WE ALL complain about the the increasing amount of red tape and legislation we are forced to work under but what would it be like if we had no laws at all? What would it be like if anarchy reigned, a world where laws and private property ceased to exist?
As somone whose lawlessness is restricted to driving against the direction arrows in supermarket car parks and ocassionally writing ‘oh yes they do’ on cardboard envelopes that say ‘photographs do not bend’, I have to admit that the concept of anarchy is hard for me to understand.
For instance, do anarchists accept something as basic to our very existence as the laws of physics? It would appear not judging by events at the recent Anarchist Bookfair in London’s Camden Centre.
One of the main complaints was (again) the effectiveness of the air conditioning system. Dissatisfied with the system’s ability to cool the main hall to what the anrachists considered to be an acceptable temperature, they were further irritated by the fact that the ac gave up the ghost entirely when they left the doors open. So, there go the laws of thermodynamics as well. Perhaps they believe in the laws of Murphy and Sod?
This got me thinking; do the authors follow the general laws of grammar, spelling and punctuation? If you were a true anarchist, surely you wouldn’t.
Furthermore, what does an anarchist book actually look like? Does it follow the general rules of publishing and printing? Surely, it would have an index, probably at the front, with totally erroneous page number references. Not that that would matter much because the pages wouldn’t use the conventional numbering system. And would a typical anarchist book be in a generally accepted square/oblong format or would it be round (well, nearly,) or triangular, but not, you understand, an equilateral triangle?
Are the books expensive? Presumably not, because if you don’t believe in property how can you charge a cover price? Not that that would bother you as a seller, because by the same reasoning you wouldn’t have paid your printer and, in the absence of copyright laws, it would, presumably, have been very easy to produce – or should that be reproduce?
Goings on at the bookfair also confused me. Apparently, the event was infiltrated by a group of splitters – the Libertarian Alliance, described in a rather po-faced way as a bunch of ‘anarcho-capitalists’ whose politics significantly clashed with the bookfair’s ethos by promoting the retention of private property and business in an otherwise lawless society. They had obviously broken some sort of ‘law’ in the eyes of ‘mainstream’ anarchists because the organisers (now there’s a misnomer) had them thrown out; unfairly I thought because they had surely shown true anarchist tendencies by taking over a pitch left vacant by someone who had booked his site but, also in true anarchist fashion, hadn’t bothered to turn up.
Yet in many ways, the anarchists seem quite conformist. Despite the venue’s air conditioning failures and a number of other nigglesome complaints, the ‘organisers’ are not contemplating moving. The venue owners were even described by Alex, one of the bookfair collective’s newest members, as being very helpful. “They seem quite cool, they aren’t freaked out by us or the fight last year,” he is quoted as saying. Now what kind of anarchist bookfair was it this year if there weren’t a fight? Shame on them.
I think I’ll stick to the laws – well, most of them. After all, avoiding all laws seems far more difficult.
Neil Everitt
Editor