Further to last week’s brief mention of Colin Ward’s death, “Ken Worpole now has an obituary in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/22/colin-ward-obituary . A brief excerpt:
bq. Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be Âdiscerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening Âco-operative Ârelations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms. One of Colin’s favourite metaphors – adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone – was the image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over.
I’d also note Daniel Trilling’s brief note at the New Statesman blog (which contains a link to an online pdf reader of Ward’s writings), Boyd Tonkin’s appreciation in the Independent, and Ross Bradshaw at the Five Leaves Publications blog.
Reading around Ward’s work in the few days since his death I kept coming across one of his favourite quotes, from the German anarchist Gustav Landauer:
bq. The State is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.
Material there, I think, for further meditation on Jerry Cohen’s critique of Rawls, the “socialism of the the camping trip”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9009.html , the importance of “ethos” and the inadequacy of a conception of human emancipation based around law and citizenship. (The “the seed beneath the snow” metaphor even finds echoes in the cover design for Cohen’s _Why not Socialism?_ ) But speculation about these convergences should form the matter of another post.
Update: Roman Krznaric’s “appreciation”:http://outrospection.org/2010/02/27/382 , and the Times “obituary”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7045467.ece .