Federal administrative
machine in a way which makes a mockery of democracy.



And his Canadian translator Richard Vernon paraphrases
Proudhon’s conclusion thus:



Solicit men’s views in the mass, and they will return stupid, fickle
and violent answers; solicit their views as members of definite
groups with real solidarity and a distinctive character, and their
answers will be responsible and wise. Expose them to the political
‘language’ of mass democracy, which represents ‘the people’ as
unitary and undivided, and minorities as traitors, and they will give
birth to tyranny; expose them to the political language of federalism,
in which the people figures as a diversified aggregate of real
associations, and they will resist tyranny to the end.



This observation reveals a profound understanding of the
psychology of politics. Proudhon was extrapolating from the
evolution of the Swiss Confederation, but Europe has other
examples in a whole series of specialist fields. The Netherlands has
a reputation for its mild or lenient penal policy. The official
explanation of this is the replacement in 1886 of the Code Napoleon
by ‘a genuine Dutch criminal code’ based upon cultural traditions
like ‘the well-known Dutch ‘‘tolerance’’ and tendency to accept
deviant minorities’. I am quoting the Netherlands criminologist
Dr Willem de Haan, who cites the explanation that Dutch society



has traditionally been based upon religious, political and ideological
rather than class lines. The important denominational groupings
created their own social institutions in all major public spheres. This
process . . . is responsible for transforming a pragmatic, tolerant
general attitude into an absolute social must.



In other words it is diversity and not unity that creates the kind
of society in which you and I can most comfortably live. And
modern Dutch attitudes are rooted in the diversity of the medieval
city states of Holland and Zeeland, which demonstrates, as much as
Proudhon’s regionalism, that a desirable future for all Europe lies in
an accommodation of local differences.

Discussions about European integration in the 1860s prompted a
skeptical reaction from Proudhon:



Among French democrats there has been much talk of a European
confederation, or a United States of Europe. By this they seem to
understand nothing but an alliance of all the states which presently
exist in Europe, great and small, presided over by a permanent
congress. It is taken for granted that each state will retain the form
of government that suits it best. Now since each state will have votes
in the congress in proportion to its population and territory, the
small states in this so-called confederation will soon be incorporated
into the large ones . . .



Swallowing up neighboring countries may be unfashionable
nowadays, but we can see Proudhon’s misgivings being realized in
the way debates and decisions of the European Community are
dominated by the large states at the expense of the smaller member
nations.

The second of my 19th-century mentors, Michael Bakunin,
demands our attention for a variety of reasons. He was almost alone
among that century’s political thinkers in foreseeing the horrors of
the clash of modern nation states in the First and Second World
Wars, as well as predicting the results of centralizing Marxism in
the Russian Empire. In 1867 Prussia and France seemed to be
poised for a war about who should control Luxembourg and this,
through the network of interests and alliances, ‘threatened to engulf
all Europe’. A League for Peace and Freedom held its congress in
Geneva, sponsored by prominent people from various countries,
such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, and John Stuart Mill.
Bakunin seized the opportunity to address this audience, and
published his opinions under the title Fédéralisme, Socialisme, et
Anti-Théologisme. This document set out 13 points on which,
according to Bakunin, the Geneva Congress was unanimous.

The first of these points proclaimed



That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in
the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war
impossible among the various peoples which make up the European
family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States
of Europe.

His second point argued that this aim implied that states must be
replaced by regions, for it observed



That the formation of these States of Europe can never come about
between the States as constituted at present, in view of the
monstrous disparity which exists between their various powers.



His fourth point claimed



That not even if it called itself a republic could any centralized,
bureaucratic and by the same token militarist State enter seriously
and genuinely into an international federation. By virtue of its
constitution, which will always be an explicit or implicit denial
of domestic liberty, it would necessarily imply a declaration of
permanent war and a threat to the existence of neighboring
countries.



Consequently his fifth point demanded



That all the supporters of the League should therefore bend all their
energies towards the reconstruction of their various countries, in
order to replace the old organization founded throughout upon
violence and the principle of authority by a new organization based
solely upon the interests, needs and inclinations of the populace,
and owning no principle other than that of the free federation of
individuals into communes, communes into provinces, provinces
into nations, and the latter into the United States, first of Europe,
then of the whole world.



The vision thus became bigger and bigger, but Bakunin was careful
to include the acceptance of secession. His eighth point declared
that



Just because a region has formed part of a State, even by voluntary
accession, it by no means follows that it incurs any obligation to
remain tied to it for ever. No obligation in perpetuity is acceptable
to human justice . . . The right of free union and equally free secession
comes first and foremost among all political rights; without it,
confederation would be nothing but centralization in disguise.



Bakunin refers admiringly to the Swiss Confederation, ‘practicing
federation so successfully today’, as he put it, and Proudhon too
explicitly took as a model the Swiss supremacy of the commune as
the unit of social organization, linked by the canton, with a purely
administrative federal council. But both remembered the events of
1848, when the Sonderbund of secessionist cantons were compelled
by war to accept the new constitution of the majority. Proudhon and
Bakunin agreed in condemning this subversion of federalism by the
unitary principle. There must be a right of secession.

Switzerland, precisely because of its decentralized structure, was a
refuge for numerous political refugees from the Austro-Hungarian,
German, and Russian empires. One Russian anarchist was even
expelled from Switzerland: he was too much even for the Swiss
Federal Council. This was Peter Kropotkin, whose ideas connect
19th-century federalism with 20th-century regional geography.

Kropotkin’s youth was spent as an army officer in geological
expeditions in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire.
His autobiography tells of the outrage he felt to see how central
administration and funding destroyed any improvement of local
conditions, through ignorance, incompetence, and universal
corruption, and through the destruction of ancient communal
institutions which might have enabled people to change their
own lives. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the
administrative machinery was suffocated by boredom and
embezzlement. There is a similar literature from any other empire
or nation state.

In 1872 Kropotkin made his first visit to Western Europe, and in
Switzerland was intoxicated by the air of democracy, even a
bourgeois one. In the Jura hills he stayed with the watch-makers, a
community of self-employed craftsmen. His biographer Martin
Miller describes his reactions:



Kropotkin’s meetings and talks with the workers on their jobs
revealed the kind of spontaneous freedom without authority or
direction from above that he had dreamed about. Isolated and
self-sufficient, the Jura watchmakers impressed Kropotkin as an
example that could transform society if such a community were
allowed to develop on a large scale. There was no doubt in his mind
that this community would work because it was not a matter of
imposing an artificial ‘system’ such as had been attempted by
Muraviev in Siberia but of permitting the natural activity of the
workers to function according to their own interests.



His stay in the Jura hills was a turning point for Kropotkin. The rest
of his life was, in a sense, devoted to gathering the evidence for
anarchism, federalism, and regionalism.

Kropotkin’s approach is not simply a matter of academic history. In
a study of Un federalista Russo, Pietro Kropotkin (1922), the
Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri quotes the ‘Letter to the Workers
of Western Europe’ that Kropotkin handed to the British Labor
Party politician Margaret Bondfield in June 1920. In the course of it
he declared that:



Imperial Russia is dead and will never be revived. The future of the
various provinces which composed the Empire will be directed
towards a large federation. The natural territories of the different
sections of this federation are in no way distinct from those with
which we are familiar in the history of Russia, of its ethnography
and economic life. All the attempts to bring together the consituent
parts of the Russian Empire, such as Finland, the Baltic provinces,
Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Siberia and others, under a
central authority are doomed to failure. The future of what was the
Russian Empire is directed towards a federation of independent
units.



Today we can see the relevance of this opinion, ignored for 70 years.
As an exile in Western Europe, Kropotkin had close contact with a
range of pioneers of regional thinking. The relationship between
regionalism and anarchism has been handsomely delineated by the
geographer Peter Hall, when director of the Institute of Urban and
Regional Development at Berkeley, California, in his book Cities
of Tomorrow (1988). There was Kropotkin’s fellow anarchist
geographer Elisée Reclus, arguing for small-scale human societies
based on the ecology of their regions. There was Paul Vidal de la
Blache, another founder of French geography, who argued that ‘the
region was more than an object of survey; it was to provide the basis
for the total reconstruction of social and political life’. For Vidal, as
Professor Hall explains, it was the region, not the nation, which



as the motor force of human development; the almost sensual
reciprocity between men and women and their surroundings, was
the seat of comprehensible liberty and the mainspring of cultural
evolution, which were being attacked and eroded by the centralized
nation-state and by large-scale machine industry.



Finally there was the extraordinary Scottish biologist Patrick
Geddes, who tried to encapsulate all these regionalist ideas,
whether geographical, social, historical, political, or economic,
into an ideology of reasons for regions, known to most of us through
the work of his disciple Lewis Mumford.

Professor Hall pointed out that



many, though by no means all, of the early visions of the planning
movement stemmed from the anarchist movement, which
flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first
years of the twentieth . . . The vision of these anarchist pioneers was
not merely of an alternative built form, but of an alternative society,
nether capitalist nor bureaucratic-socialist: a society based on
voluntary cooperation among men and women, working and living
in small self-governing communities.



Those 19th-century anarchist thinkers were a century in advance of
their contemporaries in warning the peoples of Europe of the
consequences of not adopting a regionalist and federalist approach.
After every kind of disastrous experience in the 20th century, the
rulers of the nation states of Europe have directed policy towards
several kinds of supranational entities. The crucial issue that faces
them is whether to conceive of a Europe of States or a Europe of
Regions.

To do them justice, the advocates of a united Europe have developed
a doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’, by which governmental decisions outside
the remit of the supranational institutions of the European
Community should be taken by regional or local levels of
administration, rather than by national governments. A resolution
has been adopted by the Council of Europe, calling for national
governments to adopt its Charter for Local Self-Government, ‘to
formalize commitment to the principle that government functions
should be carried out at the lowest level possible and only
transferred to higher government by consent.’

This precept is an extraordinary tribute to Proudhon, Bakunin, and
Kropotkin and the ideas that they were alone in voicing (apart
from some interesting Spanish thinkers like Pi y Margall or Joaquin
Costa). Of course it is one of the first aspects of pan-European
ideology that national governments will choose to ignore, though
there are obvious differences between various nation states in this
respect. In many of them, for example Germany, Italy, Spain, and
even France, the machinery of government is considerably more
devolved than it was 50 years ago. The same is true of the former
Soviet Union.

One anarchist thinker from the Netherlands, Thom Holterman, has
set out the criteria which anarchists would see as the prerequisites
for a free united Europe. His warning is precisely that the obstacle
to a Europe of the Regions is the existence of nation states. Another
is that because the thinking and planning of the future of Europe is
in the hands of governmental bureaucracies, they are all preparing
for a Europe of the bureaucrats.

Kropotkin used to cite the lifeboat institution as an example of
the kind of voluntary and non-coercive organization envisaged by
anarchists that could provide a worldwide service without the
principle of authority intervening. Two other examples of the way in
which local groups and associations could combine to provide a
complex network of functions without any central authority are the
post office and the railways. You can post a letter to Chili or China,
confident that it will get there, as a result of freely-arrived-at
agreements between different national post offices, without there
being any central world postal authority at all. Or you can travel
across Europe and Asia over the lines of a dozen different railway
systems, public and private, without any kind of central railway
authority. Coordination requires neither uniformity nor
bureaucracy.


 Chapter 10. Green aspirations and anarchist futures

When Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops first appeared
in 1899, the precursors of the Green movement found it an
inspiration, since its author stressed the productivity of
small-scale decentralized industry, and of a ‘horticultural’
approach to food production, for its immense output. When
his book was re-issued at the end of the First World War, an
added preliminary note observed that: ‘It pleads for a new
economy in the energies used in supplying the needs of human
life, since these needs are increasing and the energies are not
inexhaustible.’

In those days this was a rare recognition of the limits to growth.
Today we have a vast literature on the problems of resource
depletion and environmental destruction. The difficulty for
environmental activists, trying to enlist the support of fellow
citizens, is one of priorities: which campaign most urgently needs
a helping hand? Capitalism roams the globe, seeking the least
protected labor market and the least protected physical
environment, in order to stimulate, and to win, an ever-growing
market for its goods. It describes this process as ‘consumer
sovereignty’ and thus evades any responsibility for its ruthless
exploitation of poor people and weak economies. The richer we are,
the more we are inclined to shrug off our share of this
responsibility.

For many years now, we in the rich economies have had a series
of movements and campaigns described in general terms as
‘environmental’, ‘conservationist’, or ‘green’, or even ‘ecological’,
drawing our attention to the crises of the environment, global
warming, and the depletion of finite resources. Critics of these
campaigns in the rich world point out that they do not always
include an awareness of the plight of the rich world’s poor. Amartya
Sen remarked on the paradox that ‘In the poor world the poor are
thin and the rich are fat. In the rich world the rich are thin and the
poor are fat.’ He is the author of a famous study of who eats and
who starves, and of what they eat, with a theory of ‘entitlements’,
defining these as the set of ‘alternative commodity bundles which a
person can command’. His observation is a reminder that in every
society there are several simultaneous food cultures, ultimately
determined by levels of poverty and affluence. In the poor world the
powerful and wealthy and their military elites live grandly, while
the poor are ill-nourished and sometimes starving. In the rich world
a significant poor minority lives on the ‘junk food’ that the affluent
can afford to despise. In Britain the number of children growing up
in poverty trebled between 1968 and 1998.

Any discussion of environmental issues has to start with the fact of
malnutrition in a world of plenty, and then proceed to examine the
high cost of the rich world’s ‘cheap’ food. Kropotkin’s arguments
included the claim that a densely populated small country like
Britain could feed itself from its own land, an idea regarded as
absurd even though it was based on European experience. A
century later I had the pleasure of meeting Jac Smit, president
of the Urban Agriculture Network and coauthor of the United
Nations report on Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable
Cities, who explained how in Chinese cities 90% of vegetables are
locally grown, and that



Hong Kong, the densest large city in the world, produces within its
boundaries two-thirds of the poultry, one-sixth of the pigs, and close
to half the vegetables eaten by its citizens and visitors.



The best-known examples of urban intensive food production
are provided by the vast cities of South-East Asia. Singapore’s
1,500 hectares of ‘agro-technology parks’ are famous. As their
admirer Geoff Wilson points out,



The inescapable logic is that while rural agriculture can need up to
eight fossil fuel energy units to produce one food energy unit sold in
supermarkets, urban agriculture can provide up to eight food energy
units for every one fossil fuel energy unit.



Tim Lang, a professor of food policy who has been concerned for
years with the implications of findings like these, reminds us that



Supermarket distribution systems are totally dependent upon cheap
energy. Far from being more convenient, hypermarkets are actually
making us make more, not less, shopping trips. The average number
increased by 28 percent between 1978 and 1991. Shoppers also have
to go further: the distance rose by 60 percent between 1978 and
1991 . . . The common factor to all this is the food retailers’ use of
centralized distribution systems. Each firm has its own regional
distribution centers (RDCs). All food goes to the RDC and thence to
the shops. As a result the food travels much further . . .



This is known as the food-miles issue. It has been extended to even
more bizarre lengths by the policies of the giant food retailers,
searching the globe for suppliers who are cheapest, regardless of the
diversion of local water supplies from meeting traditional local
needs. In my nearest town in East Anglia I can buy Mexican carrots,
Australian onions, African mange-tout peas, and Peruvian
asparagus. This fact contributes far more to global warming than
my careless use of electricity. Professor John Houghton, Chairman
of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and of the
United Nations Advisory Panel on Climate Change, thought there
was something absurd in the fact that he had eaten delicious new
potatoes for his lunch. They had been delivered by a 40-tonne lorry
to his local hypermarket after being flown by superjet to England.
And, as he commented, ‘I could have grown them in my own back
garden.’

His remark was important because it illustrates the gulf between
our green aspirations and our actual behavior. In exploring this
gap, the work of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin has been
significant and influential. He, like Rachel Carson, had been a
propagandist on environmental issues in the 1950s and 1960s, and
this gave him the same kind of forerunner status in the emerging
American Green movement. He linked this with the homegrown
American anarchist tradition. ‘What we are trying to do’, he
explained,



is to redeem certain aspects of the American Dream. There are, of
course, several American dreams: one is the John Wayne tradition
of the cowboy going out to the West, and the whole notion of
pioneering individualism; another is the immigrant American
dream, this being the land of opportunity where the streets are
made of gold. But there is a third American dream, which is the
oldest of the lot, dating back to Puritan times, which stresses
community, decentralization, self-sufficiency, mutual aid and face-
to-face democracy.



This is where Bookchin came into conflict with yet another
American dream. As ecological awareness spread among the
children of the affluent, the national guilt over the genocide
of indigenous peoples led to an exaltation of the Noble Savage,
and a distaste for ordinary mortals who hadn’t got the Message.
What was seen as ‘Deep Ecology’ became fashionable among
those affluent enough to ‘get away from it all’ and pursue every
kind of mystical belief, so long as the checks kept flowing
into their bank accounts. Many of Bookchin’s fellow citizens
shifted from an involvement in social issues to a sentimental
and privileged idealization of ‘wilderness’ and the natural
environment, with a consequent misanthropy towards their
fellow humans.

Bookchin’s vigorous repudiation of these approaches has sought
to confront the abandonment of social concerns in an increasingly
divided America, re-asserting the claims of ‘Social Ecology’
and aiming, as he said, to advance ‘a serious challenge to society
with its vast, hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, state apparatus and
militaristic history’.

Most anarchists would take it for granted that an ecologically
viable society is incompatible with capitalism and its
demand for continually expanding markets, achieved through
the invention of wants and the built-in obsolescence of
consumer goods. At the same time, most of us feel that in
seeking more ecologically viable ways of living, we cannot
wait until the downfall of the capitalist system. The Green
movement has been in existence long enough for its
adherents to learn which approaches are most relevant
for them.

In the 1970s I was lucky enough to be employed to start a
journal for teachers and students called the Bulletin of
Environmental Education (BEE). One of its most stimulating
mentors was an inventive young man called Peter Harper,
who in 1975 went to Wales to join a group of enthusiasts
who were starting the Center for Alternative Technology (CAT)
at Machynlleth, in an old quarry in a landscape of industrial
dereliction. By the end of the century that enterprise
(operating as a workers’ cooperative of 28 members) was
being visited by about 80,000 people every year, including
20,000 children, and is world-famous as a demonstration site
for environmentally friendly power generation, building
construction, and sewage disposal. I am told that it generates
90% of its own energy requirements in renewable form from
sun, wind, and water.

Since he has long practical experience in this field, I take Peter
Harper’s conclusions seriously. He told interviewers in 1998 that



The craze for self-sufficiency and small-is-beautiful has passed.
Don’t try to do it all yourself. Start where you are strong, not where
you are weak . . . Don’t try to make your energy: try to save your
energy. Most of the action is going to be in cities, where the majority
of humans will soon be living and where, contrary to our old
Arcadian assumptions, sustainable modern lifestyles are more easily
achieved.



His continual probing of the environmental consciousness of
our fellow citizens has led him to make a different distinction
from that between Deep Ecologists and Social Ecologists.
Peter Harper divides us into Light Greens (with more money
than time) and Deep Greens (with, perhaps, more time than
money). The Light Greens, he suggests, are involved with the
new technology of solar heating, fuel-efficient lightweight
motor cars, and sustainable consumption, while the Deep Greens
believe in small, insulated houses, bicycles and public transport,
homegrown food, repair and recycling, local currency schemes,
and barter.

Meanwhile, the rest of society will continue to belong to the culture
of MORE! For, as he observes,



People aspire to greater convenience and comfort, more personal
space, easy mobility, a sense of expanding possibilities. This is the
modern consumerist project: what modern societies are all about.
It is a central feature of mainstream politics and economics that
consumerist aspirations are not seriously challenged. On the
contrary, the implied official message is ‘Hang on in there: we will
deliver.’ The central slogan is brutally simple: MORE!



Some of us, Peter Harper noted in his Schumacher Lecture at
Bristol in 2001, have apocalyptic visions of uncontrollable
catastrophes in the future resulting from indiscriminate economic
activity. He, as an optimist, and from his own experience as an
environmental activist, has a different expectation. He thinks that
as life gradually gets worse for everyone else, the Deep Greens
(the people he calls the recessive genes of the sustainability
movement) will be found to have solved what he calls the great
riddle of reconciling modernity and sustainability: ‘They will quite
visibly be having a good time: comfortable, with varied lives and less
stress, healthy and fit, having rediscovered the elementary virtues of
restraint and balance.’

Twenty-five years of offering environmental choices to fellow
citizens who came to the Center for Alternative Technology with a
variety of motives have led Peter Harper to adopt his relaxed
approach to the task of convincing us all that our lifestyles have to
change. Murray Bookchin would probably react differently, but
many years earlier he posed the same issues in discussing the nature
of a liberatory technology, one which frees rather than enslaves us.
Can we imagine, he asked, that an ecologically viable economy
could be based on a centralized nation state and its bureaucratic
apparatus? He urged that, from the standpoint of the viability of the
planet and all living things on it, anarchist concepts are not merely
desirable, they are necessary:



What was once regarded as impractical and visionary has now
become eminently practical . . . If community face-to-face democracy,
a humanistic, liberatory technology, and decentralization are
conceived of merely as reactions to the prevailing state of affairs – a
vigorous ‘nay’ to the ‘yes’ of what exists today – a compelling,
objective case can be made for the practicability of an anarchist
society.



 14. Community gardens, as envisaged by Clifford Harper.

Environmental and ecological concerns have been advocated long
enough for us to recognize peaks and troughs in the support they
receive from the general, uncommitted public, whose involvement
is vital for the manipulators of change. There are fashions in
crisis-consciousness, as in most other aspects of our communal life.
A comforting thought for anarchists is the reflection that a society
advanced enough to accept the environmental imperatives of the
21st century will be obliged to reinvent anarchism as a response
to them.

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




     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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     Chapter 9 -- Publication : November 30, 2003

     Chapter 9 -- Added : January 13, 2022

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