PERSONAL COLUMN

Confessions of a Tory anarchist

MICHAEL IVENS

During the war I used to attend meetings of a London anarchist group. I was sixteen and full of adolescent preoccupations, even I could spot that my presence occasionally embarrassed my more mature comrades. This seemed unfair because, like them, I had cycled through blitz and blackout to hear of the wisdom of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Emma Goldman and Malatesta. And, unlike them, I had to go home to a mother's scoldings if I arrived back late and the bombs were falling.

But for Kropotkin's sake I stuck it out. He was my god of anarcho-syndicalism and he gratified my intellectual snobbery as well as my utopianism. My friends might talk of Marx and Engels and Lenin. But Kropotkin! Once you'd mastered the pronunciation of his name, you were well ahead in the league of intellectual gamesmanship. Nobody had heard of him.

And then it was suddenly over. My family went away, leaving me alone in the flat. I went to sleep during a bombing raid, having carelessly left the curtains open so that my window light shone encouragingly to the enemy above. An indignant warden banged on the front door but I was a heavy sleeper and was undisturbed. He called a policeman. As I had left the back door unlocked he walked in, woke me and helped me to close the curtains. Then I was charged.

I attended court with my mother. Other black-out offenders were fined ten shillings, fifteen shillings, even a pound. When I appeared, the magistrate was far more concerned with the fact that I had left the back door open than that I had unwittingly sent light up to the enemy. I was the kind of person who encouraged burglars, he said.

Indignant at this injustice from the representative of the demon state, I protested. As a householder (not strictly true) I asserted that I had every right to leave my back door open. The magistrate was not impressed. He fined me five pounds. Fury made me quick-witted. Fortunately I was an avid reader of an Evening News feature, ' The Courts Day by Day ' (does it still exist?) and those frequently quoted words 'time to pay ', came unexpectedly to my lips. The surprised magistrate gave me time. And I wrote an eloquent letter to a Great Figure of Anarchism. "Dear Great Figure," I said. "The State has unjustly fined me five pounds for asserting my freedom. Shall I pay?" And by return came a letter which said in a palpably anxious tone, "Pay right away." And so I was lighter by five pounds and a faith.

No longer could I quote moving Herbert Read poems about clear-eyed Spanish anarchists, erect in golden lemon groves. Nor had I the right to use marvellous melodious passwords like Malatesta, Kropotkin and Bakunin, that fell like madrigals from the lips. And so I went to work for Wilfred (now Lord) Brown, reverted occasionally to my political past by leaving the office by the window rather than the door and was treated with infuriating charity. I watched narrowly as Wilfred gave way to his utopianism by backing Richard Acland's short-lived Commonwealth party, rejected the possibility of agreeing politically with anyone over the age of twenty, told Brown he was a militarist and went off peacefully into the Army. There, during a respite from shooting large guns with Newfoundlanders, I read Chesterton's Man who was Thursday and silently applauded the poet of respectability in his verbal battle with the poet of anarchy (" revolution is like sea-sickness ") until a Newfoundlander playfully kicked the book out of my hands. Conservatism was coming upon me.

After the war it expanded into Inverted Marxist Conservatism. 'Inverted Marxist' in the sense that I agreed with Marx that the economy influenced the culture although it slowly became apparent to me that it was necessary to stand Marx on his head and recognise that freedom needed a relatively free, diffused economy. But the relationship between environment and culture had already been made clear to me by-that much greater man, the fourteenthcentury Arabic historian Ibn Khaldun.

On the Brighton line, over many months, I read and annotated the works of Marx and Lenin, in order to refute them in a book on capitalism. I became director of Aims of Industry and grew used to being hailed lightly as ' fascist ' at parties and to replying that I am neither a great nationalist nor a socialist. I also believe in what is fashionably called a net for the less fortunate, in essential services for the needy (who are always with us), and as . political adviser to the young hospital doctors regret the falling apart of the National Health Service. My political views are unexceptable. And yet.... Where is the anarchism of yesteryear? And where is the lost young man?

For despite Oscar, one does not always entirely kill the thing one loved. The memory lingers on. Hence stirrings of things past when an act of synchronicity led three recently published books on anarchism to fall into my hands. Roderick Kenward's The Anarchists (Library of the Twentieth Century, '70p) has marvellous pictures of old anarchists assassinating people and going to their deaths, and an excessively simple view of the way that poverty has allegedly created anarchists.

Anarchism Today (Macmillan, '75p) has some of the old nonsense by new and in some cases committed writers, with some newer, greater and in some cases less pleasant, nonsense. David Apter oddly sees Love as the central principle. Less attractively and more new-fangled, Michael Lerner reflects on bombing being arguable ' healthy' for some individuals though disastrous for that society. "To understand the bombings it is important to recognise that to bomb buildings may be a sign of the psychological well-being of the bomber,..." And even less humour than my old syndicalist heroes: "One is reminded of Joan Baez's quite literally lifegiving suggestion, made before her marriage, when she was asked what women could do to fight the draft She replied that women should try to say yes to men who say no, which was, in the end, what she did."

But for genuine nostalgia, there was April Carter's lovely The Political Theory of Anarchism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £1.50) which is studded with 'quotations and all the old, magnificent names (' Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, you have stolen my soul away ') and is clever about laissez-faire liberalism fading into laissezfaire anarchism, and parallels between the distrust of democratic government and democratic ideology by anarchists and some constitutionalists such as de Jouve. nel. It is rather light on violence.

Miss Carter rightly quotes that anarchist sympathiser Oscar Wilde: "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at..." That is unless the map is like Yeats's 'Happy Townland ' which breaks your heart in two, and stops you from accepting things as they are, and rather• makes you hate them and want to destroy them because they exist.

For on its credit side, anarchism urges that the individual should act against the state (as he should within limits). And, as Kropotkin has pointed out, nature is not always red in tooth and claw but cooperative, something that modern Conservatism needs to recognise more. Marx had a welcome touch of anarchism in him with his comment on the withering away of the state, something the Government should practice ovcr de-nationalization.

But anarchism has its side sinister. Nihilism, the passionate contempt of democracy (in Proudhon, for example), the sadistic desire to destroy public standards, the fact that Charles Manson has become a hero and a symbol of revolt for some of the Weathermen groups, the alliance between the intellectual elite and the underground mob that Hannah Arendt regards as a cultural strand leading to fascism, and which today can be seen in other more fashionable forms : all these are present evils. And anarchists themselves will go on being tolerated by liberal societies, will form uneasy working relations with colder groups such as communists and when the revolution comes will be shot down in the streets by the cool commissars, as for example in the 1921 attack on Kronstadt.

The greatest extenuation for anarchism is that it provides a necessary dose of utopianism. As April Carter points out, the kind of utopian changes in dealing with the mentally sick, envisaged by Kropotkin in the nineteenth century, are now accepted. And the utopian ideas of the destroyers of society have come to pass through unlikely figures such as Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Modifying Kipling: Ted Heath and Pietr Kropotkin Are brothers under the skin.

And one man's Utopia grows to be another man's Pragmatica.