by
Les May
IN
1960 I joined the Young Socialists and as soon as I was old
enough voted Labour. I still do. But I also had a subscription to
‘Freedom - the Anarchist Weekly’.
What
interested me was what is usually called ‘Direct
Action’;
don’t wait for someone else to do it for you, do it for yourself.
It stlll does. Don’t just grumble that there’s a lot of litter
in the street,
pick
it up and put it in the waste bin. That’s practical anarchism at
work.
As
a practical political philosophy I concluded
that like Marxism its a dead duck, but for a diametrically opposite
reason. Marxist governments can plan roads and build power systems,
but can’t make sure there are enough toothbrushes in the shops.
You need markets for that because markets are the
way
that information about shortages is
fed back from consumers to producers.
At
least some of the brands of Anarchism would be able to solve the
toothbrush problem, but I am sceptical that it could ever solve the
problem of building a power grid. (And please don’t trot out the
‘We would keep it local’. That’s fine so long as there’s a
wind blowing to turn your local turbine. And
when it isn’t … ?)
It
was all a long time ago. Nowadays
I content myself with counting
the self righteous jargon words in pieces
like that below.
I don’t see this bunch
changing the world.
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