By Terry Liddle
Anarchist Ideas And Counter-Cultures In Britain, 1880-1914. Matthew Thomas, Ashgate Publishing Limited, £47.50 ISBN 0 7546 4084 1
When Thomas Paine wrote: “that government is best which governs least” he was expressing an idea later held by anarchists who believed that the government is best which doesn’t govern at all. Unlike Spain, where in the 1930s the CNT/FAI was a mass working class movement, Anarchism in Britain has always been a minority within the Socialist Minority. However, its history is nonetheless interesting and Mr Thomas sets out to explore in some depth the history of British Anarchism from the revival of interest in Socialism in the 1880s to the outbreak of World War in 1914.
Mr Thomas sees the event, which sparked off the rise of Anarchism in Britain as the result of a defence campaign of the German Anarchist editor Johann Most who was being threatened with prosecution by the British government. In the East End of London, these people formed the Labour Emancipation League. The LEL had affiliated to Henry Hyndman’s Socialist Democratic Federation and when it split, the LEL went into the Socialist League of William Morris. The relationship between Morris and the Anarchists in the Socialist League was always difficult particularly when some advocated “propaganda by deed”. Foolishly, the Anarchists removed Morris from his job as editor of the SL paper Commonweal which without him went into decline.
In 1886, the Russian Anarchist Peter Kropotkin came to live in Britain and founded the paper Freedom, which is still published. In East London, large numbers of Jews found refuge from Tsarism and they published Arbeter Fraint, a Yiddish language Anarchist paper.
Mr Thomas next looks at attempts by Anarchists to educate themselves other than through the state-provided system. In East London, the 13-year-old Nellie Ploschansky set up a Sunday School in the Anarchist club premises in Jubilee Street and this despite the opposition of the local Rabbi. It is interesting just how young some of the Anarchists were. When the Rossetti sisters set up an Anarchist paper The Torch, one was 16 and the other 13. Amongst the educational material available was a poem by William Morris. There were other Socialist Sunday Schools too, the first being set up by Mary Gray of the SDF in 1892. The socialist educationalist Margaret McMillan used these schools as a forum for her advanced ideas. Classes in Esperanto, which was seen as a future international language were popular. One is, of course, reminded of the later work of AS Neill at Summerhill.
The Anarchists not only set up schools they also tried to establish self-managed communities, little islands of libertarian socialism in a vast ocean of capitalism. The failure of an earlier generation of followers of Utopian socialists such as Fourier and Owen to establish such communities should have been a dire warning. Some of these communities were influenced by the religious ideas of Tolstoy. It is debatable if Tolstoy can really be considered an Anarchist. Other communities had their roots in such religious bodies such as the pacifist Croydon Brotherhood Church. The numbers involved in such communities were small and some socialists saw them as a diversion from the class struggle. Some tried to set up not agricultural communities but urban producer co-operatives. It was probably inevitable that such enterprises would fail. In the 1960s, there were again attempts to establish such communities and again they would mostly fail.
The next two chapters are devoted to Anarchism in the world of labour looking firstly at the new unionism amongst the unskilled such as dockers in the late 19th century and anarcho-syndicalism in the early part of the 20th century. Some of the ideas impacting on Socialists in this period, the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1903, were those of the American Marxist Daniel DeLeon rather than those of European Anarcho-Syndicalism which would be so influential in Spain and France.
The American Industrial Workers of the World were also influential at this time and there were various attempts to set up a British IWW. Various approaches to this question were taken by various individuals such as Guy Aldred who tried to combine Marx and Bakunin
Tom Mann, once a leading light in the ILP, set up an Industrial Syndicalist Education League. He would end up in the Communist Party along with many members of the SLP.
The penultimate chapter looks at Anarchist ideas on the politics of gender. Because it advocated the franchise, Anarchists were critical of the Suffragette movement. However, it should be noted that Sylvia Pankhurst’s group which became the Workers’ Socialist Federation would share many of the Anarchists’ criticisms of the outcome of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Many of the questions of relations between the sexes and the place of women in society are still very much live issues.
In his final chapter, Mr Thomas draws his conclusions stating that Anarchism deserves more consideration than has hitherto been the case. The book is not without problems. JW Gott’s The Truthseeker publishing a discussion on Nietzsche does not make it anything like an Anarchist paper. Also Mr Thomas should know better than to misquote the title of Dan Chatterton’s paper twice.
It is almost inevitable that Mr Thomas’s book will be compared with John Quail’s The Slow Burning Fuse (1978). I think that Quail’s book, while it has less information, is written with much more sympathy with its subject. Also, Quail’s book was a cheap paperback. The high price of this book is more likely to keep it in the hands of academics, whose main interest in political movements is furthering their careers, rather than in those of today’s generation of political activists who could make better use of the information it contains.