ANARCHISM AS A DOCTRINE HAS A PECULIAR FASCINATION FOR scholars. It both repels and attracts. It attracts because it embodies rage – the particular rage people have when they see man as an obstacle to his own humaneness. It is the ultimate statement of how outrageous the human condition can be. But it is precisely because man does not live by rage alone, but must master it by discovering proximate means to solving the ordinary problems of daily life, that anarchism repels. It seem a romantic luxury at best – a cry of pain for the future, just as nostalgia is for the past and, like nostalgia, this cannot fail to be attractive.

Perhaps because of this anarchism is not a mere reflection of anger but also a contributing source. It is thus more than a lightning rod for the anger that exists. Anarchism is associated with unreason and bombs, violence and irresponsibility.

THE NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL CONFLICT IN FRANCE AND THE IDEOLOGIES underlying them pose some formidable questions to the historian and the sociologist of the workers’ movement. Those which particularly interest us deal, on the one hand, with the existence of anarchist ideas and concepts within the sum total of ideological utterances in May and June 1968 and, on the other, with the libertarian character of the methods of contestation which have appeared in France during recent years. I have deliberately confined myself to the wide notion of the ‘practice of contestation’ precisely because it goes beyond the phenomenon of the wildcat strike or the unrest in the universities and corresponds to a more general concept which has not as yet been monopolized by any theory. ‘Generalized contestation’ does not claim to be a definitive sociological category. On the contrary, it is a provisional portmanteau word which will take a more definite shape once we emerge from the chiaroscuro of impressionistic criticism and philosophical reflection.

NINE YEARS AGO GEORGE WOOD SURVEYED THE ‘GHOST OF THE historical anarchist movement’ and concluded that there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of a renaissance’. History showed that ‘the movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again’. Seven years later, when identifiably anarchist tendencies re-emerged in the youth movements in England and Holland, Woodcock wondered ‘whether I had been rash in so officiously burying the historic anarchist movement’. He decided. that he had not been rash because of the differences between the new anarchists and the old. The new anarchists represented no ‘knock in the coffin’ but ‘a new manifestation of the [anarchist] idea’.

Woodcock described the new anarchists as ‘militant pacifists’ who had ‘forgotten Spain and had no use for the old romanticism of the dinamitero and the petroleuse’. He pointed to the difference between the old days when one ‘joined’ an anarchist party and the current situation in which the young ‘became’ anarchists. Finally, Woodcock discerned no obvious signs of an anarchist revival in the United States.

SPAIN IS THE WESTERN COUNTRY WHICH, SECOND ONLY TO PORTUGAL, holds the record for the most unmitigated, the most lasting and – by its own standards – the most successful domination of the extreme Right. None should be surprised, then, that after thirty-one years of determined authoritarian rule, Spanish anarchism should not be a significant force at present. Like all revolutionaries everywhere and always, Spanish anarchists in the past managed to gather some strength only when there was a degree of freedom allowing them to organize politically, unheard of in General Franco's regime, or else when dictators were afflicted by impotence in certain geographical areas, or by glaring imbecility, none of which has been the case in post-civil war Spain.

IN 1965 IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ON THE anarchists in Britain to begin by observing that anarchists no longer figured in the popular consciousness and that the existence of anarchists could occasion as much polite surprise as the continued existence of the Independent Labour Party. This present article and its inclusion in a special issue on Anarchism is perhaps in part a proof that this situation is no longer true, and that anarchism has recently attracted sufficient attention to justify a new and closer look at anarchists in Britain today. It would hardly be rash to argue that whatever else may be true of the Left in Britain in 1970, the anarchists’ presence deserves to provoke much less polite surprise than it may have done five years ago.

This article is not, however, a description of the shape and variety of anarchists and anarchist groups to be found in Britain today. It is rather an attempt to describe one particular facet of anarchist thought which has characterized anarchism in the 1960s and to relate this to the ‘anarchhation’ of the New Left described by James Joll in his concluding article. It is to that extent an extrapolation and abstraction from a very wide range of alternatives and undoubtedly presents a picture which many anarchists would not recognize or would repudiate.

IT WOULD SEEM CURIOUS TO AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER THAT THE DISSOLUTION of the Nihon-Anakisuto-Renmei (Japanese Anarchist Federation) should be formally announced in January 1969, at a time when militant students were determined to defend their ‘fortress’, the Yasuda auditorium of Tokyo University, which they had occupied for several months, against an attack by the riot police. The anarchists themselves called the dissolution ‘a deployment in the face of the enemy’. Yet they had to admit at the same time that they had reached a deadlock in their attempts within the Federation to formulate new theories of anarchism and to hit upon new forms of organization for the new era of direct action which they believed had begun. Indeed, they remained very weak numerically, and they had only a limited direct influence among the student movements which appeared in their eyes to have ushered in this era.

NOTHING FAILS LIKE FAILURE; THE LESS ANARCHISTS ARE READ, THE less they write, and the less they are written about. The anarchist movement has risen and fallen in turn for more than a century, and in the trough just before the current wave there was probably less new literature concerning anarchism than ever before. My object here is to examine the situation in this country at that time, roughly between 1941 and 1960, and then to see how it has changed during the last ten years. (I have excluded articles in periodicals in order to avoid over-complication,)

LIKE THE HISTORICAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT THE NEW LEFT TODAY is an international phenomenon, and it is recognized as such both by the revolutionaries themselves and by the authorities, just as the revolutionary movement was a century ago. In June 1871, a few weeks after the suppression of the Paris commune, Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister in the provisional government, said ‘Europe is faced by a work of destruction which is directed against all nations and directed against the principles upon which civilization rests.’ And on 14 November 1968, a few months after the attempts at revolution in Paris in the spring, M. Raymond Marcellin, Minister of the Interior in the French government, said ‘a study of the movement launched in the German Federal Republic in November 1967, in Britain from 1968, and the attempts observed in Holland at the same time disclosed the disturbing simultaneousness, a complete identity of methods of action and of intervention between communist and activist groups. We observe in the convergence of the phenomenon between Europe and the United States in the last few years the action of determined and militant minorities cultivating close contacts with each other across frontiers and living in a state of permanent conspiracy against society.’