Anarchy is Beautiful

In the mid-1960s a unique artistic and political movement emerged in Amsterdam from the remnants of the dying, far-left “Ban the Bomb” movement and a highly experimental performance art scene based around spontaneous “Happenings.” The movement took the name Provo (short for provocation) and lasted two years as a serious effort that “culminated explosively in a spontaneous five-day riot” (Richard Kempton) in June, 1966.

Provo, which declared itself as an explicitly anarchist organization, stands in contrast to the disjointed and confused political intentions of many other student and artist political movements around the world during the 1960s. The abstract focus within the radical uproar of the 60s contributed significantly to its ultimate fate of reformist compromise with the system, which deflated its revolutionary momentum and allowed it to fizzle out. 

Provo functioned as a spontaneous and creative group while maintaining very serious demand on society. The statement of their creation declared its reasons for existence and its dedication to anarchism:

-Because this capitalist society is poisoning itself with a morbid thirst for money. Its members are being brought up to worship Having and despise Being

-Because this bureaucratic society is choking itself with officialdom and suppressing any form of spontaneity. Its members can only become creative, individual people through anti-social conduct.

-Because the militaristic society is digging its own grave by a paranoid arms build-up. Its members now have nothing to look forward to but certain death by atomic radiation.

Provo’s focus was very environmental. Their concept of pollution stretched to include visual and noise pollution. Their re-envisioning of a liveable world and urban environment was one suited to an artistic movement.  Robert Jasper Grootveld, a founder of Provo considered the “Prophet of Amsterdam” and “genius of the absurd,” developed his logic and strategy of capitalist overthrow through what started as an intense one-man anti-smoking campaign.

Moving from tobacco, Provo took on car culture, pasting fliers with crude images of cars in a traffic jam emitting smoke and noise pollution represented by crudely written repetitions of “kanker, kanker, kanker” and “bram, bram, bram.” True to their name and mission, the text on the flier was highly provocative, declaring

if you see a car emitting lots of poisonous gas, take its number and phone 81206 between 4:30 and 5. Provo will move into action-and we know how to deal with them!

Provo may have been one of the first groups to initiate an organized campaign against car culture, a struggle that has found roots and flourishes today. It was this analysis that would lead Provo to launch the White Bicycle Plan.

Provo’s strategy for challenging power revolved around two tactics: regular “Happenings” and the introduction of a slew of White Plans for social reconstruction. Happenings, either politically charged performance art or highly artistic protests, usually began with Provos defacing a famous statue (usually the same one for several weeks in a row) and lighting afire objects that they declared to be symbolic of the systems they opposed. Provos who lead Happenings dressed in absurd costumes, painted their faces and spoke in highfalutin political jarble. They succeeded, usually, in their goal of provoking the police, who repeatedly beat and arrested the demonstrators, bringing them immense public sympathy and a listening audience for their ambitious White Plans.

Provo’s White Plans spanned from a proposal that all abandoned properties in Amsterdam have their front doors painted white so that they may be known as “public property” for squatters and the homeless (the White House Plan) to  a proposal that police turn in their uniforms and guns to become white-clad social workers at the command of the public (the White Chicken Plain).

With the White Bicycle Plan, Provo demanded the removal of all automobiles from Amsterdam, to be replaced exclusively by bikes painted white and left everywhere for anyone to use. True to Provo form, the text of the plan is riddled with metaphor and hyperbole:

Provokatie #5

PROVO’s Bicycle Plan

Amsterdammers!

The asphalt terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has last long enough. Human sacrifices are made daily to this latest idol of the idiot: car power. Choking carbon monoxide is its incense, its image contaminates thousands of canals and streets.

PROVO’s bicycle plan will liberate us from the car monster. POVO introduces the WHITE BICYCLE, a piece of public property.

The first white bicycle will be presented to the Press and public on Wednesday July 28 at 3 P.M. near the statue of Lieverdje, the addicted consumer [which Provo’s often lit on fire at Happenings], on the Spui.

The white bicycle is never locked. The white bicycle is the first free communal transport. The white bicycle is a provocation against capitalist private property. THE WHITE BICYCLE IS ANARCHISTIC.

The white bicycle can be used by anyone who needs it and then must be left for someone else. There will be more and more white bicycles until everyone can use white transport and the car peril is past. The white bicycle is a symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the authoritarian car. In other words:

A BIKE IS SOMETHING, BUT ALMOST NOTHING!

Though the plan ultimately failed (police confiscated all of the introduced bikes, ironically citing a law that stated bikes must be locked to prevent theft), its spirit, analysis and imagery would lay the groundwork for future campaigns against car culture that are prominent today in many cities. 

The notion of creating “bikes only” cities is alive and well in Critical Mass, an unpermitted, leaderless bike ride that occurs monthly in many of the world’s major cities. Critical Mass is approaching its 20th anniversary and a more recent trend of yearly, weekend-long Critical Mass events such as Intergalactic Critical Mass in Rome or Velorution in Paris draw upwards of 10,000 cyclists into the streets. PROVO’s artistic deconstruction of private and public property dynamics combined with a provocative public presence contained an early form of the “Reclaim the Streets” logic that heavily underlies Critical Mass.

The White Bike, for its part, has reemerged in a more somber context. Beginning in the 90s and continuing today, cyclists who want to draw attention to the “asphalt terror” that car culture afflicts on cyclists, while memorializing its victims, place “ghost bikes,” bikes painted entirely white, at locations where cyclists were killed in accidents with automobiles. 

The tradition of direct action against car culture and the attempts to strategically (white bike) and actually (critical mass) create models for sustainable and egalitarian modes of transportation while maintaining an unforgiving criticism and rebuke (ghost bikes) of the current “car peril” that lives on and sustains our fossil fuel-based capitalist economy is a relatively new one. It has its roots in anarchism and finds common ground with the so-called New Anti-Capitalist Movement of the mid-90s to present. It contains all the critical analysis, fun and beauty that has sustained anarchist efforts above their scientific socialist counterparts, allowing their themes and strategies to be re-born through our movement’s history, bringing us with irreversible haste to the day where we may actualize the world we’ve all daydreamed about while riding our bikes.

On October 13th, 1909, Francisco Ferrer was executed by firing squad under the orders of Spanish authorities in Madrid. His execution came at the end of what has come to be called “The Tragic Week” in Catalonia. 

Always a stronghold of freethinkers and a hotbed of anarchist and socialist ideas with a clear rejection of Spanish nationality, Catalonia’s workers brought the economy to a halt with a general strike in protest of the continued colonization of Morrocco by the Spanish Empire. Riots and confrontations with the police broke out as authorities tried to force workers back to their factories and martial law was declared. 

Like at so many other points in history, the State used an ensuing chaos as cover for a mass extermination of political dissidents. It was under this convenient guise that Francisco Ferrer was executed for his ideas, his influence, and the very threatening success of his free school, the Escuela Moderna, in Catalonia.

Before his untimely death, Ferrer had become one of Europe’s most prominent advocates of libertarian education. His Escuela Moderna would become the most popular model of free schooling until the 1960s. His death inspired the creation of hundreds of free schools around the world, especially in the United States. 

But Ferrer was not the first to espouse ideas about libertarian education and freedom for young people in the industrial west. As Paul Avrich explains:

He was in the direct line of an educational tradition which, rooted in eighteenth centure rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism, involved a shift from emphasis on instruction to emphasis on the process of learning, from teaching by rote and memorization to teaching by example and experience, from education as a preparation for life to education as life itself. 

Ferrer entered the scene of radical education at a crucial point in the development of European thought on the subject. The west had undergone a vast intellectual and social awaking during the previous centuries. The creation of universities and the fervent discontent of the masses over the still-new industrial economy and its vast inequalities led to a massive outpouring of analysis and proposed solutions. Progressive ideas came from all corners.

  Education was at the forefront of this movement. In creating a world free of the old harmful dogmas and built on the progressive ideals of the new century, the creation of freethinking children was of utter importance. Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and prominent Christian anarchist, put it as such:

I started my social activity with the school and teaching, and after forty years I am more convinced that only by education, free educations, can we ever manage to rid ourselves of the existing horrible order of things and to replace it with a rational organization.

Freethinkers, atheists, socialists, writers and countless other groups of intellectuals threw themselves into the task of writing an educational program for a new world. Anarchist took perhaps the most active and direct role in putting these theories into practice.

  The ideas espoused were infinitely varied but a majority fell under the umbrella of what might be called “libertarian education.” At the heart of libertarian education is the idea that children should be free to self-direct their own education in an environment that facilitates free thought. Thus, many intellectuals and radicals made it their work to establish free schools, where children could learn in an atmosphere of freedom, with access to the natural world around them.

  Tolstoy opened a free school in Yasnaya Polyana which was run on one simple principle, which he explained clearly:

Let it be known that there is only one criterion for teaching: freedom 

  Robert Owen, an American Utopianist who set up various free colonies and Utopian projects in the United States experimented with various free school models in his early intentional communities, most prominently at New Harmony. 

  One of the most successful early libertarian educators was Paul Robin. Robin, as director of the Prevost Orphanage, in Cempuis France  transformed the orphanage into one of the first existing libertarian schools. In the fourteen years he spent there he “laid the groundwork for ‘integral’ education, of girls as well as boys, designed to develop both the physical and intellectual capacities of the pupils in a non-coercive atmosphere” (Avrich 5). 

 
  Like his successor, Ferrer, Robin would be stopped in his tracks by the State. Because of his radical ideas about education and his advocacy for such heretical ideas as birth-control, he was removed from his post in 1894. But his school had left a lasting impression, Robin’s project would become the model upon which Ferrer built the Escuela Moderna.

  In 1900 Fransisco Ferrer recieved a large and unexpected inheretence from a former “student.”  Ernestine Meunie was a woman of upper-class background who Ferrer had taught Spanish to while living in France.  Once a fairly conservative woman, Ferrer’s charm and his simple and persuasive manner of speaking and explaining social conditions made an unexpected anarchist of Meunie. With her contribution Ferrer was able to see his dream of opening a free school come to fruition. It was a dream long in the works.

 
  Ferrer had studied and met with many of the founders and advocates of radical educational philosophy. He had been especially influenced by the anarchists. Anarchist approach to education put children on the same level as adults, considered them free, autonomous human beings and believed in the inherent goodness of human beings when not corrupted by social vice. As Mikhail Bakunin put it:

Children belong neither to their parents nor to society. They belong to themselves and their future liberty.

  It was thus as an anarchist educator that Ferrer built the model for the Escuela Moderna in 1901. In the first year of its existence, the school received 70 students, boys and girls, of mixed social backgrounds. Tuition was paid on a sliding scale, with some of the poorest students attending for free. In 1905, the last full school year of the Escuela Moderna, attendance had risen to 126 and was still on the rise when Spanish authorities closed the school. 

  The Escuela Moderna  had no lesson plan, no grades and no requirement for attendance. Classes could be arranged at students’ request with adult facilitators at which time the learning process was a discussion between child and adult, each hearing and learning from the others’ ideas. Noise was  considered natural and disputes between students were rarely if even intervened by adults.Practical knowledge and hands-on experience were strongly emphasized over book learning and memorization. Paul Avrich:

Accordingly, a lesson in the Escuela Moderna often consisted of a visit to a factory or laboratory, where things were demonstrated and explained, or to a museum where art was displayed,or to a park or the hills or the sea, where geological conditions were studied, botanical specimens collected and individual observation encouraged.

  Ferrer saw education as an ongoing experience, integrated with all aspects of life and not restricted to children. Parents were encouraged to play an active role in the school as well as to attend evening and Sunday lectures, which were free and heavily attended by workers.

  Ferrer also used the Escuela Moderna as a school for the training of libertarian teachers as well as a radical publishing house, putting out a vast array of literature for all ages. He organized an entire collection of books to be published exclusively to suit a free school environment. These books, written and translated by some of Europes most prominent scholars, were meant to address the most forward and recent scientific, social, geographical and anthropological  ideas in a language accessible to students who had not grown in a compulsory learning environment. Over 40 textbooks were issued. Many of these books were in the lineage of anarchist thought, and it was here that the authorities both of church and state began to feel alarmed. Avrich explains:

There were also collections of writing on the mythology of religion and ‘the injustice connected with patriotism, the horrors of war, and the iniquity of conquest’…These were regarded with intense disfavor by the Spanish authorities as tending to undermine the established order, cultural as well as political.

  Children’s books also held a special place in the school’s library. The first book found suitable for the Escuala Moderna was a children’s book, The Adventures of Nono, by Jean Grave, which Ferrer described as ” a kind of poem in which a certain phase of the happier future is ingeniously and dramatically contrasted with the sordid realities of the present social order; the delights of tile land of Autonomy are contrasted with the horrors of the kingdom of Argirocracy.” 

  As an anarchist, Ferrer saw social revolution as an inevitability in creating a new world society free of church, state and capital where the freedom of individual could flourish in a co-operative environment. Thus he unabashedly admitted that to facilitate free thought in the classroom was to create revolutionaries. 

  It must not be misunderstood that a form of indoctrination was present in the Escuela Moderna. But let us shed this delusion about neutrality in a learning environment. Education is a social endeavour, and society rests on ideas, all social edeavours are built on a bed of assumptions. There can be no neutrality.  But the social foundation that the Escuela Moderna was built on was meant to facilitate thought, to welcome challenge to its own ideas just as much as to those it opposed. The philosophical groundwork was the destruction of all dogma and the dismantling of reigning ideologies that inhibit freedom in the child as well as humanity as a whole.

     Students were exposed to the social philosophies of Ferrer and other adults at the school, they were “educated to believe in liberty, equality and social justice…imbued with the ideals of brotherhood and cooperation and with a sympathy of the downtrodden and oppressed. They were taught that war is a crime against humanity, that the capitalist system is evil, that government is slavery, that freedom is essential for human development” (Avrich).

But these ideas were discovered not through compulsion and repetition, but through exploration and free discussion. This can be allowed in a free school because these are the ideas that humanity leans toward naturally. An authoritarian school dares not open a free discussion of patriotism, religion, property etc.  because to defend and make excuses for such institutions one must say things that they would never say to children and that children would never hear anyway.

Repetition, memorization, lecturing and book learning are the tools of authoritarian education because only through laborious, detached monotony can children learn to accept such unattractive concepts. Exploration, discussion, self-reflection, activity and craft are the tools of libertarian education because the unrestrained human spirit will always guide itself towards freedom, freedom of self and love of others.

For anarchists, a belief in the inherent cooperativeness and mutual respect of humans must be coupled with the sober realization of less productive secondary tendencies (violence, competition) that may easily be extracted in a coercive social environment. Our current masters employ twelve years of schooling, financial dependency, a lifetime of divisive news stories, perpetual war at home and abroad among countless other tactics to keep the fires burning inside of us that keep us from living the lives we deserve and desire. 

More and more we are finding that we don’t need to rely on philosophy and gut feeling to declare that humans are natural empathic and co-operative and that, as libertarian educator William Godwin said “Depravity in children is always learned.”Developments in natural science, evolutionary biology, neurocognitive sciences, childhood development and all other branches of science and social study uncover more and more every day the fact that the human species is, as Jeremy Rifkin puts it “soft-wired for empathy.”

The theory of mutual aid in evolutionary biology, first posited by prominent anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin, suggests that the evolutionary urge is toward cooperation within in a species and that it is this tendency, not competition, that has played the most prominent role in the evolution of species and their ability to survive

Rifkin’s claim about empathy comes from a series of neurocognitive studies that lead to the discovery of mirror neurons, the part of the brain that allows us to experience empathy. Studies suggesting empathy as the foundation for human cognitive response are popping up everywhere.

Similarly, in economics, a series of studies done at MIT, funded by the pentagon and the federal reserve, continuously (to the distress of its funders) showed that financial incentive and competition were detrimental to creative productivity.

Dan Pink (hardly an anarchist) working off these results, suggests that the three major factors, quite alien from the traditional assumptions of capitalist economics, that actually drives us are autonomy, mastery and purpose. As humans we enjoy self-directions, we like “getting good at stuff” and we like to feel purpose. 

Autonomy, mastery and purpose. It seems obvious, it seems intuitive, right? It is. Its been known forever, these ideas have been posited in a million ways by a million people throughout history, Dan Pink is one, Francisco Ferrer is one, and there are many more. The desire for anarchy, a social system built entirely on the fulfilment of these ideas, is a desire familiar to the whole of humanity, it manifests in infinite forms, some are self-aware, most are not.  Ferrer’s students had a taste of it, and its dangerous stuff, because it leaves the taster wanting more. So he was killed and so many others too. But its unstoppable. It lives inside us. Long live anarchy, long live the social revolution.