Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (98 page)

On the other hand, anarchism made little inroads in the British labour movement. Despite the anti-political example of Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, syndicalism developed late in Britain and failed to win over the reformist trade union movement. In
The Industrial Syndicalist
(1911), Guy Bowman, Tom Mann and his comrades tried to encourage the formation of unions on the model of the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and argued for workers’ control as opposed to the State nationalisation of industry. Tom Mann advocated class war and a revolutionary workers’ movement ‘because it will refuse to enter into any long agreements with masters, whether with legal or State backing, or merely voluntarily; and because it will seize every chance of fighting for the general betterment - gaining ground and never losing any’.
²³
These ideas influenced the Irish labour militant James Larkin at the time.

The strongly libertarian pamphlet
The Miners’ Next Step
(1912) published anonymously in South Wales by Noah Ablett and others, rejected the notion of leadership - ‘all leaders become corrupt despite their own good intentions’ - and called for the unions to become cells of the new society with branches having supreme control and the executive being a purely administrative body.
²⁴
Another group associated with the
The Syndicalist
(1912) was more directly anarcho-syndicalist in inspiration and stressed the need for greater decentralization. Its chief spokesman was Guy Bowman who was influenced by the French CGT. But British syndicalism remained a minority movement and waned after the First World War.
²⁵

The anarchist movement proper lost its way at the turn of the century, although some anarchists involved themselves in communities like Clousden Hill near Newcastle and Whiteway in the Cotswolds. The First World led to a split between the minority who like Kropotkin supported the allies and those who opposed the war. Despite Guy Aldred’s brave efforts in journals entitled
The Herald of Revolt
and
Spur
, he had little effect on the
working class. By 1924 the anarchist movement in Britain was in disarray.
Freedom
was discontinued in 1927. Only some pockets of working-class anarchists remained, mainly in London,- Sheffield, South Wales and Glasgow.

It was not until the Spanish Civil War that the anarchist movement began to revive again.
Spain and the World
, edited by Vernon Richards, came out in 1936 and helped revitalize the Freedom Press. Marie-Louise Berneri, the daughter of Camillo, soon collaborated on the journal. It was succeeded by
Revolt!
in 1939. During the war the Freedom Press group brought out
War Commentary
, resulting in the arrest in 1944 and imprisonment in 1945 of the editors John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom for spreading disaffection in the army.
²⁶
A new generation of intellectuals became involved in anarchism, including John Cowper Powys, Ethel Mannin, Herbert Read, Augustus John, and George Woodcock. Woodcock was associated with Freedom Press during and after the war. He edited the literary journal
Now
, wrote about syndicalism and posed the alternative
Anarchy or Chaos
(1944). He subsequently went to Canada where he became a respected man of letters, continuing to write anarchist biography and history. During and after the war Alex Comfort also wrote articles for Freedom Press.

There was a gradual revival of anarchism in the fifties in Britain before the rise of the New Left. Anarchists became influential in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, especially in the Committee of One Hundred. But the nature of the anarchist movement had changed. In 1944 the Freedom Group withdrew from the Anarchist Federation of Great Britain when it was taken over by syndicalists, who in 1954 renamed it the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation. Despite the publication of
Direct Action
, they made few inroads amongst their chosen constituency. In a 1960 survey by
Freedom
the majority of readers were professionals and only fifteen per cent were workers.
²⁷

In the sixties Colin Ward edited the remarkable journal
Anarchy
which attracted contributions from a wide range of libertarian writers including Alan Sillitoe, Adrian Mitchell and George Melly. With much insight, Ward has been concerned
with Anarchy in Action
(1973) in fields as diverse as town planning, housing, education and allotments. Like Landauer, he wishes to create new relationships and institutions in the shell of the old society. Nicolas Walter has written persuasively
About Anarchism
(1969), edited many anarchist classics and been deeply involved in anti-militarist and humanist activities. For many decades the thoughtful centre of anarchism in Britain has remained the Freedom Press, formed over a century ago by Kropotkin and his friends, which continues anarchist education through its journals and publications.

In academic circles, Michael Taylor has recently developed an anarchist critique of the liberal State, using arguments drawn from modern logic and political theory. In
Anarchy and Co-operation
(1976), he argued cogently that social order exists in inverse proportion to the development of the State, and went on in
Community, Anarchy, and Liberty
(1982) to maintain that anarchy as a stateless social order can only exist in a stable community with a rough equality of material conditions.

The minor revolutionary trend in British anarchism has been kept alive by anarchists like Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer who have been associated with the paper
Black Flag
and have adopted a class-war form of anarchism which calls for
The Floodgates of Anarchy
(1970) to be opened. In the early seventies, the Angry Brigade revived old terrorist images of anarchism, although none of its members were identified as anarchists.

Anarchy in Britain not only permeated youth culture towards the end of the sixties, a time of student sit-ins and squatting, but spilled into the seventies in the alternative movement of communes and co-operatives. Anarchists played a vital role in the ‘counter-culture’, seeing anarchism not merely as a system of beliefs but a way of living. They adapted their dress and manner to their politics, and sought to create new free institutions. A whole alternative network developed amongst so-called ‘hippies’ and ‘travellers’ who wanted to be left alone to live their own lives. A recognizable culture of resistance to the State emerged from the world of free festivals, city gigs, fanzines, squats, and food co-ops, and around ancient sites like Glastonbury and Stonehenge. Conflict with the authorities and owners of private property reached a head in the battle of Stonehenge in 1985 when police prevented the ‘Peace Convoy’ from celebrating the summer solstice. The ecological tendency of the movement is expressed in the
Green Anarchist
which sees industrialization destroying the planet and urbanization encouraging crime and despair. In their place, it calls for the creation of autonomous self-sufficient villages where all can have a roof over their heads and work the land.

Towards the end of the seventies, there was an explosion of anarchistic attitudes and symbols amongst the urban youth in the form of punk. When the Sex Pistols’ anthem
Anarchy in the UK
stormed the charts in 1977, anarchy and punk were indissolubly connected: ‘I am an anarchist/I am Antichrist’ shrieked Johnny Rotten. ‘No Future’ they proclaimed. God and State, work and sex, home and family - all the lynchpins of bourgeois living they demolished, one by one; all condemned as bad jokes in the still better joke of the music. Johnny Rotten styled himself an anarchist, and their first four singles consciously or unconsciously echoed - some say turned into music - the rebellion. Yet it was not entirely a new phenomenon. The band’s graphic artist Jamie Reid and their manager Malcolm McLaren were
certainly aware of the theories and stunts of the Situationists whose influence had been felt in British art colleges in the late sixties and in the popular music scene in the seventies. Rotten himself became the medium for an ancient libertarian instinct of which he was only dimly aware.
²⁸

Anarchy gave punk its shock tactics and do-it-yourself thrust, as a distinctive culture developed around the provocative music, dress and lifestyle. ‘We’re pretty vacant’, the new anti-elite disclaimed, ‘And we don’t care.’ Vivienne Westwood made ageing feminists like Germaine Greer look coy by suggesting that sex gives the establishment the horrors and by urging the young to live out their ‘wildest fantasies to the hilt’. With the revolutionary pacifist band Crass, anarcho-punk became more serious in 1979; their commune in the Epping Forest linked such experiments of the sixties with the eighties. The Clash further evoked modern British alienation in ‘Lost in the Supermarket’ in denouncing the special offer of ‘guaranteed personality’. The Mekons, The Slits, X-ray Spex and Subway Sect continued the musical subversion.

The ‘acid house’ scene of the late eighties and early nineties, in which youth take over temporarily empty buildings for a rave, is less overtly political but still confounds the elders, those who man the State institutions, who have consistently proved psychologically unable to allow youngsters a freedom to let themselves ago, to relinquish their given authority over them. Inspired by the Situationists and anarchist theory, another post-punk anti-authoritarian tendency emerged in the late 1980s around the ‘Free University’ collective in Scotland, and from journals like
Smile, Here and Now
and the more scholarly
Edinburgh Review.
Much of the new libertarian writing is in the Ranter and Dadaist tradition of poetic declamation. It fuses fact and fiction, history and myth, and opposes the primitive to the civilized. Rather than resorting to agit-prop, it tries to politicize culture and transform everyday life.

The most popular anarchist tendency in the eighties has been the Class War Federation. While it shares some of the shock tactics and ‘fuck-off graphics of punk, the similarity stops there. While making a broad assault on culture, Class War still seeks the ‘destruction of the ruling class by the working class’. Its principal line, developed by Ian Bone and other middle-class organizers, has been to urge its followers indiscriminately to have a go at bashing the rich and taking on authority.
²⁹
Class War members (and fellow travellers) were prominent in the ‘Stop the City’ of London campaign in 1984, and in the Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square of March 1990. Both inspired the British press to raise again the spectre of the ‘anarchist menace’. Being the most populist and violent of the recent anarchist groupings, they have attracted fascistic elements who are more interested in a brawl than the creation of free institutions.

Other strands within British anarchism have been kept alive by the syndicalist Direct Action Movement which re-formed in 1979 and seeks independent organization in the workplace and ‘a system where workers alone control industry and its community’. Some claim that the tiny Socialist Party of Great Britain was anarchist in inspiration. The Anarchist Communist Federation, who were also prominent in what they call the ‘Battle of Trafalgar Square’ during the Poll Tax riots, demand the ‘abolition of all hierarchy, and work for the creation of a worldwide classless society’. Like Class War, they have little to do with industrial union politics, but they are aware of the subtleties of the anarchist tradition.
Solidarity
and
Peace News
call for libertarian socialism and non-violent revolt respectively. Some anarchists are active in the growing animal liberation movement, arguing that freedom should not be restricted merely to the human species.

The most recent development in Britain, as in other advanced industrial societies, has been to recognize the anarchist possibilities inherent in capitalism’s reliance on computers. This not only involves computer hacking (breaking into computers to steal or alter data), but in creating alternative information networks. As the black flag of anarchy flies from London’s fashionable West End to the ancient hills of Stonehenge, the new black chip moles away in the most automated offices of the city.

The new century sees anarchism alive and kicking in Britain and back in the news. Anarchists have been prominent in the anti-war and anti-globalization movements, sections of which organize themselves on anarchist lines and engage in direct action.

T
HERE
HAS
OF
COURSE
been a long libertarian tradition in the United States. The early settlers came to escape religious persecution, and from the beginning were hostile to any form of government and were fiercely jealous of their personal independence. As early as 1636 Roger Williams was arguing that forced belief was ‘soul-rape’ and that each person must have the liberty to ‘try all things’.
¹
At the same time Anne Hutchinson asserted that the godly were no longer sanctified by obligations to law but were purified by the covenant of grace, ‘the indwelling of the spirit’.