Anarchy, Freedom, Native People & The Environment

GEORGE WOODCOCK

Interview by Alvin Finkel

Article originally published Fall 1990

George Woodcock is a Canadian treasure. Author of innumerable books and articles on subjects ranging from Canadian literature to Gandhi to the native peoples of British Columbia, Woodcock is always lucid and generally controversial. An opponent of systems of external authority both capitalist and communist, Woodcock's many works champion human desires for autonomy and for community. In this interview, he shares his insights on the possibilities of creating genuine freedom in complex modern societies. Mr. Woodcock, 78, has just finished writing a book on the history of British Columbia, and now is “between things”—doing a little poetry, a little translation. Winner of the Governor General's Award, he lives in Vancouver where he is contemplating his next book.

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Aurora: You've published a great deal on anarchist theory and traditions. Are there lessons in this body of work for industrial societies, or have we passed the state where there are opportunities for organizing society without the overwhelming influence of state and corporate bureaucracies?

Woodcock: I think anarchism and its teachings of decentralization, of the co-ordination of rural and industrial societies, and of mutual aid as the foundation of any viable societies, have lessons that in the present are especially applicable to industrial societies.

The anarchists, unlike William Morris and John Ruskin, have never stood in opposition to industrialization. Indeed, as many modern sociologists recognize, the best-known anarchist theoretician, Peter Kropotkin, particularly in Mutual Aid and Fields, Factories and Workshops, was a pioneer in sketching out ways in which an industrial society could be humanized through the efficient use of new techniques.

Surely recent events have demonstrated very clearly the failure of state and corporate bureaucracies in organizing modern societies. State bureaucracies throughout the Communist world have shown the total inadequacy of centralized governmental production and distribution to provide for the needs of populations. In all these countries the recent relaxation of centralized state bureaucracies has demonstrated the extraordinary resilience of individual and co-operative as opposed to state-regulated enterprise.

I was in China three years ago to see the extraordinary revitalization of the economy as the peasants once again took control of the products of their fields and as small co-operatives began to operate local industries and even coal mines. Almost overnight, stubborn problems of consumption were solved by the willing and spontaneous activities of farmers and artisans. In the streets of Chinese cities one saw great markets springing up, controlled by voluntary agreement between the peasants and merchants who went there to sell. These markets had no queues like those which formed in Moscow at the same period; sufficiency of consumer goods had been achieved in a very short time once the state and its centralizing agencies did not interfere.

Since then, everywhere in the Communist world except for Albania, the dismantling of centralized state bureaucracies has begun, because everywhere these bureaucracies have shown their total incapacity to manage either national or local economies productively. Once the control of production was put back into the hands of the producers, the natural inclination of all societies towards mutual aid and co-operation went into action again and saved the situation.

The same criticisms apply to corporate bureaucracies. It is, to begin with, disputable how much benefit such bureaucracies have ever been to society as a whole. In the interests of profit, on the one hand they increase the cost and on the other they diminish the variety of consumer goods, even on the agricultural level with such products as apples and potatoes. At the same time, they work in collaboration with labour union bureaucracies to dehumanize the conditions of work through mass production techniques; most of the improvements union bosses claim to have gained are cosmetic ones.

These two tendencies combine to reduce the quality of life for individuals, a tendency that is increased by the fact that corporate bureaucracies also pollute and destroy the environment. This is dramatically revealed these days on an international scale by sensational oil spills and by the continued devastation of the Amazon basin.

On a more local scale we see this in the series of disputes between logging companies on the one hand and environmentalists and native peoples on the other regarding the practice of “clear cutting.” In all these situations, corporate bureaucracies show themselves to be irresponsible, antisocial and, because of their size, inefficient.

In consequence, many industries are now finding a decentralized form of production more efficient than Henry Ford-style centralized mass production; this is particularly the case in the automotive industry Ford helped to create.

At the same time, experiments in centralized agricultural planning in Soviet Russia, Communist China, and smaller countries ruled on so-called “Marxist” principles have universally failed on the most important level, that of the efficient production of consumer goods. Where they have been replaced by individual peasant holdings or by small locally controlled co-operatives, the increase in productivity has been strikingly large and almost immediate.

I think that experience has shown by now that bureaucracies—whether political, corporate, or labour—are efficient in inverse proportion to the area they control; and the lesson of this experience is that if we are to better our lives and save our environments, we must move away from centralized national or corporate structures and in the direction of decentralized confederal structures allowing much greater participation of the citizen as producer, consumer, and community member.

Aurora: Many of Canada's native peoples, about whom you've written extensively, can look to a past in which complex state organizations were unnecessary. Is there much in this past that can aid them in searching for a better future?

Woodcock: I doubt if any of the Canadian native peoples can look back on a complex state organization as we envisage such organizations in the modern world, whether totalitarian or soi-disant democratic.

What we mean by the state is a rigid authoritarian hierarchy of power in which the government always has the last say in determining not only matters of collective interest but also the lives of individuals. Though structures roughly approximating this definition may have evolved in a few places in the pre-Columbian Americas (Inca Peru and less certainly Aztec Mexico) there was no time in Canada when complex state organizations existed or were considered necessary.

The Inuit and the forest Indians of northern British Columbia had virtually no political organization beyond the wandering extended family. The Coast Indians of British Columbia, who had the most complex culture north of the valley of Mexico, possessed elaborate social ranking systems but virtually no political organization.

The man whom traders or explorers saw as the chief of a village was in fact no more than primus inter pares, the head of the most prosperous lineage in the village. He had no more than a moral influence over the rival house chiefs, based not on any political system but on his ability to gather the consumer goods necessary for the celebration of prestigious potlatches or giving feasts.

The only groups among whom some kind of political organization state existed were the Plains Indians of what we generally call the Blackfoot Confederacy, and the confederation of Iroquois tribes—the Six Nations of history—who appeared first in Canada as dreaded invaders and did not settle in what is now Canadian territory until late in the eighteenth century, after the war of American Independence. In neither case did anything remotely resembling a political state emerge. In both instances there existed a loose confederacy of tribes with common interests though not always with a shared language.

In both confederacies the tribes were autonomous groupings of lineages holding certain rights and organized under a concept of chiefly authority that Europeans always found puzzling since the chief had no more than his personal prestige to sustain his dignity, and he enjoyed no form of absolute power. He really projected the authority generated by councils of elders, warrior societies, and women's societies among the Iroquois in what were essentially systems of participatory democracy, not state hierarchies.

The tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy would usually meet each summer in a common camp on the western plains, and there, matters of common interest—usually mutual defence and shared raiding enterprises— would be discussed without obligation on any side; there was never, so far as I have been able to ascertain, any permanent council of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

The Iroquois tribes during their pre-Canadian period did have a common council of sachems, in whose selection the women, whose influence derived from their control of agriculture, played a great role; but this council did not interfere in the internal affairs of the tribes, so that it remained the co-ordinating body of a true confederation rather than the government of the state.

It seems to me that this history of anarchic and federalist organization, based on the negation of centralized political authority, gives the Indians a position of special advantage in the modern world—once they can gain the economic basis of a fair land settlement. Then they will be in a marvellous position to reculer pour mieux sauter, to draw on the lessons of their own past to help them rebuild their societies.

We, the others, might learn a great deal about ways to solve our own problems by watching them. They have developed more political sophistication, and groups like the Inuit and the Dene, so disunited before, now consider themselves “nations,” though by this they do not mean “nation-states” but groups of people with their own languages, land, and traditions.

There is no Indian “nation” because the variety of native traditions leaves no room for one, and no thought of an “Indian” state exists. The aims of native people today lean rather towards establishing a number of small self-governing sovereignties with federal links with the rest of Canada. And why not, since Canada's destiny is surely a confederal one in need of experimental social and political forms?

Aurora: You've written recently rather positively about the evolution of the Canadian nation-state in the nineteenth century as a contribution to the development of a national identity. Do you believe generally that nationalism can be a positive force, and if so, how do you distinguish healthy and unhealthy nationalism?

Woodcock: Alas, how easily even a writer whose reputation rests so largely on his clear prose can be misunderstood!

I have never written, as you suggest, on the Canadian nation-state or on any other nation-state in a positive way, since my view of such political structures and their effects is entirely negative. They have been and still are responsible for most of the major disasters of the modern world, including of course two major wars and the outbreak of such totalitarian maladies as National Socialism in Germany and nationalistic Communism in Stalin's Russia. Modern communications have rendered them wholly obsolete, yet the survival of these outdated dinosaurs prevents us from creating effective international organizations; they have turned the United Nations into a mockery of what we need, and within countries they have prevented the development of effective systems based on the contemporary demand for participatory democracy and libertarian decentralism.

I may, as a historian, have at times objectively traced the development of a nationalist tendency in Canadian politics; who could fail to do so? But always, whether dealing with Sir John A. MacDonald and his National Policy (which was unashamedly structured to favour Central Canada and ruin the Maritime provinces) or Pierre Trudeau (with his undated Jacobinical centralism whose consequences may yet tear Canada apart), I have condemned any attempt to create a nation-state here. To do so would be out of keeping with the country's history and geography, its vast cultural variety, and its long-term inclinations towards regional autonomy and towards recreating in terms suitable for the twentieth century the sovereignties of the native peoples.

We have in this country a unique opportunity to take up the lead which the Swiss offered at the end of the Middle Ages and to present a true con-federal society to the world, a grand experiment that would help spell the end of the nation-state everywhere.

Like George Orwell, I believe patriotism (a love of one's land or community and not of its political system) to be a positive force. Patriotism at its best is cohesive. It leads us to respect others as we are able to respect ourselves; it is not divisive, as is nationalism, which is built on fear and resentment.

Aurora: Your work on Gandhi makes clear your admiration of pacifist principles. Do you think such principles have a greater degree of support now than early this century, or does the cooling of superpower tension, for example, simply reflect a lull in the world's continuous history of war-making?

Woodcock: I am sure that active pacifism has increased and that resistance to participation in warfare, i.e. conscientious objection, would be higher than ever before in the event of large scale wartime call-ups in the western countries. In themselves, such individual gestures are probably of little importance, but they do reflect a general dread of war and a general, though somewhat vague and diffused, resolution that major conflicts must not occur again. I think the awareness of this barely articulated feeling does weigh on the minds of politicians, but they are much more influenced by the sheer destructiveness of any foreseeable major war.

At the end of 1979 I was asked on a CBC panel show whether I foresaw a major war as a likely prospect in the 1980s. Not a major war, I answered, but a lot of nasty little wars. That of course is what happened, and some of the nasty little wars are continuing, in places like Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, without much benefit to anyone and with a great deal of harm to millions. During this period even the major powers became involved only in “nasty little wars”—the Russians in Afghanistan, the British in the Falklands, the Americans in Grenada.

I think there will never again be a World War like those of the past. And only some horrifying miscalculation is likely to set off an atomic war. But there are powerful interests, both industrial and political, that are likely to encourage small wars in the hinterlands of the world, where ever-more-sophisticated conventional weapons can be tried out and consumed. There is still not a strong enough world opinion to prevent it. Even a country like Sweden, neutral by law and largely pacifist in sentiment, profits from selling the Bofors gun to potential belligerents.

What is needed is a grand gesture from a country of standing which would declare neutrality and transform its armed forces into a redemption corps dedicated to rehabilitating polluted and devastated areas of the country, tree planting, etc. Canada would be ideal for this role.

Aurora: The destruction of the environment is an issue that has recently assumed political importance. Is it possible to change the lifestyles that contribute to environmental degradation without extensive state regulations? In general, how easily can one reconcile notions of civil liberties and individual choice with reasonable limitations placed on our endeavours by the needs of the environment?

Woodcock: In principle I am opposed to attempts to save the environment by compulsion and by the kind of regulations that would reach into every home. Unless a great majority of the people is already convinced, such attempts to change behaviour by wholesale compulsion usually fail, and very often they have socially disastrous side-effects.

Think of prohibition in the United States, the popular resistance to which produced an era of organized and profitable crime. Think also of the pathetically unsuccessful attempts in recent years to suppress drug consumption, which again have heightened the profits of crime and encouraged its spread, accompanied by widespread corruption among politicians and public servants.

The approach to environmental issues—the most effective and least disruptive one—I suggest should be a double one. Most pollution still comes from the major industries (pulp mills, oil refineries, logging operations, chemical factories), and strict codes should be laid down for them, with heavy fines and eventually dispossession as the penalities for noncompliance. (Imprisonment should not be a penalty; that makes martyrs and is counter-productive.)

The general public, seeing the major polluters brought in line, would be encouraged to play their major part in recycling, and in avoiding petty pollutions, particularly if the municipalities were also penalized for non-treatment of sewage, perhaps by the withdrawal of federal and provincial grants.

Municipalities should also be held responsible for recycling depots and ensuring transport to them for the recyclable garbage people are persuaded to put out in their “blue boxes.” Certain products, like white toilet paper, should obviously be phased out, but that should not be difficult once the major polluters are dealt with and the public encouraged to make a habit of environmental carefulness.

Aurora: Do you think that increased trade has limited the ability of national governments to set their own economic agenda, as economists keep telling us? If so, is that likely to contribute to greater international harmony or to detract from it?

Woodcock: Economists are usually wrong. The point here surely lies in the question: “Why should governments set any economic agenda?” Surely that is ideally for the producers to decide, and in a true confederal society it would be easy, with each industry self-managed.

Self-managed industries are always more flexible in dealing with competition and with international trade situations than state-managed ones, because they are more flexible (as the economic crisis of Communist countries have shown). By self-managed, of course, I mean industries in which the workers have a fair share in ownership and management, which eliminates owner-worker dissent and leaves individual enterprises and whole industries more room to manoeuvre.

There is no real reason why industries in one country should not make their own terms with similar industries in others, without governments interfering. Indeed, they sometimes do that already. The great danger is not competition between parallel industries in various countries, but the elimination of competition by the growing power of the multinational corporations. It is that respectable but ruthless financial mafia that must be controlled and in the end destroyed.

Aurora: What issues generally will become the key ones for civil libertarians in the years to come?

Woodcock: 

The abortion issue will remain with us for a long time, though in terms of civil liberties it is a straightforward one, with women having a complete right to control their own bodies. I think in the decades ahead we have to make decisions on the vital issue of libertarian versus paternalistic government. Too often nowadays people are being controlled “for their own good,” instead of being allowed to go to Hell, if they wish, in their own particular handbaskets. This explains the current mania for stamping out smoking, with all its exasperating restrictions, and also, as I have already pointed out, our foolish policies on drugs. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom of people to harm themselves if that is their choice.

On more specific civil libertarian issues, I think we have to be alert to attacks on freedom of the press, which are now being made covertly, through the taxing procedures. The proposed extension of the Goods and Services Act to books is an obvious instance, especially since books have long been exempt from Customs duties in Canada.

So is the similar tax on periodicals, which will most affect the more outspoken and experimental papers, also hit by the Goods and Services Tax. This is a none-too-subtle form of censorship by elimination directed at the very publications and publishers most likely to bring out writing critical of the regime. To tax books is only a degree less atrocious than to ban or burn them.

Sometimes I am asked whether I foresee the danger of a totalitarian government in Canada. The danger does not have to be foreseen; it is here. Let us do our best to prevent this being realized.

Books by George Woodcock

Beyond the Blue Mountain. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987.

Introducing the Stone Angel. ECW Press, 1987.

Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987.

Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada. Douglas & McIntyre, 1985.

A Place to Stand On: Essays by and about Margaret Laurence. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1983.

Letter to the Past: An Autobiography. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1982.

The Canadians. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1979.

Gabriel Dumont: The Metis Chief and His Lost World. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1975.

Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Harmondsworth, England: Markham, 1962.

Article originally published Fall 1990

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An Aurora Update

George Woodcock died in 1995 at age 82. Prior to his death he was awarded the Freedom of City award on February 22, 1994 (Freedom of the City is the highest award given by the City of Vancouver. Reserved for individuals of exceedingly high merit, it is given only in exceptional cases, usually to someone who has gained national and international acclaim in the arts, business or philanthropy, and who has brought recognition to Vancouver through his or her achievements).

Further information on George Woodcock can be found at:

UBC: Canadian Litertaure

Updated July 2001

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Aurora Online

Citation Format

Finkel, Alvin (1990). Anarchy, Freedom, Native People & the Environment: George Woodcock. Aurora Online: