Two Excerpts by George Woodcock

The following is from his essay  Not Any Power: Reflections on Decentralism, in Anarchy, 1969.

“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 fields from the 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 priests 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 over-towering 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 princes and had little to say about common men. But if we can judge from the highly traditional and at least partly autonomous 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 writers 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 Apennines, have survived into the present. To the same ‘dark’ ages belong the earliest free city republics of medieval 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 cunningly retains its mountaintop independence in a world of great states. But these are rare survivals, due mainly to geographic inaccessibility in the 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 houses 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 extend 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 fellow enrages protested in the name of the local communes of Paris, which they regarded as the bases of democratic administration; 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 this period the American frontier still lay in the valley of the Mississippi, and there was a tendency—which existed until the end of the pioneering days—for the small pioneer 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 Mennonite communities in 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 upwards 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 decentralized society integrating industry and agriculture, manual and mental skills. World War II led to considerable community movements 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 decentralism and communutarianism 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 form 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 on an ever wider scale, 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 particularly to antediluvian ones like those of the Marxists, the more penetrating and durable its effects are likely to 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 have 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.

…

From Canadian Forum, “Up the Anti-Nation” (1971)

I believe that Canada, more than any other country in the World today, can develop in a revolutionary way the experiment of Switzerland, which was aborted when the French Revolution diverted attention away from federalism to radical nationalism. We are among the few peoples who still have time to avoid the fevers of nationalism and to create the anti-nation, a society open within because it is fully participatory, and open towards the world, inclusive and not exclusive, a society which other countries, under the spur of disaster, may find an example worth the imitation.

Merely to sketch such a Canadian society in its entirety would take a book, and one day I may write it, drawing on the neglected federalist tradition, on Kropotkin and Proudhon, on Geddes and Morris, on the Spanish communes and the early kibbutzim, on the Peckham Experiment and the direct democracy of Appenzell, on Gandhi’s insights into rural reconstruction and Mumford’s into the regeneration of cities, and bringing all these untried libertarian visions together in the setting of a country whose physical realities would make it an inevitable failure as a nation-state—Canada.

In concrete terms—and in brief—I propose a hastening of decentralization, a rigorous devolution of power, a universalization of the concept of responsibility. I propose that we abandon the image of the pyramid in thinking of society, and substitute that of a mosaic, where the pieces create patterns which are more than themselves, but the patterns remain on the same level as the pieces. In these terms, the Canadian type of federalism, a two-level structure of dominion and provincial governments, with little constitutional link between them, is quite inadequate. This is why all the talk of new constitutions, and of confirming Canadian independence by patriating the B.N.A. Act, is irrelevant. There is a potent relevance, on the other hand, in Proudhon’s remark when he cast a solitary vote in the French Constitutional Assembly of 1848: “I vote against the constitution because it is a constitution.” For above all other characteristics, the society of the future must be based on voluntary decisions, and hence it must be liable to perpetual revision.

This means a more varied and flexible kind of social and political organization than we have known before, an organization whose very suppleness will make it better adapted to deal with the threats of technological change than the present rigid organizations of society and government. This makes it difficult to sketch in blueprint detail because it will emerge largely as a reaction against changing technological threats to a rational existence. However, there are certain basic requirements that can be laid down. The starting point of organization would be as far as possible from the national level: in those places where men meet face to face, the shop, the street, the office, the college, the village. This indeed implies the economic consequence of true federalism, which is the control by a community of producers over their means of work, though not ultimately over the destination of the product, for here the locality associations, the groups of residents, embrace the producers in their other role as consumers.

Beyond this level one can see certain peculiar Canadian conditions imposing themselves on organization, especially distance and regional difference. At the point where the locality groups, the producers’ groups, the factories run by guilds of workers, coalesced into municipalities or rural area associations, there would probably be little difficulty, since these would merely be more participatory forms of existing organizations, concerned largely with municipal affairs and education, though involving themselves also in the co-ordination of distribution. But at the point of regional coalescence it is obvious that there would have to be a radical change in the Canadian political structure in the direction of decentralization. The provinces as now constituted are far too unwieldy to be responsive to the day-to-day needs and demands of a socialized community, and their electoral patterns create unnecessary clashes of interest. A small province like Prince Edward Island may be fairly homogeneous, but even in Nova Scotia there are obvious conflicts between the interests of Halifax people and country people, and between those of Cape Breton and the rest of the province. The intolerable situations of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, harnessed to provinces whose governments are dominated by rural and small town interests, is equally obvious, and perhaps the most urgent step of all in making Canadian federalism a reality would be the creation of five free cities (the three I have mentioned plus Ottawa and Winnipeg) of provincial status, and the devolution of the provinces into federations of regions determined by geographical and economic interests. This would encourage the emergence of rural nuclei of activity which would provide a counter-attraction to the cities and perhaps slow the pace of metropolitan growth.

Within this structure, the principle to follow would be the minimization of remote control, coupled with the maximization of responsibility through participation. In other words, any decision of any kind that affects only a local group must be reached by that group alone and by consensus if possible. District and regional boards would consist of elected delegates, subject to immediate recall if they act against the obvious wishes of their constituents. (To give only one example, such a provision would have prevented Mayor Campbell from recently defying the wishes of the people of Vancouver on the issue of the Four Seasons development.) Beyond that level, provincial and federal assemblies would be elected under similar provisions, which should greatly trim the arrogance of political leaders, and, to ensure the prompt response to rapidly changing social needs that is essential in our era, the referendum and the initiative would be brought into all levels of government.

The great advantage of such a system is that, by creating multiple levels of responsibility, all related directly to the basic level through the possibility of popular votes on all important issues, it produces a deeper participation, and while it is impossible to conceive that all conflicts of interest will be eliminated, the socialization of the sources of wealth would be likely to reduce them. It will be objected that a federalism which begins by encouraging the most local of interests may disintegrate into parochialism, but my experience is that once people begin to take any interest at all in political or social affairs, their horizons soon spread beyond their narrow personal interests, and, since national prejudices can hardly be strong in a country where the central superstructure is minimal and where political mythologies are discouraged, the chances of honest international co-operation based on a sense of world-responsibility are more hopeful among federally-organized countries than among nation-states.

A more important objection to my suggestions is obviously that based on a certainty of the lowering of material prosperity. It has been one of the unfortunate aspects of the progress syndrome in socialists and communists that they have been unable to conceive a better society except in terms of higher and higher living for more and more people, an eventuality which the steady depletion of the world’s resources renders impossible. The anarchists have always been more realistic in this respect. Long before the pundits of the counter culture, they made a virtue of returning to a simpler existence where work would be done for joy rather than money and, in that dignified poverty which Proudhon and Paul Goodman have extolled, things of the spirit and mind would have more importance than material wealth. Some such consolation we shall all have to accept in any case if we ever embark on the course of making ourselves economically independent of the United States. We shall have to reverse the direction of technology, to use it for the simplification rather than the complication of production, for the reduction in size of manufacturing units and power grids, for the recycling of materials and the use of renewable forms of energy, like sunshine and the tides. (I doubt if we shall have to go back to the horse-plough and the abacus, though that would do us no harm.) All this retrenchment will be easier if we have abandoned the habit of seeing such things, in imitation of the Americans, on a megalomaniac national scale. It will also be easier then to admit that what we have in abundance is land and water, that in a country like Canada the encouragement of the trend towards urbanization has been an aberration, and that industrialization is no solution in rural areas where the need is to bring the lost farmlands back into cultivation and restore the balance of existence between town and country.

What, after all, are our alternatives at this crossroads of destiny where Canada now stands? With improbable luck, we can allow nationalism to harden our country into a single centralized and authoritarian state that will enter the suicidal competition of the existing nations for space and resources. It is more likely, however, that a policy of nationalism will result not in one, but in two such states, plagued by the kind of conflict that has wrecked the Indian subcontinent for a generation. But a genuine federalism—unlike the  disguised statism  of Trudeau—would stand a chance of retaining Quebec as an autonomous constituent region, and on Quebec’s own terms. Federalism is the one way in which we can turn to advantage the very factors of cultural and geographical diffusion that tell against us as a national state. After all, the Swiss succeeded in keeping themselves together, with four languages and cultures; they did so by refusing to accept the temptations of nationalism.”