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Title: Reflections on decentralism Author: George Woodcock Date: 1969 Language: en Topics: critique, history, organization, primitivist Source: Retrieved on October 1, 2009 from http://www.panarchy.org/woodcock/1969.eng.html Notes: Originally published in Anarchy, October 1969
I was asked to write on decentralism in history, and I find myself
looking into shadows where small lights shine as fireflies do, endure a
little, vanish, and then reappear like Auden’s messages of the just. The
history of decentralism has to be written largely in negative, in
winters and twilights as well as springs and dawns, for it is a history
which, like that of libertarian beliefs in general, is not observed in
progressive terms. It is not the history of a movement, an evolution. It
is the history of something that, like grass, has been with us from the
human beginning, something that may go to earth, like bulbs in winter,
and yet be there always, in the dark soil of human society, to break
forth in unexpected places and at undisciplined times.
Palaeolithic man, food-gatherer and hunter, was a decentralist by
necessity, because the earth did not provide enough wild food to allow
crowding, and in modern remotenesses that were too wild or unproductive
for civilized men to penetrate, men still lived until very recently in
primitive decentralism: Australian aborigines, Papuan inland villagers,
Eskimos in northern Canada. Such men developed, before history touched
them, their own complex techniques and cultures to defend a primitive
and precarious way of life; they often developed remarkable artistic
traditions as well, such as those of the Indians of the Pacific rain
forests and some groups of Eskimos. But, since their world was one where
concentration meant scarcity and death, they did not develop a political
life that allowed the formation of authoritarian structures nor did they
make an institution out of war. They practised mutual aid for survival,
but this did not make them angels; they practised infanticide and the
abandonment of elders for the same reason.
I think with feeling of those recently living decentralist societies
because I have just returned from the Canadian Arctic where the last
phase of traditional Eskimo life began as recently as a decade ago. Now,
the old nomadic society, in which people moved about in extended
families rather than tribes, is at an end, with all its skills
abandoned, its traditions, songs and dances fading in the memory. Last
year the cariboo-hunting Eskimos probably built their last igloo; now
they are herded together into communities ruled by white men, where they
live in groups of four to six hundred people, in imitation of white
men’s houses and with guaranteed welfare handouts when they cannot earn
money by summer construction work. Their children are being taught by
people who know no Eskimo, their young men are losing the skills of the
hunt; power Ă©lites are beginning to appear in their crowded little
northern slums, among a people who never knew what power meant, and the
diminishing dog teams (now less than one family in four owns dogs and
only about one family in twenty goes on extended hunting or trapping
journeys) are symbolic of the loss of freedom among a people who have
become physically and mentally dependent on the centralized,
bureaucratic-ridden world which the Canadian Government has built it
since it set out a few years ago to rescue the people of the North from
“barbarism” and insecurity.
The fate of the Eskimos, and that of so many other primitive cultures
during the past quarter of a century, shows that the old, primal
decentralism of Stone Age man is doomed even when it has survived into
the modern world. From now on, man will be decentralist by intent and
experience, because he has known the evils of centralization and
rejected them.
Centralization began when men settled on the land and cultivated it.
Farmers joined together to protect their herds and field from other men
who still remained nomadic wanderers; to conserve and share out the
precious waters; to placate the deities who held the gifts of fertility,
the priest who served the deities, and the kings who later usurped the
roles of priest and god alike. The little realms of local priest-kings
grew into the great valley empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and
overtowering these emerged the first attempt at a world empire, that of
the Achaemenian Kings of Persia who established an administrative
colossus which was the prototype of the centralized state, imitated by
the despots of Northern India, the Hellenistic god-kings, and the divine
Caesars of Rome.
We have little knowledge how men clung to their local loyalties and
personal lives, how simple people tried to keep control of the affairs
and things that concerned them most, in that age when writing recorded
the deeds of kings and priests and had little to say about common men.
But if we can judge from the highly traditional and at least partly
autonomous village societies which still existed in India when the
Moghuls arrived, and which had probably survived the centuries of
political chaos and strife that lay between Moghuls and Guptas, it seems
likely that the farther men in those ages lived away from the centres of
power, the more they established and defended rights to use the land and
govern their own local affairs, so long as the lord’s tribute was paid.
It was, after all, on the village communities that had survived through
native and Moghul and British empires that Gandhi based his hopes of
panchayat raj, a society based on autonomous peasant communes.
In Europe the Dark Ages after the Roman Empire were regarded by
Victorian historians as a historical waste land ravaged by barbarian
hordes and baronial bandits. But these ages were also in fact an
interlude during which, in the absence of powerful centralized
authorities, the decentralist urge appeared again, and village communes
established forms of autonomy which in remoter areas, like the Pyrenees,
the Alps and the Appennines, have survived into the present. To the same
“Dark” Ages belong the earliest free city republics of mediaeval Europe,
which arose at first for mutual protection in the ages of disorder, and
which in Italy and Germany remained for centuries the homes of European
learning and art and of such freedom as existed in the world of their
time.
Out of such village communes and such cities arose, in Switzerland, the
world’s first political federation, based on the shared protection of
local freedoms against feudal monarchs and renaissance despots.
Some of these ancient communes exist to this day; the Swiss Canton of
Appenzell still acts as a direct democracy in which every citizen takes
part in the annual voting on laws; the Italian city state of San Marino
still retains its mountain independence in a world of great states. But
these are rare survivals, due mainly to geographic inaccessibility in
days before modern transport. As national states began to form at the
end of the Middle Ages, the attack on decentralism was led not merely by
the monarchs and dictators who established highly organized states like
Bourbon France and Cromwellian England, but also by the Church and
particularly by the larger monastic orders who in their house
established rules of uniform behaviour and rigid timekeeping that
anticipated the next great assault on local and independent freedom and
on the practice of mutual aid; this happened when the villages of
Britain and later of other European countries were depopulated in the
Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth century, and their homeless
people drifted into the disciplined factories and suffered the
alienation produced by the new industrial towns, where all traditional
bonds were broken, and all the participation in common works that
belonged to the mediaeval villages became irrelevant.
It was these developments, the establishment of the centralized state in
the seventeenth century and of industrial centralization in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that made men for the first time
consciously aware of the necessity of decentralism to save them from the
soulless world that was developing around them.
Against Cromwell’s military state, Gerrard Winstanley and the original
Diggers opposed their idea and practice of establishing new communes of
landworkers on the waste lands of England, communes which would renounce
overlords and extended participation and equality to men, women, and
even children.
When the French Revolution took the way of centralism, establishing a
more rigidly bureaucratic state than the Bourbons and introducing
universal conscription for the first time, men like Jacques Roux and his
fellows enragés protested in the name of the local communes of Paris,
which they regarded as the bases of democratic organization, and at the
same time in England William Godwin, the first of the philosophic
anarchists, recognized the perils of forms of government which left
decision making in the hands of men gathered at the top and centre of
society. In his Political Justice Godwin envisaged countries in which
assemblies of delegates would meet — seldom — to discuss matters of
urgent common concern, in which no permanent organs of central
government would be allowed to continue, and in which each local parish
would decide its own affairs by free agreement (and not by majority
vote) and matters of dispute would be settled by ad hoc juries of
arbitration.
The British and French Utopian socialists of the early nineteenth
century, as distinct from the Marxists and the revolutionary socialists
led by Auguste Blanqui, were inspired by their revulsion against
monolithic industrial and political organization to base the realization
of their theories on small communal units which they believed could be
established even before the existing society had been destroyed. At that
period the American frontier lay still in the valley of the Mississippi,
and there was a tendency — which existed until the end of the pioneering
days — for the small pioneers societies of trappers and traders, miners
and farmers, to organize themselves in largely autonomous communities,
that managed their own affairs and in many senses of the word took the
law into their own hands. In this society, where men responded to
frontier conditions by ad hoc participatory and decentralist
organization, the European and American Utopian socialists, as well as
various groups of Christian communities, tried to set up self-governing
communes which would be the cells of the new fraternal world. The
followers of Cabet and Fourier, of Robert Owen and Josiah Warren, all
played their part in a movement which produced hundreds of communities
and lasted almost a century; its last wave ebbed on the Pacific coast in
the Edwardian era, when a large Finnish socialist community was
established on the remote island of Sointula off the coast of British
Columbia. Only the religious communities of this era, which had a
purpose outside mere social theory, survived; even today some of the
Mennonite communities of Canada keep so closely to their ideals of
communitarian autonomy that they are leaving the country to find in
South America a region where they can be free to educate their children
as they wish. The secular communities all vanished; the main lesson
their failure taught was that decentralist organization must reach down
to the roots of the present, to the needs of the actual human beings who
participate, and not upward into the collapsing dream structures of a
Utopian future.
Other great crises in the human situation have followed the industrial
revolution, and every one has produced its decentralist movements in
which men and women have turned away from the nightmares of megapolitics
to the radical realities of human relationships, The crisis of the
Indian struggle for independence caused Gandhi to preach the need to
build society upon the foundation of the village. The bitter repressions
of Tsarist Russia led Peter Kropotkin to develop his theories of a
decentralised society integrating industry and agriculture, manual and
mental skills. World War II led to considerable community movement among
both British and American pacifists, seeking to create cells of sane
living in the interstices of a belligerent world, and an even larger
movement of decentralization and communitarianism has arisen in North
America in contradiction to the society that can wage a war like that in
Vietnam. Today it is likely that more people than ever before are
consciously engaged in some kind of decentralist venture which expresses
not merely rebellion against monolithic authoritarianism, but also faith
in the possibility of a new, cellular kind of society in which at every
level the participation in decision-making envisaged by
nineteenth-century anarchists like Proudhon and Kropotkin will be
developed.
As the monstrous and fatal flaws of modern economic and political
centralism become more evident, as the State is revealed ever more
convincingly as the enemy of all human love, the advocacy and practice
of decentralism will spread more widely, if only because the necessity
for it will become constantly more urgent. The less decentralist action
is tied to rigid social and political theories, and especially to
antediluvian ones like those of the Marxists, the more penetrating and
durable its effects will be. The soils most favourable to the spread of
decentralism are probably countries like India, where rural living still
predominates, countries like Japan where the decentralization of
factories and the integration of agricultural and industrial economies
has already been recognized as a necessity for survival, and the places
in our western world where the social rot has run deepest and the
decentralists can penetrate like white ants. The moribund centres of the
cities; the decaying marginal farmlands; these are the places which
centralist governments using bankers’ criteria of efficiency cannot
possibly revivify, because the profit would not be financial but human.
In such areas the small and flexible cell of workers, serving the needs
of local people, can survive and continue simultaneously the tasks of
quiet destruction and cellular building. But not all the work can be
done in the shadows. There will still be the need for theoreticians to
carry on the work which Kropotkin and Geddes and Mumford began in the
past, of demonstrating the ultimately self-destructive character of
political and industrial centralism, and showing how society as a whole,
and not merely the lost corners of it, can be brought back to health and
peace by breaking down the pyramids of authority, so that men can be
given to eat the bread of brotherly love, and not the stones of power —
of any power.