#colin ward
DSC_0289a1 Atelier with Scriptorium by Russell Moreton
Via Flickr:
They will be schools no longer, they will be popular academies, in which neither pupils nor masters will be known, where the people will come freely to get, if they need it, free instruction, and in which, rich in their own experience, they will teach in turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack. This then will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity. Michael Bakunin, 1870. Freedom in Education/Anarchism, Colin Ward 2004.
You may think that in describing anarchy as organisation, I am being deliberately paradoxical. Anarchy you may consider to be, by definition, the opposite of organisation. But the word really means something quite different; it means the absence of government, the absence of authority. It is, after all, governments which make and enforce the laws that enable the “haves” to retain control of social assets to the exclusion of the “have-nots.” It is, after all, the principle of authority which ensures that people will work for someone else for the greater part of their lives, not because they enjoy or have any control over their work, but because to do so is their only means of livelihood.
-Colin Ward, Anarchy as Organisation
