Chapter 1 : Radicals, Exiles and Socialist Beginnings -------------------------------------------------------------------- People : ---------------------------------- Author : Constance Bantman Author : John Quail Author : Nick Heath Text : ---------------------------------- Chapter 1. RADICALS, EXILES AND SOCIALIST BEGINNINGS Social agitations and working-class movements in the nineteenth century were many, various and contradictory. Certain themes can, however, be picked out. Ever present was the class war in varying degrees of complexity. Certain formal political liberties were struggled for: freedom of speech and press, freedom of assembly and freedom of conscience. The fact that some people’s meetings for their version of freedom were broken up by other people with a different version, or that, say, nonconformists desired freedom from Church of England interference but were in no way prepared to countenance freedom for secularists merely adds charm to the proceedings. There was wide sympathy for nationalist movements of one sort and another and for the Irish particularly; yet British imperialist adventures could count on jingoist crowds turning out in support with monotonous regularity in the latter part of the century. Even the major question of the extension of the franchise meant different things at different times. The Chartists had tried to achieve a sudden rearrangement of political power through the ‘constitutional’ means of manhood suffrage. In effect, however, it was a ‘transitional demand’ — to use Trotsky’s phrase — a demand round which people will mobilize but which would not be granted by the ruling class this side of revolution. And whether the Chartists were of a tendency towards ‘moral force’ or ‘physical force’, manhood suffrage was too revolutionary for the ruling elites. These were, for many decades after 1848, overwhelmingly representative of ancient aristocratic privilege. The slow inclusion of members of the capitalist and professional classes in no way reduced its sense of its exclusive right to rule. Reform when it came seems to have been acceptable because the political elite had decided that the artisan class that it enfranchised, though perhaps under protest, in the 1867 Reform Act did not in any serious way intend to challenge that right. The spirit of the times seems to have been clearly enough illustrated by the cordial relations that existed between the leadership of the skilled ‘New Model’ trades unions and the Radical capitalists of the Liberal Party. This underlined the social stability that increasing prosperity among the working class seemed to have established. That rise in prosperity was real enough: by 1865 real wages were 20 per cent up on 1850, and 33 per cent up on 1850 by 1875. For all this, it is worth pointing out that Booth in his surveys at the end of the 1880s found that fully one-third of the population was living below a most stringent subsistence line. The misery, degradation and disease at the bottom of the social heap is more fully described in other works. Suffice it to say that Doré, who illustrated Dante’s Inferno, found the subject a comparable challenge. Nevertheless the sense of increasing prosperity was real in the 1860s as was the sense of stability that went with it. And while this reduced the element of insurrection founded in misery in working-class politics it heightened the sense of self-importance. Prosperity was seen as the wages of worth, and it was more readily assumed that just demands would be met, one such demand being for an extended franchise. The Chartist spirit had by no means disappeared: in London in May 1866 a demonstration calling for electoral reform turned into a riot which involved, among other things, the destruction of over a mile of railings from round Hyde Park. But the sense of demands made and met undoubtedly bound together the social groups whose place it was to ask with the groups whose place it was to give. Although a more deep-seated spirit of revolt might exist among members of the First International or groups of old Chartists, it is nevertheless true that the activity connected with the possibilities opened up by the 1867 Reform Act took little note of it. This (self-named) Radical activity was not based on a socialist politics. In its extreme forms its enemies were the aristocracy and others who benefited by unearned income and ancient privilege like the Church of England clergy and the royal family. (There was a considerable undertow of republicanism and secularism in Radical circles.) Radicals were frequently small businessmen or artisans who could become such by employing a few men. They tended to respond most readily to an analysis which divided society into two parts: the productive classes (i.e. masters and men) and the unproductive classes in the shape of the aristocracy, Church, etc. For the most part the Radicals aimed at cutting down the influence of the unproductive classes by reform rather than by the guillotine. It was certainly in a spirit of reform rather than revolution that the Radicals began to take advantage of their new influence after 1867. This coincided and is connected with a rapid growth in the number of independent workingmen’s clubs which sprang up all over England but which were particularly important in London. It had already been noticed that “The working classes, alike physically and politically, are now a very important power in the State. Their relations both to their employers and to the country at large are full of grave responsibility for the future of the country.”[2] The Club and Institute Union set up in 1862 had been designed to encourage wholesome pursuits among the working class; and on a program of temperance, class collaboration and decorum had gained many philanthropic upper-class patrons. From this source had stemmed a number of well-appointed, highly subsidized and tightly controlled clubs. In the late 1860s and 1870s, however, working men began to organize their own clubs, sometimes to escape into a more easy-going atmosphere without patronage and sometimes for more directly political reasons. Among clubs founded for the latter can be included the Commonwealth Club in Bethnal Green established on the initiative of John Hales and the Patriotic Club in Clerkenwell similarly served by Tom Mottershead. Both these men had been members of the General Council of the First International, and John Hales was to stand at one point as a Radical candidate. When the Metropolitan Radical Federation was established, the independent clubs were the branches. At the height of their influence in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Radicals had a relationship with the Liberal Party amounting to an alliance of which they were the left wing. But as time went by they were absorbed and by the 1890s “became a mere appendage of the Liberal Party, putting forward or supporting Liberal candidates in elections for the School Boards, the Borough Councils and the L.C.C. Instead of capturing the Liberal Party for Radicalism it provided it with election fodder and carried out election chores.”[3] Yet in the period before Radical independence faded, the clubs provided centers of political discussion and self-education which both contributed to the development of the new socialism of the 1880s and provided it with an audience. The new ideas made some headway among the Radicals: by the end of the 1880s an informant of Booth’s described the typical Sunday of a member of the Borough of Hackney Radical Club — which allegedly had more influence in the Borough than any religious body — as follows: “He goes to the club in the morning about 11, sits with a pot in front of him and froths at the mouth over all kinds of socialistic rot; then he has a band which finishes up by playing the Marseillaise; in the afternoon he goes round and visits other clubs and there is more frothing of the mouth and of the pot.”[4] So socialism was to creep in and influence the Radical rank and file. But in one sense it had always been there, although as a submerged and sometimes only just discernible tradition which can be traced back through the century, from Robert Owen, various sects like the Spencean Philanthropists, sections of the Chartists and so on. Examples pop up from time to time in the present book. In the 1860s and 1870s this tradition was continued through individuals who were a part of the Radical milieu. It is clear, however, from the limited work that has been done that from the collapse of the International in the early 1870s to the development of the new socialism of the 1880s continuity was preserved, as we shall see, by small but more decisively socialist groups. Of anarchist groups there is no trace, though anarchist individuals can be found from time to time. Of the socialist groups that existed in the 1870s, some were influenced by what was, at base, a more militant Radicalism, though with more emphasis on physical force. Some were influenced by theories of the mutual antagonism of capital and labor. Some socialists put this view in the context of traditional aspirations towards parliamentary representation, thus providing the earliest apostles of a party of labor (or Labor Party). Others preserved the element of physical force, opposed parliamentary activity and argued that the working-class struggle for emancipation would, of necessity, have to be revolutionary. It was to libertarians of this shade of opinion that anarchism was later to appeal, not in a vacuum but to an already developed set of ideas and to a body of self-confident and active men. The specific and developed theories of anarchist mutualism, collectivism and communism were really only taken up by English people in the 1880s; yet foreign anarchist exiles in England before this time could and did find areas of mutual understanding with sections of the British socialist movement. How this understanding developed and where it led can perhaps be most immediately demonstrated in the lives of individuals, though we should beware of possible distortions. These men were prominent rather than preeminent. Frank Kitz was born in 1848, the son of an English mother and a German father — though he seems to have been orphaned early because he was later to describe himself as “a fatherless lad.”[5] From an early age he lived alone, as his mother found work ‘in service’ — i.e. as a domestic servant. “I supported myself,” he wrote later, as errand boy, porter and messenger in various situations: ill-shod, badly clothed, and seldom enjoying a square meal except when my mother smuggled me into her employer’s kitchen … I decorated the walls of my lonely room with pictures of the French Revolution which I purchased out of my scanty earnings. Brought up in the neighborhood of the West End with the evidence of wealth and luxury confronting me — wealth unearned, comfort undeserved — and with my own undeserved hardships, I needed no lectures upon surplus value or dissertations upon economics to cause me to challenge the justice of a system which confers wealth upon the parasites of society and clouds the lives of thousands as it had already clouded mine with care and poverty. As a boy he “attended every meeting or demonstration held by the advanced movement in London. In the riot at Hyde Park,” he writes, “at the time of the Reform League [i.e. 1866] my white printer’s jacket made me conspicuous in the skirmishes with the police and only my nimbleness saved me from arrest. The police behaved with their usual brutality …” He was by this time apprenticed as a dyer, which was to be his trade for the rest of his life. When his apprenticeship was finished in 1869–1870 he went on the tramp, first round south-east England where he financed himself when no work was available by taking the Queen’s shilling [the traditional down payment on joining the army] and then rapidly disappearing. He then traveled through the north of England. “Here I found everywhere the same conditions — the factory with its iron discipline, the mazes of mean streets and insanitary slums for the workers, the enslavement of women and children.” He returned to London and settled in Soho in late 1873 or early 1874. It was here that he was introduced by a friend to a discussion group called the Democratic and Trades Alliance which met regularly in a pub run by a shoemaker who had been blacklisted for his trades union activity. “Becoming a regular attender at these meetings,” writes Kitz, “I there became acquainted with G. Odger, John Rogers, G. Milner, W. Townshend, the brothers Murray, G. Harris and G. Eccarius, all members of the lately defunct British Federation of the International. … Most of the members were Soho tailors and shoemakers, always the most advanced among the workers. … There I made my first attempt to open a debate, reading a paper against political action and was sat on heavily and informed that I would never be a speaker and not to try again …”[6] It is to be noted that Kitz’s first speech was to be against political — that is, electoral — activity. And Kitz is being too modest here. Whatever the reactions to his first speech it does not seem to have affected his standing among this ‘steadfast old guard’. He is first mentioned as taking part in a debate on communism in August 1874. In September he took the chair at a meeting — a position of some prestige. By December of that year he had been elected secretary. But there were disagreements within the alliance: “We had our conflicts with the purely Trades Unionist members, who, when our foreign comrades solicited our help [for a celebration of the Paris Commune] opposed cooperation. The bills announcing the celebration (and brave bills they were, with the Red Flag printed upon them) were removed from the club room notice board. The brothers Murray who represented our speaking power at the time, went unofficially to help them. Eventually we shed this fossilized element, shifted our quarters and blossomed out as the Manhood Suffrage League.” This organization was founded in 1875 and Frank Kitz was its secretary. Although the League was more to the left than its predecessor, its members were by no means all revolutionaries: “Moderate men can be found on its committee as well as extremists, and on Sunday evenings this dialectic was strongly apparent. It was always an open forum and meetings could vary considerably in their political tone. “The most advanced politicals in London were among the members … but the discussion was wide open and the most moderate views could sometimes prevail …”[7] One measure of the differences between the League and its predecessor, however, lies in the more positive attitude to the Paris Commune which caused the League to come into being. Fairly advanced Radicals like Bradlaugh, for example, balked at the ‘unconstitutional’ nature of the Commune. He was reported as saying in a speech that “The Commune asked for the recognition and consolidation of the Republic. But he denied their right to do it by force of arms …” Radicals might be sickened at the slaughter — some 30,000 people were massacred when the Commune was crushed — but for them the Commune was not a heroic beginning of a new world. The Manhood Suffrage League thought differently. Kitz writes: “Freed from obstruction and opposition, we cordially cooperated with our foreign comrades in holding an international meeting at the Cleveland Hall to celebrate the Commune. It was a most enthusiastic demonstration and marked the beginning of the revival” (i.e. of socialism). A large number of English working men attended. But whether because of the incomplete commitment to revolution of the League or the pressure of new ventures, by 1877 Kitz was no longer secretary of the Manhood Suffrage League. He mentions no particular break in his memoirs, so it is likely that he retained a connection with it that gradually atrophied over the years. Certainly by 1877 Kitz was working for the formation of a specifically socialist, revolutionary and internationalist movement in London. The international element was important. As he says, “the socialist movement in England owes its origins largely to the propagandist zeal of foreign workmen.”[8] More specifically, they were German exiles. Kitz spoke fluent German and was in close contact with them. The Social Democratic Party was growing in Germany and was an increasingly influential example internationally. It should not be assumed, however, that ‘social democracy’ meant then what it means now. Kitz was committed to revolutionary rather than electoral action and by his use of the phrase he clearly meant a revolutionary democratic socialism. The distinction was between a total social democracy and a partial political democracy. At that time ‘social democracy’ was not reducible to parliamentary reformism. There had been German political refugees in London since the events of 1848, one of the better known of them being Karl Marx. For the most part these refugees were men mostly “past middle age and already longstanding members of some English trade union or another …”[9] and their meetings were mainly social affairs where politics were discussed as part of a pleasant chat over a drink. There was, however, a steady influx of younger men with more activist tendencies. This influx was to turn into a flood as a result of the German Anti-Socialist Laws; yet the quickening of the German political atmosphere to which these Laws were something of a response had already affected the German exiles by 1877. One consequence was that at an informal gathering after the Cleveland Hall meeting Kitz describes how he was “urged by my comrade Johann Neve” (of whom more later) “to form an English section of the Socialist party. I succeeded in getting together a number of comrades including those of the British Federation whom I have already referred to and thus was started an English Revolutionary Society, which, working with the foreign element was to take its part in the International Socialist movement …” This English Revolutionary Society was a part of the Social Democratic Club, which met in pubs in Soho from its foundation in August 1877 until it found permanent premises in Rose Street (now Manette Street) in 1878. There were some five sections according to nationality, with Frank Kitz as secretary of the English section. The move to club premises was important because now discussion and organization could go ahead without the interference of landlords; and without the expense of hired rooms, says Kitz, “we were enabled to hold public meetings with greater frequency.”[10] When a wave of refugees arrived in London from Germany after the passage of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1878, the Rose Street club became a central point for defense and aid. The general publicity given to the Laws also attracted attention to the thing they were designed to repress. “Shortly after this influx of refugees,” writes Kitz, “the sections jointly issued a pamphlet by J. Sketchley, entitled The Principles of Social Democracy thus taking advantage of the interest awakened. … Many thousands of this pamphlet were sold, the German section bearing the major portion of the cost, in order to aid propaganda among our own working class. The English section undertook the reissue of two pamphlets on communism by H. Glasse; they also published an address to the amnestied Communists of Paris and 50,000 copies of this leaflet were distributed …”[11] (Sketchley, incidentally, was an old Chartist.) In order to understand the reasons for and the consequences of the Anti-Socialist Laws it is necessary to explain in more detail what was happening in Germany in this period. A German anarchist movement had existed since the mid-1870s.[12] Their propaganda was spread by wandering agitators and smuggled newspapers. It was a small movement, in isolation, yet it began to have some influence on the left wing of the Social Democratic Party. This influence grew because of the anomalous position of the party. It was rapidly increasing the number of seats it held in the Reichstag (and displaying all the tendencies towards respectability which such positions seem to entail). On the other hand, however, even a majority of seats held by the SDP in the Reichstag would have given it no real power. The Reichstag was able, under the constitution, only to advise the Kaiser and his Chancellor; and the latter were able to ignore this advice, constrained only by a wish to preserve the forms of government by consent. The extent to which the anarchists began to have influence among the party’s left wing was the extent to which it began to see that even quite modest reforms might only be achievable by revolutionary means. Yet there was no revolutionary turbulence among the German workers, as the general lack of response to revolutionary propaganda seemed to prove. At this time the anarchists were developing ideas as to how such working-class passivity could be overcome. It was suggested that a new kind of propaganda was needed, a propaganda of deeds rather than words. Kropotkin, for example, writing at about this time, asked what separated “the argument from the deed, the thought from the will to act.” He answered his own question by saying: “It is the action of minorities, action continued, renewed without ceasing, which brings about this transformation. Courage, devotion, the spirit of self sacrifice are as contagious as cowardice, submission and panic.”[13] And he goes on to say that this action will be “sometimes collective, sometimes purely individual” but that it would neglect no “means at hand … to awaken audacity and the spirit of revolt by preaching by example.” This preaching by example was later to be better known as ‘propaganda by deed’. The theory of propaganda by deed seemed to invite the most spectacular actions and in Germany it led to two attempts on the life of the Kaiser. In May 1878, Emil Hödel, and in June of the same year Carl Nobiling, shot at the Kaiser as he was driven through the streets in an open carriage. Both attempts failed. The failed assassins both had links with known German anarchists and Hödel declared himself an anarchist at his trial. He was beheaded. Nobiling died of self-inflicted wounds. No revolutionary upsurge accompanied these attempts, any such thing being preempted in any case by the frantic reaction of the German authorities. Bismarck, the German Chancellor, irritated by the growing electoral strength of the SDP, constitutionally circumscribed and severely legalistic though it was, seized upon the assassination attempts as an opportunity to smear the party. The result of his efforts was the Anti-Socialist Laws of October 1878. After the second assassination attempt Berlin became an armed camp. All known socialists had their homes raided. Even before the passage of the Laws over 500 people had been arrested and sent to jail for ‘insulting the Kaiser’ or ‘approving’ of the attempts on his life. Some of the cases would have been laughable had it not been for the suffering involved: A drunken man received two and a half years in prison for murmuring “William is dead, he lives no more.” A woman talking about the Emperor’s wounds was sentenced to a year and a half for saying “The Kaiser at least is not poor, he can afford to care for himself.” A worker … while sitting on a bench along Unter den Linden was heard to say that “Hödel is a dumb-bell but Nobiling planned his attempt well.” This slip of his tongue cost him four years of his freedom.[14] The results of the repression were twofold. Firstly, as far as the left-wing socialists were concerned the mask of the democratic process was ripped away to reveal black reaction. Secondly, socialist agitation of any sort was made both doubly difficult and very much more dangerous. A wave of socialist refugees left Germany and many came to London. Frank Kitz described the situation: “Thousands were expatriated, hundreds of families broken up, hundreds imprisoned; seizures and confiscations were the order of the day. Of those torn from their families a number went insane and others were irretrievably ruined; a great number sought refuge in London and our club in Rose Street presented at times the appearance of an arrival or departure platform at a station with luggage and cases of prohibited literature and the bewildered emigrants going to and fro.”[15] The bitterness caused by the repression and the Anti-Socialist Laws probably made more anarchists than the German authorities had been able to silence by their measures. For some years London was to be the major center for the production of German revolutionary and anarchist propaganda and the organization of its secret distribution. Into the embittered society of the German exiles in London came Johann Most, later to be the central figure in a case which was to prove a rallying point for the new socialist movement. When he arrived in London, Most was a dissident left-wing social democrat who had been forced out of Germany. No theoretician, as a bitterly sarcastic and humorous speaker and journalist who was popular with working-class audiences, he had earned himself some notoriety and a string of jail sentences. He had been elected to the Reichstag, which he found frustrating, until another jail sentence for a speech on the Paris Commune put an end to his political career. On his release he edited a Berlin social democrat newspaper whose circulation he boosted from 2,000 to 18,000 in a year. Further activities in this direction were abruptly halted after Hödel’s attempt. Most spoke about it at a meeting and though his comments were not approving he was arrested and sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. When this term was up he was sentenced to a further five months, which he spent in solitary confinement. In December 1878 he was released and given twenty-four hours to leave Berlin. He went to Hamburg, where the local party leaders, their nerve completely shot, advised him to emigrate to America. Most did leave Germany but went instead to London, arriving just before Christmas 1878. Most’s energy was unaffected by his prison sentences and expulsion. With the financial and practical help of members of the Rose Street club, the first issue of Freiheit, a paper designed for illegal distribution in Germany, was published on 4th January 1879. At first it described itself as a social democrat paper but from February 1879 onwards it steadily downgraded the importance of electoral activity; and in 1880 it began printing specifically anarchist articles. At this time, too, fairly formal links were alleged to exist between Most and “the younger generation of Bakuninists in Paris, the group that publishes the Révolution sociale.”[16] Once the paper was established a number of successful networks were set up for smuggling the paper into Germany. Large numbers were sewn into mattresses in a factory in Hull and exported. Sailors carried quantities of it from England to Germany via Hamburg. Each issue of the paper was given a different title so that the authorities had to first find out its name before banning it. Naturally German police spies were sent to try and infiltrate the smuggling networks and the group round the paper. Kitz relates that on several occasions “we were puzzled by the fact that the German government was aware of the new titles before the paper reached Germany, and thus forestalled us. Johann Neve and I set out to find the cause. Suspecting a member who had recently joined we supplied him with a specially printed copy of the paper bearing a title different from the one we actually intended to use. The bogus title was prohibited but the other escaped. I regret to say that this member met with a serious accident when attending a fête held in support of the Freiheit.”[17] The spy was shot and seriously wounded on Hampstead Heath. The mixture of political ideas in Freiheit at this time represented fairly accurately Most’s own ideas, which took parts of left social democracy, Blanquism (i.e. putschist republicanism) and anarchism but which were marked by strident calls for revolutionary violence that grew out of a wild and bitter response to the repression in Germany. His itch for vengeance found an exemplary object in the assassination of Czar Alexander II by Russian nihilists in 1881. Freiheit published an article by Most entitled ‘Endlich’ (‘At Last’) which enthusiastically supported their action. The Russian government applied pressure — pressure from the German government can be assumed to be constant — and Most was prosecuted by the British authorities. He was found guilty of incitement to murder heads of state and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. His arrest and sentence caused something of a stir in London Radical and socialist circles. A short-lived English-language paper, also entitled Freiheit, was issued by the English section of the Rose Street club as the organ of a defense committee. Frank Kitz was the editor. The paper printed an English translation of Most’s article but avoided being enmeshed in the prosecution by presenting it as part of the speech of the prosecuting counsel at the trial! Jack Williams stood on the steps of the Old Bailey during the trial and sold many copies of this edition. Protest meetings were held, some successful as at Mile End Waste in April, some less so as at Peckham where “the Radicals combined with Tories, opposed the speakers and were only prevented by force from seizing the platform …”[18] The prosecution of Most was opposed publicly on the grounds of the right of asylum and the right of free speech (although the first issue of the Freiheit did reprint some approving remarks of Disraeli’s on tyrannicide). Such an approach did find quite wide sympathy — the jury at Most’s trial asked that he be treated with some mercy since he might be suffering from violent wrong done to him in Germany. The German Freiheit continued under caretaker editors until further publication in London was stopped as a consequence of an article applauding the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish by Fenians in Phenix Park, Dublin, in May 1882. The office was raided and its plant seized. Johann Neve narrowly escaped arrest and two compositors were jailed for six and nine months. Freitheit was forced to move, first to Switzerland and then to the United States. In its short but eventful London career it had produced a number of important incidental effects. Through dissensions within the German exiles a split had taken place, the orthodox defense committee removing to new premises in Tottenham Street. The progressively anarchist supporters of Most remained at Rose Street until they formed a distinctively anarchist club in St Stephen’s Mews, Rathbone Place, some time around 1883. The prosecution of Most had provided a focal issue around which the English socialists could organize and had more actively brought these militants into contact with foreign revolutionaries. The prosecution had also further discouraged hopes that the new Liberal government of 1880 would prove a dynamically reforming force. Perhaps a word should be said here about the personal qualities of Kitz at this time. A contemporary related later that during the time of the Most prosecution “Kitz was having a very bad time … and finally had the brokers in. He had £20 in his possession subscribed to the defense fund … After much perplexity as to its safety he … hid it in a small barrel of sand which he was using in his work. After the brokers had departed he found the barrel had been untouched.”[19] He was thus able to hand over the money to the defense counsel. It was a trustworthy man indeed who could hold twenty pounds for his cause without thought of its usefulness to himself when bailiffs were stripping his house of his last sticks of furniture. From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org Events : ---------------------------------- Chapter 1 -- Added : February 12, 2021 About This Textfile : ---------------------------------- Text file generated from : http://revoltlib.com/