Chapter 12. COOPERATIVE COLONIES

Cooperative enterprises of a utopian kind in England have suffered the fate of all enterprises designed as rehearsals for a great change that has not yet come. They have been defeated and have collapsed, or they have changed and become absorbed, being no longer dangerous. Yet they represent a continual and continuing attempt to place the relationships of work and living on a basis which differs severely from the norm that has existed since the Industrial Revolution. Their makers have attempted to realize in a concrete way ahead of time the conditions they desire or expect in society as a whole. They have attempted in varying degrees to achieve communism in property, cooperation in production and a rather indefinable quality of freedom with sympathy and mutual care in personal relationships which Morris called “good fellowship” and Orwell “decency.” Revolutions have furnished us with examples where such activity has occurred on a general scale — notably in Catalonia and Aragon in the early days of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in 1936–1939. Yet in such cases the very scale of the operation means the making of revolution. Even in times of an expansive movement in less than revolutionary periods such colonies may have a generally accepted exemplary and experimental role. And while the utopian cooperators in non-revolutionary times may see their role as exemplary to encourage some general development, the spirit of the enterprise cannot but be affected by the loneliness of it all. The desperate need to live in good fellowship is unsupported by the general social situation or a specific social movement. Inevitably, therefore, no matter how much the intention is to provide an example to others, the world at large appears hostile and the enterprise tends to represent not so much an attack on the ‘old world’ but a withdrawal from it.

These remarks do not, of course, apply to more ‘hard-headed’ ameliorative measures such as the retail cooperatives which have grown into chains of supermarkets hardly distinguishable from other such enterprises. It has to be readily admitted that the beginnings of such cooperatives were not without idealism, heartache and sacrifice. Yet the commercial viability of these enterprises seems to have been seen not as a crass necessity for survival but as an assumed virtue. They had originally been intended in Owen’s time to provide money for communities. From the beginning, therefore, they were oriented towards profitable trading. However “they were … foredoomed to find that the very sensible innovations which permitted the shops to survive and compete for life, also worked against the fulfillment of any more adventurous hopes.”[364] Retail cooperatives therefore moved quite rapidly out of the utopian socialist sphere of influence. The utopian cooperators were concerned to make a new life and only in passing to ease the conditions of the present one. They were in intention revolutionary rather than reformist. The history of English utopian cooperators by no means starts and finishes with the anarchist movement. From the time of Robert Owen through the times of the Chartists and the International men and women had attempted to make a world in the here-and-now compatible with their desires. The movement continues to this day in such disparate forms as the workers’ communes of the Autonomous Assemblies in Italy and the various imitators of the Woodstock nation. Yet for a while libertarians, if not anarchists, moved to the center of the tradition in England. We have seen that no matter how subjectively revolutionary these enterprises were, objectively they represented a withdrawal from the fray in the absence of a general revolutionary movement. In 1893, perhaps the question was open; by 1896 this type of colony represents a self-protective shell against a hostile world. Thus we are forced to look at them both as a separate world of their own and in the context of a demoralized movement.

Straddling the gap between the cooperative colonies and the retail cooperators were the cooperative workshops. These were started for every reason, from the sharing of resources, through attempts to find work for blacklisted workers, to attempts to live socialism in working hours at least. This is a confused area and much more work needs to be done on it. However, the Labor Annual for 1898 reported a great growth in productive co-ops. They were, it said, selling most of their products through distributive co-ops and were facing bitter opposition from private employers, particularly in Scotland where participants were being blacklisted by employers.[365] This Labor Annual also advertised a necessarily incomplete pamphlet, Cooperative Workshops in Great Britain, in 1897, which nevertheless ran to sixty pages. Some trades were more susceptible to cooperative working than others. Boot and shoemaking, with its relatively high ratio of skill to capital costs seems to have been in the lead. It was, in fact, the policy of the more militant Leicester branches of the Boot and Shoe Union in the 1890s to press the union as a whole to devote some of its funds to financing cooperative enterprises both productive and retail.[366] But this more ambitious general program seems to have been based on the experience of existing small-scale workshops — it is worth noting that Battola, one of the Walsall anarchists, was working in a shoemaking cooperative in Soho at the time of his arrest. Cooperative workshops also existed in light engineering, printing, tailoring and other areas.

A growth in the number of cooperative colonies in England paralleled the rise in the number of cooperative workshops. In 1898, four communities were reported as existing in England. By 1899 there were eight; and this seems to have represented a high point, for by 1900 the number had dropped to six.[367] The most interesting of these from the anarchist point of view, and one of the earliest, was the colony at Clousden Hill Farm near Newcastle-on-Tyne. The direct inspiration for this colony was a series of articles by Kropotkin, written for the magazine Nineteenth Century which represented the groundwork of a book later published as Fields, Factories and Workshops.[368] In these articles Kropotkin developed ideas which seem relatively unremarkable now, yet represented a considerable advance in their time. Kropotkin used the most up-to-date technological information to show the real material possibility of the anarchist-communist ideal of productive units small enough to allow federal organization which would be both largely self-sufficient and easily self-managed on direct democratic lines. In place of woolly ideas of the ‘simple life’ Kropotkin assessed the possibilities of such an existence both economically and technologically. It should be stressed that Kropotkin was not calling for the formation of colonies as kinds of pilot plant for the revolution. His works were intended to develop the possibilities open to revolutionaries in the event of general social reconstruction. This was made quite clear by him in a letter sent to the anarchists who set up the Clousden Hill colony when they invited him to become their treasurer.[369] The colonists had seized upon the practical proposal made by Kropotkin that intensive agriculture under glass could find a favorable environment near coal mines where coal could be bought relatively cheaply without massive haulage costs. By early 1895 plans were well advanced, finance was forthcoming from an unnamed ‘wealthy London anarchist’ and land was being bought. Kropotkin refused the treasurership on the grounds of his general opposition to colonies as a pre-revolutionary tactic and in particular because of their low success rate. He was sympathetic, however, and for several years kept in touch with them and in a minor way lobbied for their support. For a few years the colony seemed to be making progress. A report in Freedom, August 1897, on the second anniversary of the colony was optimistic. They believed that they were showing workers both what could be done with little capital and also demonstrating the practicality of the anarchist lifestyle. They had leased eighteen acres of land, one quarter of an acre being under glass in four greenhouses. One, they proudly related, gave a rich crop of cucumbers — twenty a week! They were distributing their produce through retail cooperatives but were careful to preserve their own autonomy. They had no wage system. “Every member works according to his or her ability and enjoys equally all the Colony can grant.” Matters of common concern were discussed at weekly meetings, while in all other matters the individual was completely free. The colony at that time was composed of fifteen men, two women and four children. The report finishes by saying that they needed more women. For a later history of the Clousden Hill Colony we have to rely on a rather hostile source, W.C. Hart. He says the colony was undermined by inexperience and internal bickering despite its initial prosperity. Numbers of people began to leave and finally two of the colonists bought out their colleagues. A flower business started by these two proved unsuccessful and came before the Newcastle Bankruptcy Court in April 1902.[370]

Hart seems to imply that this marks the end of Clousden Hill. Another distinctly anarchist colony was founded at Whiteway, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1897. This seems to have been more straightforwardly ‘simple life’ in conception, without the technological point-making of Clousden Hill. It was founded by Samuel Bracher, a Gloucester journalist who put a considerable amount of money into the scheme.[371] The membership of the colony expanded from eight to forty quite rapidly. By 1900 the colony was reported to have had ‘friction’. It had burned its title deeds and declared that it “recognizes no laws or external rule. … At present the group have no ‘prospects’ and desire none.”[372] An unattractive picture is painted of this period by a hostile witness: “While some worked hard, the majority sponged idly. … No idea can be given of the indolence and sheer animalism of this Whiteway Anarchia with its lawless license and its cadging. So disgusted were some of the Colonists that they renounced Anarchy straightway and on an adjoining farm started a cooperative colony based on laws and authority, the chief law being ‘He that will not work, neither shall he eat’.”[373] Among the people who left were the founder and his family. Other contemporary accounts do not seem to mention a split, though they do mention the movement of a number of people from a mainly Tolstoyan anarchist colony between Croydon and Purley to Whiteway as well as the ‘friction’ referred to above. It might easily have been this change of personnel which accounts for a different picture given elsewhere of the same colony — though admittedly it could easily be the one “based on laws and authority” referred to above. This author however emphasizes the continuity of events rather than otherwise and calls it an anarchist colony.[374] An early raid by a local farmer provoked by the “lack of sense of ownership” of the colonists, which involved him and his laborers stripping the colonists’ potato crop was never repeated though he was not resisted. Tramps came and could be as lazy as they wanted. “They were never told to go; but somehow the tramps went and they did not return. Perhaps the life was too lazy for them.” (It is worth pointing out that being told to go is not the only way of being told to go.) The colonists operated as far as possible on a system of barter and dispensed with fashion, readily taking to sandals as popularized by Edward Carpenter. Well after the turn of the century it was said that “…so far their harvests have not failed them … they have had many a surplus over their wants and this has been spent on luxuries which they cannot grow or manufacture such as books and a piano.” The colony survives to this day and in the 1930s provided a place of retirement for several anarchists of our period including Tom Keell and Ferd Charles.[375]

The Purley/Croydon colony, about which not much information seems to be available,[376] also provided the inspiration for an experiment in Leeds which lies somewhere between a colony and a cooperative workshop with more general social aspirations. In Freedom for November 1898, Billy MacQueen reported that: “Some while ago our comrade J.C. Kenworthy came to Leeds and in a number of public meetings tried to bring home to his audience the possibility of living up to the ideal even today. This notion went home in one or two cases, and set folk thinking; with the result that a year ago G. Gibson, who had hitherto been a prosperous cycle manufacturer and electrician, decided to throw his works into the movement.”

It was originally set up for victims of the engineering lockout of 1897 but they didn’t fall in with it:

so it was started with a few comrades gathered from various parts … it was decided to have the thing thorough (and to this) no doubt is due its success … the essentials were truth, frankness and good fellowship — the expressions of pure healthy life.

They have not formal membership; no rules, no formal admission.

If one thinks their place is there, they go. Only such accounts as are necessary to determine the question of weekly loss or gain are kept. There is no recognition of ‘fair’ or ‘equal’ division of wages. Each man or woman in connection takes from the treasury such as they need.

Work if it is worth doing at all, ought to be done well, and, acting up to this, the Brotherhood make the question of profits quite secondary. If there are any they are to be plowed back.

The idea of a communal home has already been attained and an agricultural colony is possible.

At present the efforts … are mostly centered in the making of bicycles and various electrical apparatus. One comrade makes the clothing that is needed by the others, whilst another mends their boots and soon hopes to be making them. Comrades wanting anything in the shape of bikes, etc., should make an inquiry. The address is: Brotherhood Workshop, 6 Victoria Rd., Holbeck, Leeds.

The experiment is extremely interesting to us who have approached Anarchy from another road, because now, after one year’s running, the workshop is living proof that folk call live together harmoniously without the aid of law or excessive organization. In this case it must exercise a great influence for good upon the general movement.

For all the optimism of the report, by 1900 the colony was not doing well, though it had inspired an offshoot in Blackburn: a communal workshop doing electrical work with about ten members.[377] It is probable that the Leeds colony closed down shortly after this.

The actual colonies themselves represented concrete examples of a rather general aspiration in the anarchist movement. We find, for example, the Edmonton, London, anarchist group reporting in early 1898 that they had started a cooperative (presumably retail), the profits from which were to be set aside for a colonizing scheme. “This we have conducted for a year in accordance with our principles,” they said, “and our increasing prosperity is evidence of the practical nature of such principles.”[378] In both Leeds and Manchester at different times the anarchist groups ran cooperative print shops which were basically used only for propaganda.

John Turner himself had been the manager of the Socialist Cooperative Federation whose headquarters had been in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Holborn. Ferd Charles at a later date was part of an Oxford Builders cooperative, which involved a hundred building workers.[379] The continuing concern for the cooperative movement and for its wider possibilities was based in a theoretical position which was most clearly expressed in Kropotkin’s pamphlet The Development of Trades Unionism, which first appeared as an article in Freedom in March 1898. Here Kropotkin was developing his evolutionary ideas in the more tranquil years of his British exile. Less concerned with questions of immediate revolutionary activity, he was now searching for the historical, social and scientific ground which would nourish the gradual growth of a libertarian society. This led him to examine the processes going on around him for hopeful signs. He found them in the trades unions, in cooperatives and in municipal organization.

He saw that as they stood they were not anarchist organizations, yet if they were to take up a unified federalist and “encroaching control” stance then they would inevitably lead to anarchism. The agitational question of how this change of direction was to be achieved was not discussed. These ideas were broadly acceptable to the anarchist movement, which saw the cooperatives as an early prefiguration of the society they desired. This area of sympathy is to be found in writings and speeches at all times, though in times of violent class confrontation it tended to sink into the background. In times of reaction and sluggishness, cooperation would emerge as a major concern which could absorb energies which it did not seem profitable to apply in other areas.