Still worth fighting: Nicolas Walter remembered
From Freedom News UK
The great anarchist historian and activist left us a message for these dire times
~ Natasha Walter ~
How do we keep hope and faith alive? People keep asking that question as we watch the climate slide into crisis, war crimes stream across our social media platforms, and authoritarian leaders take power. While our problems may feel newly pressing, a pamphlet published in 1969 was already discussing how easy it is in dark times to fall into a state of permanent protest — “the practice of many active anarchists who keep their beliefs intact and carry on as if they still hoped for success but who know—consciously or unconsciously—that they will never see it”. From this point of view, “there is no hope of changing society… What is important is not the future… but the present, the recognition of bitter reality and constant resistance to an ugly situation”.
Still, the writer continues, “it is just as dogmatic to say that things will never change as to say that things are bound to change, and no one can tell when protest might become effective and the present might suddenly turn into the future”. And so, those who resist are “scouts in a struggle which we may not win and which may never end but which is still worth fighting”.
These words come from About Anarchism, by my father, Nicolas Walter (1934-2000). This combination of cynicism about the present together with a continuing commitment to a better future is characteristic of his work. Today, on what would have been his 90th birthday, I feel the absence of his voice ever more keenly.
At the recent undercover policing inquiry hearings I was amused to hear that Roger Pearce, the undercover police officer who spied on Freedom in the 1980s, gave this assessment of Nicholas Walter to his superiors: “a cautious, alert individual whose sardonic temperament is met with respect or intense dislike, but never indifference”. True enough, but he inspired a great deal of affection and love among those who knew him best.
Pearce also shared his judgement of Nicolas’s key work: “This well-written pamphlet, produced by probably the most prominent of today’s intellectual anarchist genre, is of inestimable value to anyone seeking a survey of the anarchist scene which is both comprehensive and concise. It is cited time and again as the publication which guided the political and apolitical alike to espousal of anarchism”.
While an undercover policeman is hardly an objective reviewer of anarchist philosophy, that does seem a fair assessment. About Anarchism still bears re-reading, as does much of the rest of Nicolas’s output on anarchist history and ideas, which ran like a steel thread through Freedom – and related publications such as Anarchy, The Raven and Wildcat – all the way from 1959 to 2000. While so many of these articles and reviews were keyed into the historical legacy of anarchism, rather than its contemporary practice, his own ideas and writing now come into ever sharper focus.
Whenever I go back to Nicolas’s work now I’m struck by how current, unfinished and probing it still seems. Although Nicolas had such unparalleled grasp of the history of anarchism, his work grew out of his activism as much as out of his research. Richard Taylor chose to end his recent book English Radicalism with an essay on Nicolas, whom he has described as “the most erudite and eloquent anarchist historian and analyst in post 1945 Britain. He was, moreover, a leading civil disobedience activist in the peace movement”.
For Nicolas, there was no distinction between theory and practice. It was in the rise of the Committee of 100, the nuclear disarmament group dedicated to civil disobedience, that he found the chance to put the ideas that he had been exploring into practice in the early 1960s, and he seized that moment.
This was the time when he came to the insight that he himself thought was central to his political philosophy, the idea that there can be no distinction between means and ends. He first explored this in a discussion of Gandhi’s philosophy in his 1962 pamphlet on civil disobedience, Nonviolent Resistance: Men Against War. “In the Indian dharma, as in the analogous Chinese tao, the way and the goal are one”, he wrote, and went on to state that this leads to “a healthy refusal to make any convenient distinction between ends and means”, as opposed to the views of western philosophers who “have tended to believe that if one takes care of the ends, the means will take care of themselves. This line of reasoning leads to Auschwitz and Hiroshima”.
Nicolas returned frequently to the moral and political importance of remembering that the means and the ends are one. In one article published, unusually for him, in the Guardian (collected in David Goodway’s Damned Fools in Utopia), he laid it out with particular force. “Everyone says something should be done – we say do it yourself. The politicians say: If you want peace, prepare for war. We say: If you want peace, prepare for peace. They say the end justifies the means – we say means are ends”.
The great force of this insight helped Nicolas and others to steer the political culture of the Committee of 100 and other groups that flowered at that time (such as the Spies for Peace and Solidarity) away from the hierarchies and discipline of the old Left and into the anarchist way of organising that attempts to build the non-hierarchical society we want, here and now.
In his 2023 book If We Burn, a study of recent resistance movements across the world, Vincent Bevins examines that key political insight and blames it for such movements’ inability to build conventional power structures. In doing so Bevins states that the idea that “means are ends’ was first enunciated by David Graeber in 2002. “In the 1960s, the New Left had insisted that means also mattered in addition to the ends. David Graeber… went even further. In a 2002 essay for New Left Review, he explained that … the means were the ends”.
But Bevins and other observers of social movements need to look well further back for this idea — certainly 40 years earlier to Nicolas Walter, as well as to the anarchists and proto-anarchists who influenced him. As Nicholas said in 1962, when he saw to his irritation that people were putting forward anarchist ideas as totally new: “Are Winstanley, Rousseau, Godwin, Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Bakunin, Morris, Kropotkin, Cole and all the rest really nothing more than names? Has the anarchist stream really been driven so far underground?”
Too often our radical histories are ignored, our personal and political roots are pulled up, and it is hard to hear the roar of those underground rivers of dissent. When I hear protesters today stating that their prison sentences for protest are unprecedented, I remember that when my parents and their friends set up the Spies for Peace group in 1963, which broke into government nuclear bunkers to publish the secrets of the warfare state, they knew they were running the risk of much longer sentences than protesters risk today. In my recent book Before the Light Fades, in which I tell the story of my parents’ involvement in the Spies for Peace, I quote my mother Ruth Walter: “We knew we were risking twenty years imprisonment, and that was scary but we knew it was the right thing to do. I was quite prepared to do it”.
The Spies for Peace got away with their illegal actions, but Nicolas went on to be arrested for protest throughout his life, and was imprisoned for heckling a politician in 1968. He did that in protest at the Vietnam War, and in hindsight no serious commentator would argue that the protesters had got it wrong and the warmongers had got it right. Just as few would argue that the British government was right to keep secret from the people the plans for surviving nuclear war in the 1960s. Anarchists are so often doing the work that needs to be done in order to challenge the free operation of authoritarian governments, and yet now just as then, their reward is mockery and imprisonment.
We cannot afford to keep losing the histories of our movements, when we so badly need them, not just to understand the past, but to help us consider the possibilities of the present. We need to understand that there were always other forks in the road, and that those paths may still be rediscovered now. Nicolas Walter’s understanding of the anarchist past was a key to his continued faith in the future. As he once stated with disarming confidence, “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion”.
Natasha Walter is an author, journalist, and founder of Women for Refugee Women