The Metropolis

The anarchists are coming, and this time they're organised

Mike Pollitt | Monday 17 October, 2011 16:26

Tony Wood supports Tottenham Hotspur, looks like Keith Allen on a good day, and wants to abolish all forms of money. He’s also one of the organisers of this Saturday’s Anarchist Bookfair. So, is he dangerously insane? Or has the time for anarchy finally arrived?

It turns out that 2011 is a strange time to be an anarchist. As Tony and I were having a super-civilised chat in Whitechapel’s Freedom Bookshop, a few hundred protesters were preparing to camp out by St Pauls for Occupy LSX. You’d think he’d be delighted.

Not quite. Protests like the Occupy x’s, he tells me, are “a cry for help”.

“[The protesters] want to make capitalism fairer. We say you can’t make it fairer. Capitalism is about accumulating money for a small group of people.”

So they’re wasting their time?

He wouldn’t say that. “Anything which gets people to question the current system is a positive thing.” In his view though, Occupy’s questioning, and their remedies, don’t go anywhere near far enough.

“If you are going to get to an anarchist society,” he says, “an element of the very rich won’t want that to happen and there could be a bloody revolution.”

For a couple of seconds this suggestion hangs in the air. “Of course,” he says, the very image of twinkling affability, “I don’t want that to happen”.

No, no of course.

The society Tony would like to live in would look a bit like a fully socialist state. But instead of a central elite managing nationalised industries, the workers would manage it all themselves. “Workers” here is perhaps the wrong word, because there’s no money and so no wages. So how would it work?

Well, to take food distribution (Tony’s example), farmers would still grow the food, delivery men would still collect it and drive it to the distribution centres (currently Tescos), and assistants (currently Tesco workers) would still lay it out. But no money would change hands at any stage. All the people in this chain would then collect whatever food they needed. We would all do the same, each of us personally responsible for taking just enough and no more, and there would be no need for systems of management or shareholders or government or any hierarchy above that of the common human being.

Does he genuinely believe that this is possible, given that it flies in the face of 20,000 years of observable human behaviour?

Yes, he sincerely does. Nor is he disheartened that as yet, only a minority of people share his vision. With 3,000 people expected at the bookfair, over 100 stalls booked in and 10 more turned away for lack of space, the movement isn’t negligible. But it’s a long way from replacing Tesco.

He plans to get there by doing the little things, and helping other people take control. Not for him the inordinate intricacies of anarchic theory. Tony’s a very practical anarchist.

“My anarchy is saying to people ‘you have to take control of your own life’. People are brought up [to think] that someone else makes the decisions.”

This means setting up residents groups in Haringey to organise their own buildings and communities. It means getting a zebra crossing installed on an accident-prone road. As he talks engagingly about the benefits of self-run communities, he sounds like a One Nation Tory pushing the Big Society. Except for the bloody revolution part, of course. And the abolition of money. There he differs.

And then there’s the violence. Destruction of property. Lawlessness. The self-styled Black Block, who smashed up parts of central London on March 26th this year, call themselves anarchists. I ask him if he supports this sort of action. He is uncharacteristically equivocal.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

So he doesn’t support it. But he declines to condemn it. His narratives develop lacunae where human motivations should be.

“I think what happened at Millbank [in November 2010] was not planned, it was just a number of students who were so pissed off that it just happened. The other student demos a lot of that was the kettling and the police action…[During the August riots] there was a lot of anger and it just sparked.”

So things just happened and just sparked, and stuff got broken. He has sympathy for “innocent” people caught up in it, but doesn’t see smashing up a betting shop or torching a furniture shop as violence.

Hmm. It is at this point, for me, that anarchism loses its appeal as a cultural curiosity. For all the idealised vision of a coherent society based on principles of common humanity, for all the failings and injustices that capitalism has wrought, I just don’t like the idea of going round smashing up other people’s things. I do want a fairer capitalism, I do think it can be achieved, I don’t want anyone’s head on a spike, and I don’t think society would function without money. I think I knew all this before meeting Tony, who was a true gent to talk to, but I certainly know it now. The alternative is…well, anarchy. And who really wants that?

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