The Ned Wood Archive

I am an Anarchist

The Sex Pistols

I’m an anarchist.  Sort of.  I have a few anarchist genes, though I don’t know where I got them from.  I don’t mean anarchy as in complete absence of any laws, which is what Rotten was referring to.  Or more accurately, he was reflecting back on the great British public the fears that the establishment had planted in them over the past few hundred years.  The association of literal anarchy with socialism or with any form of rule other than that of the established ruling class.  No I don’t mean that anarchy, I mean the constructive syndicalist, communal anarchism propounded by the likes of Bakunin and Kropotkin.  I mean the fragmentation of our society into local interest groups. 

Bakunin said that you don’t get liberty without equality: social, economic, and political equality.  And this is where so many folk fall down.  They either go too far towards equality meaning rigid adherence to collective uniformity, meaning state-imposed communism, or they go too far towards liberty, meaning complete free-market economics with its inherent inequality between those with the muscle (financial, historical, or just plain bloody-mindedness) to monopolise the market and those without.

Where I draw the line and hold back from complete acceptance of the anarchist argument is that a few too many anarchists want to turn their backs on the larger scale approach completely.  Much as we’d like to go back, we’ve come too far down the road to abandon a national approach to some of our problems.  Much as my great, great, great granddad (who, rumour has it, sometimes spelled his name Ned Ludd) would have liked, we can’t throw out our machines, we can’t forget our inventions, we can’t stop travelling across the world, we can’t stop talking to each other.  We need a state managed transport system.  We need some form of international communications network, although the internet seems close enough to me.  Bakunin recognised the need for a global approach too.  We’re all in this together. 

Perhaps we should rename it Autonomy.  Autonomy in the UK is coming some time, maybe.  The real strength of Anarchism as a political belief is in its grouping together of individuals at a local level to control their own destiny.  These groupings, call them communes if you like, are then banded together at regional and higher levels.  As far as is possible, control over an individual’s destiny is placed as near to the individual as possible.

In many ways, the Buzzcocks were the ultimate punk band.  Even though they got there after the Pistols, maybe they got it right when Shelley sang ‘I Want You Autonomy’.  It’s a thing that’s worth having.