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Title: House and Home Author: Colin Ward Date: January 1964 Language: en Topics: housing Source: Retrieved on 8th October 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/house-home Notes: Originally published in Anarchy #035: House and Home
THE WORD ANARCHY MEANS “WITHOUT AUTHORITY”, and anarchism as a social
theory implies an attempt to provide for social and personal needs from
the bottom up, rather than from some government or other authority down,
or for some-one else’s profit. It implies an extension of the idea of
voluntary associations and autonomous groups to cover the whole field of
human activity.
The anarchist thus has peculiar difficulties in formulating an approach
to questions like housing, in which the initiative is so much in the
hands of people with political, financial and economic power, and so
little in those of people with none of these things, but simply the need
for a roof over their heads. An older generation of anarchists, adopting
a militant and revolutionary approach, would point out that the housing
problem is a permanent feature of modern society which only a revolution
would eradicate. They were right, no doubt; we still have a housing
problem, and they didn’t get their revolution. But since we are today
advocating anarchism as an approach and not simply as a hypothetical
destination, we have to look around for those fields in which means
which are in harmony with anarchist ends can be applied today. And the
difficulty experienced in locating examples is a measure of the way in
which so vital and basic a human need as housing has slipped out of the
range of things which ordinary people can provide for themselves. Even
such credit organisations as building societies which were originally
instituted in the early 19^(th) century as organs of working class
mutual aid, have become vast money-lending organisations which most
working-class people are not credit-worthy enough to employ. Ray Gosling
pointed out recently in New Society that even since the years just
before the war the range of people able to make use of building
societies has “gone up a class.”
A year ago, in ANARCHY 23, we attempted to survey the possibilities of
popular intervention in the field of housing, by discussing the
potentialities of housing societies, including self-build societies, and
by giving an account of the most significant example of direct action
for housing, the “squatters’ movement” immediately after the last war.
In this issue another aspect of popular direct action for houses is
described, thanks to the material, gathered in South America by John
Turner, which formed a recent special issue of the journal Architectural
Design, from which we reproduce William Mangin’s case history, which,
apart from its intrinsic human interest, illustrates a similar pattern
of evolution to that of previous examples. John Turner argues that the
squatters’ settlements or barriadas of Peru, “far from being a problem
are in fact the only feasible solution to the rapid urbanisation
problem”, and Architectural Design notes that:
Although the 350,000 people who inhabit the barriadas of Lima are living
outside the law, in that they have no legal right to the land they have
settled on, their determination to remain has won them the tolerance of
the public authorities, who now, through the Junta Nacional de la
Vivienda, allocate aid, at first experimental, but later more
systematic, to the more permanent of the communities.
This is the same sequence of Initiative, Consolidation, Success and
Official Action, which we noticed in all previous examples of direct
action applied to the housing problem in a non-revolutionary situation.
(The reader of William Mangin’s article will notice that the barriada
builders of Lima do not by any means consider themselves to be
revolutionaries.)
Little has happened in the Housing Society movement since the article
“What Hope for Housing Societies” in ANARCHY 23, to make them a feasible
proposition for people of average earnings. The government promises
further loans, but not at the kind of interest rates which would bring
down the cost. (In this connection see the discussion in this issue,
from two points of view both claiming to be anarchist, of local
authority housing.)
A quite different approach to the housing question is raised by Teddy
Gold in this issue. Even if we could all get houses, is the standardised
solution of the one-family house or flat, the kind of housing we really
want? He is campaigning to start a housing society to build
Multiple-Family units, for the reasons which his article set out. This
moves from the question of housing to that of the family: is the
statistically standard family the kind we really want to belong to? How
many happy families do you know?
But the housing news of the year has undoubtedly been the revelations of
racketeering landlordism known as Rachmanism which became “news” simply
because the late Mr Rachman shared a mistress with people concerned in
the Profumo scandal. Tenants have been discover-ing that unity is
strength. The Spectator’s account of the formation of the St Stephen’s
Tenants Association concluded thus:
Of course, it was difficult to persuade tenants, even if their rents
were grossly unfair, to take the risk of going to the Tribunal and
incurring the wrath of their landlords. However, fourteen were piloted
through the terrors of reprisal to success. The reductions ranged from
one-third to two-thirds.
It wasn’t an entirely bloodless victory: the tenants were threatened by
agents of the landlords before they went to the Tribunal (one tenant was
visited by two men and an Alsatian), and they were threatened again
after the reductions had been made (one was attacked by four men with
empty bottles and came away with a broken wrist and abrasions).
But beyond the individual gains against bad landlords and the occasional
dents inflicted on official complacency (“We all know what dreadful
things are happening. It is up to the people to go to the police. We as
the borough council can do nothing at all”), the mere coming into
existence of a group of people, white and coloured indiscriminately, for
the express purpose of improving their living conditions, forced
landlords to tread more warily, authorities to uncover blind eyes, and
the tenants themselves to realise that they were not quite as helpless
as they had once supposed.
Later came the eviction of Mrs Cobb, during which the police
distinguished themselves, and the formation of further tenants’
associations in other boroughs. Colin MacInnes commented that “Direct
action of the kind adopted by the tenants’ associations may not be
unconnected with the recent marked upsurge of anarchism among the young
in their tactics, that is, if not always in their conscious philosophy.”
Perhaps this is optimistic, but something has to happen to break the
housing stalemate, something beyond reliance on the promises of the
politicians in readiness for the general election this year.