Colin Ward on organisation

 
 
POSTED: December 3, 2024
 
 
 
 
 

In 1973 Colin Ward wrote a book called Anarchy in Action, which placed him somewhere on the same Venn diagram as guild socialists like GDH Cole.

In 2010, after a long and extremely varied career, he died. In 2011 Andrew Kelly edited a book called Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: a Colin Ward reader which reprinted a chapter from Anarchy in Action called “Anarchism as a Theory of Organisation” (pages 49 – 54).

In this Colin Ward describes the necessary nature of effective organisions. He writes that they “should be”

(1) voluntary (2) functional (3) temporary and (4) small

They should be voluntary for obvious reasons. There is no point in advocating individual freedom and responsibility if we are going to advocate organisations for which membership is mandatory.

They should be functional and temporary because permanence is one of those factors which harden the arteries of an organisation, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, in serving the interests of office-holders rather than its function.

They should be small precisely because in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop.”

This forms the most succinct definitions that I know of an organistion that operates effectively but not efficiently. I genuinely wish that I had remembered it to include in Cultural Democracy Now.