[Applause]
I’m going to try to convince you of
something today which I think will be
difficult I shall probably fail in that
endeavor not least because I think often
we need some kind of crisis to make
ourselves think differently about the
world to look at it afresh and throw
away our preconceptions and I say that
because I had a crisis myself to go
through that process in my favor is the
fact that I think we may be in a period
of crisis right now certainly an
environmental crisis an economic crisis
of a concentration of wealth in the
hands of a few and of course a political
crisis which is all too evident in the
rise of populism nationalism society
divided against itself my own crisis
happened 15 years ago I used to believe
in the Western model I used to believe
that free markets lightly regulated were
the best way to bring wealth and
flourish allow everybody to flourish I
used to believe that small groups of
people representing the whole so-called
representative democracy was the best
way to govern the best way to bring
peace stability to our society I was
once a member of that small group I was
a British diplomat I worked on many
things I ended up working on Iraq and
its chemical biological and nuclear
weapons my crisis came to a head when I
realized my government had been telling
lies about the things that I had worked
on I ended up testifying in secret to an
official inquiry into the war and after
great personal torment and anguish I
decided to resign from the British
Foreign Office but my crisis had been
building for some time before that
as a diplomat I had been writing
speeches for my ambassadors and for my
foreign secretary telling the world how
we had it under control how government
could manage the world the problems in
front of us we could fix them but when I
looked out of my window I saw something
different
I saw inequality rising I saw the
concentration of carbon in the
atmosphere increasing rapidly
I saw particular after 9/11 which I
witnessed I saw growing instability and
what seems to be now perpetual war so
that summer of 2003 I sat back a little
lost and I tried to figure it out
in government we had a tendency to place
patterns upon the world and seek the
evidence to justify those patterns the
opposite if you like of scientific
method worse people believed us in a
sense we were making it up so what I
tried to do was go out to the world and
look at it afresh what was actually
going on and start from that and try to
derive an economics and politics from
those observations what do we see in the
world we see billions of actors in a
constant process of action and reaction
and counter reaction it is not it is not
order it is not chaos it is something in
between this is the definition of a
complex system of complexity I read and
read one night I was sitting with my
little daughter at about 3:00 in the
morning she was awake we were watching
pay TV on our sofa and there was an
advert for a course in complexity theory
and I looked at the the advert and I
thought that looks interesting I bought
the bought the course complexity theory
tells us a number of things about the
world first of all it’s impossible to
understand the complex system from the
top down it’s constantly dynamic there
are far too many moving pieces if you
take a snapshot of it at one moment it’s
already changed
this means it’s very difficult to
understand that system none of us can
truly understand it let alone a
government looking from the top trying
to manage that system it makes it very
very difficult if not impossible to
manage this means for one thing that
change is unpredictable in that system
if you pull a lever at one end of the
system as a government might with a
policy you can’t predict the outcome at
the other end of that system of what
that policy might produce it’s
unpredictable but by contrast also in
such a system change can come from an
individual agent or a small group of
agents in fact they may they may be the
most effective motor of change rather
than a great big government we’re used
to thinking we have to be big but in
fact we can be very small a single agent
in a complex system can trigger change
when that complex system is primed for
change so called criticality it can
trick a single agent agent contributor
if you think of Mohammed Aziz for
example the young man in Tunisia whose
singular act of setting fire to himself
brought revolution in Tunisia and across
the Arab world the Arab Spring but also
counter-reaction repression in Egypt and
of course mass murder by the Assad
regime in Syria this is a different
model of change in complex systems it is
impossible to create stability from the
top-down in fact if you try to control
that system to create order you are as
likely to create disorder at the end but
in a complex system order is plausible
it is feasible through the actions of
individual agents us individuals
cooperating together collaborating to
create things to organize ourselves to
organize our society it’s a deeper more
endemic inherent order I would suggest
more resilient when I realize this about
complexity in the world
I suddenly realized that what it means
of course
that changes up to us we can no longer
look to others authority to do things
for us when I realize this I found it
profoundly upsetting it turned my model
of politics literally on its head I was
very angry shhhht by this revelation and
the more I read the more I realized that
in fact others had come to these
conclusions earlier in the 19th century
and this philosophy had a name and I
realized that by deduction rather than
by conviction
I had actually come to believe almost by
accident in anarchism Emma Goldman the
likes of pyotr Kropotkin in russia 19th
century anarchist believed that you
could only have government for the
people when it was by the people they
rejected communism and I think if they
were around today they would argue that
anarchism is more relevant than ever and
I would suggest to you that it is in
fact essential if we’re going to solve
the problems in front of us but what is
well first of all anarchism doesn’t tell
us that things will be able all right in
the end both communism and capitalism
have in common this idea that it’s all
going to be okay if we keep doing it we
go through the pain now eventually it’s
going to be good for everybody
anarchism doesn’t pretend that it
doesn’t offer a blueprint for a utopian
society which by the way is inherently
fascistic anarchism is a process it is
action it is collaboration with people
without power without people having
power over one another collaboration as
equals everybody included in
decision-making it is work unlike voting
though I would I’m sure you agree that
our current political system with
politicians trading simplistic vulgar
slogans about what to do about the world
and electoral politics and partisanship
that seems to be more successfully
dividing us than uniting us
the political system that we have today
is more part of the problem than the
solution anarchists propose instead
direct democracy this means everybody
involved in the decisions that affect
them this was democracy as practiced in
ancient Greece where citizens took it in
turns to take the decisions for the city
but more recently direct democracy has
been practiced by tens of thousands of
people in a large city in Brazil called
porto alegre where thousands of people
took part in debates to decide the
priorities for the city budget after 10
years of this the World Bank of all
people did a study of the results and
the results were extraordinary though
perhaps predictable if you think about
it if you include rich and poor alike in
decision-making the outcomes of those
decisions are going to be more equitable
and sure enough when the World Book Bank
looked at Porto Alegre they found the
things like sanitation health care and
education will were much more fairly
distributed than they had been before
this experiment in participate Rhee
democracy began they also found
interestingly that both politics the
ugly form partisanship and corruption
all dramatically declined which again
makes sense because if politicians are
not allowed secretly to carve up a
budget and pay off their cronies why do
you need political parties at all
you just decide anyway it works this is
a system that has been proven it’s not a
wild idea anak ISM isn’t chaos people
think oh it’s just means you know
everything a free-for-all is not that at
all at all but you can’t have a fair
politics when power and wealth is
concentrated in the hands of a few the
wealthy those already with wealth and
power will always get access to the
decision-makers they will always be able
to reach those policymakers more easily
than the rest of us you have to create a
fairer economy anarchists do not propose
state ownership as the answer they
propose instead that everybody who
contributes to an enterprise should be a
beneficiary of that enterprise they
should be an owner of that enterprise
they should have a say in the future of
their enterprise this is of course the
co-operative model and again it works
Spain’s 10 10th largest company is a
conglomerate a cooperative called
Mondragon in Britain it’s
longest-lasting retail store was founded
when the family owner of a collection of
stores realized that his family was
worth more and was earning more than all
of the company’s employees put together
disgusted he turned the company John
Lewis into a co-operative this happened
when he was lying in bed injured after a
horse riding accident his own kind of
rupture I’ve seen these models work in
small villages in neighborhoods of New
York City in cities big cities also in a
remarkable region of eastern Syria
called rojava where after the collapse
of the Assad regime they have
implemented self-government from the
bottom up including all ethnicities
races where women are always given
leadership roles chair every meeting
where decisions are made at the lowest
level possible where even in decisions
of justice and wrongdoing they do not
look to authority to make the decisions
to punish they look to the group society
to decide what is best what is the best
this produces something extraordinary
this produces society that is fairer
that is better where there is more
cooperation less division more harmony
more love but this won’t happen on its
own no politician will legislate for
this kind of society to arise it will
have to be built and tended to
it’s not something that we can just
expect to happen through the dialectic
of history and indeed the dialectic of
history tells us that things change
nothing can be taken for granted it’s
pretty clear that the current
dispensation that left is very
comfortable in the late 20th century of
representative democracy and a kind of
capitalism that dispensation is coming
to an end and the question is what will
replace it and it’s pretty clear what
will replace it right now and it’s not
pretty
and unless we act that will continue to
be our future there’s something deeper
here to the conception of the human in
current contemporary Orthodox economics
and politics is of somebody who can’t be
trusted you need governments to set down
rules to coerce them to punish them if
they do wrong it posits the human as
individual consumer materialist somebody
who protects their own rather than
protects their own against the threats
from outside i profoundly believe that
this is a grotesquerie
it’s a travesty of what we are if you
ask the dying soldiers what they will
tell you is that they live for other
people they will sacrifice their lives
for other people in a sense they only
exist in other people so for me
anarchism has become much more than a
merely political or economic philosophy
it’s become a guide to how to live and
with that I’ll sit down and turn the
rest of you
[Applause] [Music]