Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE FINAL YEARS 189

the womb of the old order. Yet many of those liberterians and socialists who have realised that genuine change can come only from below have failed to move much beyond the depiction of the new age yet to be achieved and vague moral injunctions to individuals to change themselves in preparation for ‘heaven on earth”?! Others have become preoccupied with living the liberated life for themselves, without confronting the fact that such ‘advance posts’ of a free cooperative society will remain isolated prefigurative experiments unless there are also structural changes in the political and economic systems. This was clearly realised by Mitrinovi¢. Whilst at different periods in his life his prime focus of concern shifted, he never lost sight of the fact that the new realm of existence for which he worked could never be realised without the transcendence of such obstacles as the state leviathan and the private ownership of the means of production. The programme of the New Britain movement—with its emphasis on workers’ control in the sphere of production, the utmost geographical and functional devolution and decentralisation of decision-making power, the radical overhaul of the financial and monetary system—addressed problems that are as pressing today as they were in the 1930s, indeed more so.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century we find the individual reduced to a state of passivity and helplessness before the technically aggrandised machinery of the corporate state in the West and the massive impersonal bureaucracies of the state ‘socialist’ countries. In the West we see the maintenance of permanent inequality in the guise of equal opportunity, whilst in the Eastern block the human needs of individual freedom and creativity are ignored and stifled in defence of ideological orthodoxy and in favour of industrial and technological development. The working out of the opposition between the two great historical movements of liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism has resulted in them approaching a point of convergence: societies characterised by hierarchical control, powerless and atomised individuals living under centralised states engaged in global imperialism and the destruction of nature—each threatening to bring about the final annihilation of humanity through their participation in the criminal nuclear arms race. The need for a ‘third way, ‘above and between’ these two historical forces is greater than ever before. Bakunin once observed that “freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice . . . Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality,”2? suggesting the need for a synthesis that could hold in some kind of dynamic tension the liberal values of individual freedom, autonomy and pluralism and the socialist values of economic equality, cooperation and mutual aid. For many in Britain in the 1930s the New Britain movement represented such a third way. The ideas and insights that