One of my favorite anarchists died recently.  That would be Colin Ward (1924-2010).  The journal, Anarchist Studies, is dedicating  a special issue in Autumn 2011 to his work and legacy.  The volume 18, number 10 issue of that same journal has a tribute to him written by David Goodway.  I want to quote from it here and then in a later post I'll give a Ward quote from his essay Harmony Through Complexity.

" . . . His  third book, Anarchy in Action (1973), was his only work on the theory of anarchism, and indeed the only one 'directly and specifically about anarchism' until his final publication, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2004).  In Anarchy in Action he makes entirely explicit his highly original anarchism ( even if, as he always acknowledged, much indebted to Kropotkin and Landauer).  The opening words have been much quoted: 'Th argument of this book is that an anarchist society,  a society that organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like  a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism'.  His kind of anarchism, 'far from being a speculative vision of a future society . . . is a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trend of our society'."