Chapter 15 : World War One -- And After

Chapter 15. WORLD WAR ONE — AND AFTER

When war was declared on 4^th August 1914, it came as a surprise. No matter that warning voices had been raised on the danger of war, no matter the direst predictions of the anti-militarists, the fact that a war had started in Europe was a surprise. From our position in history we look back at that bloody waste of life, appalled and wondering. How could people not only allow themselves to be sucked into that war, how could they voluntarily march off into its jaws? Yet in 1914 the only wars that generations had known had been squalid little wars conducted by regular armies in far-flung corners of the world, carving out empires and markets over the bodies of native populations hardly equipped to resist. The exceptions (at the Crimea and the Franco-Prussian War) were many years in the past and had been much less than total wars. The tightening web of alliances arising out of the rival imperialisms of the metropolitan powers had formed almost imperceptibly to the mass of people concerned in their own domestic battles. The speed with which Europe was suddenly at war even surprised the politicians: “We blundered into war,” as Lloyd George was to put it. Even Freedom, which could be expected to be gloomy in its predictions, talked of “tens of thousands doomed to die” instead of millions. For the raw power of the allies on both sides, in terms of industrial output (in terms of available waste, one might say), was evenly matched. Any major conflict could be guaranteed, outside considerations of brilliant strategic invention, to be long, drawn-out and bloody.

There had been expansive declarations in the international socialist movement of brotherly love and solidarity. It is easy to condemn the comfortably placed socialist politicians, if one is so disposed, for their panic, indecision and final cowardice in the face of their earlier statements that socialist brotherhood could conquer capitalist bloodshed. Yet those statements had been made without any thought as to the context in which such brotherhood would have to operate. They were not brave or imaginative men for the most part, as they had consistently demonstrated before this testing time. The majority of them had proved cowards in small things. Why then expect them to be brave in large ones? Indeed, the working class, which had taken so much into its own hands in the years of the Syndicalist Revolt, had already lost if it waited for the ‘leaders’ it had so often ignored. Freedom had correctly (if glibly) noted in 1910 that the necessity was to convince the workers that if they were “to use the General Strike spontaneously in case of need [it] would do more to avert the possibilities of capitalistic wars than any one thing we can think of.”[471] The working class of England (not to mention the other countries involved) showed no signs of taking any such steps. A determined minority of socialists opposed the war from the beginning — it was, in fact, an anarchist, W.D. Ponder, who delivered the first recorded anti-war speech the day after war was declared under the egis of the North London Herald League. Yet for the mass of the working class, the atmosphere was almost one of carnival. As one writer said, “What terrible attraction a war can have! The wild excitement, the illusion of wonderful adventure and the actual break in the deadly monotony of working class life! Thousands went flocking to the colors in the first days, not because of any ‘love of country’, not because of any high feeling of ‘patriotism’, but because of the new strange and thrilling life that lay before them.”[472]

The war was to have a fragmenting effect on the socialist movement in several ways. Firstly, there was the battle between patriots and anti-militarists which not only took place between factions but within them. Then there was the disruptive effect of the government and attendant patriots, concerned as they were to crush ‘pro-German’ sentiment. Further, there were the effects due to the separation between the struggles which were to develop over conscription and which took place in industry. Yet in another sense the strains on the socialist movement and the resulting fragmentation that the war produced were a further lesson in the nature of the thing that socialism was committed to overthrow. The struggles that developed against the war itself and within the situation the war produced were to reintegrate as war weariness grew. This reintegration was given a strong impetus by the news of the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917. For the embattled socialists in prison or in the factory this news brought a great upsurge of hope — if a revolution could take place in a stronghold of reaction what was not possible in the more developed countries of the world? Yet the October Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, marked the opening of a new era of left revolutionary politics which is only now drawing to a close. The Bolsheviks presented a new organizational concept for revolutionaries. The relationship of the revolutionary party — the Communist Party — to the mass was forthrightly authoritarian and exclusive. The party was to capture control of the organizations from the workers and lead them along the path decided in its centralized decision-making structure. For each country there could only be one Communist Party and since that party represented the only path to revolution, all other tendencies outside the party were not just wrong but counter-revolutionary. It is not the purpose of this book to argue the pros and cons of this position. It is abundantly clear, however, that any major success of such a tendency meant severe damage to an anarchist movement, with its pluralism and decentralism. And while the Communist Party remained small in its early years in England, in the face of its succès d’estime the anarchist movement well-nigh withered away.

But let us start at the beginning. Shortly after the outbreak of war the anarchist movement was thrown into turmoil by the chilling news that Kropotkin and a small group round him supported the war against Germany. While the immediate reaction of the vast majority of the British movement was to reject the war and immediate steps were taken to propagandize against it, this sudden change of heart by Kropotkin could do nothing but confuse and damage the movement. Kropotkin had written a series of articles in Freedom between May and August 1913 entitled ‘Modern Wars and Capitalism’. In this series he demonstrated clearly that the rival market-seeking by the metropolitan states as the agencies of their respective capitalists tended inevitably to encourage military conflict between those states. Yet on the outbreak of war in August he underwent a rapid change of heart. Keell, by now the editor of Freedom, described how he met Kropotkin and Marsh “in a noisy Lyons café in Oxford Street.”

They were there first and when I arrived, Peter — the old soldier again — was sketching on paper the military situation in France: the Germans he thought would be in Paris in a week. Then we began to discuss the war as Anarchists and I found out at once that Peter and I differed fundamentally. He spoke of German militarism and its barbarity in Belgium, and the duty of the Allies to throw the enemy back over their own frontiers. Marsh was pro-Peter. My arguments cut no ice with them. I pointed out that a victory for the Allies would be a victory for the Czar and the end of the revolutionary movement in Russia. … Peter and I discussed what he should write in the next issue of Freedom. He evidently thought he could not write a pro-war article in view of my opposition, so we agreed he should do one on Communal Kitchens as he thought there would soon be a food shortage in the country.[473]

This grotesque article appeared in the September issue of Freedom. Indeed the communal kitchens that sprang up to distribute food in France after the war was declared in an upsurge of patriotic egalitarianism could be considered examples of mutual aid. But in the context of the time it was equivalent to admiring the smoke plume from a juggernaut which was roaring down on the world. Kropotkin declared himself publicly in the October issue of Freedom in an article entitled ‘An Open Letter to Professor Steffen’. Gone was all the understanding of a conflict irrelevant to the mass of those who were to be swallowed by it. He wrote, “I consider that the duty of everyone who cherishes the ideals of human progress … is to do everything in one’s power to crush down the invasion of the Germans into Western Europe.” He asserted that “Since 1871 Germany has been a standing menace to European progress … the territories of both France and Belgium MUST be freed of the invaders.” His latent francophilia and germanophobia had become rampant. Keell replied in an article entitled ‘Have The Leopards Changed Their Spots?’ (This referred to the combatant states rather than Kropotkin’s immediate circle.) He said, “The more I study the evidence the more certain I am that the growing commercial as well as military power of Germany was a challenge to Britain and the Allied Powers and the supremacy of one or other is the sole point at issue. And the workers are slaughtering each other to decide it. They will gain nothing by this war. Whatever the result may be, they must lose.”

The November issue was largely devoted to a symposium on the war, where the pro-war ‘anarchists’ and the anti-militarists debated the issue. It also included a forthright letter from a Scottish anarchist, Robert Selkirk, condemning Kropotkin’s article. Cherkesov — one of Kropotkin’s old friends — was furious and told Keell, “Freedom cannot be an open tribune and Freedom must stop.” Keell went to see Kropotkin in Brighton and there was a strained and partially bitter confrontation between them; Kropotkin was particularly annoyed at Selkirk’s letter, where he was called a recruiting sergeant by implication. Keell replied that “he who wills the ends wills the means.” Kropotkin more or less asked for Keell’s resignation, which Keell refused to give. Kropotkin reasserted Cherkesov’s statement that Freedom must not be a ‘free tribune’ and Keell seems to have agreed — but on the side of not admitting pro-war articles. At tea another guest was a wounded British officer on leave. On the mantelpiece were arrayed the flags of the Allies. Keell was glad to get out. He and Kropotkin never met again. Keell, in consultation with a number of anarchists, decided that from now on Freedom would be against the war. Whatever criticisms can be made of Keell he showed great courage in standing up to pressure from Kropotkin who had been revered to an almost sickening extent in the anarchist movement. Secular saints have their dangers when dead; alive they are a constant implied menace. Keell was the braver when we remember that he too was a positive worshiper of Kropotkin.

His difficulties were not over, however. He had more or less declared unilateral independence, and his alleged ‘seizure’ of Freedom was the subject of some lobbying — by Turner and Cherkesov, according to Keell. The result was that George Cores went to the next annual conference in Stockport at Easter 1915 armed with a bitter denunciation of Keell. This denied that the matter was anything to do with a pro- or anti-war position but rather a matter of Keel’s undemocratic seizure of the paper. Cores had not enjoyed a good relationship with Keell before this time. Correspondence in Amsterdam shows that when Marsh retired from the editorship of Freedom in 1912 he was suggesting that Cores and Keell should run the paper jointly. Yet Keell became sole editor at this time, and it is interesting to note that in another context Keell boasts that he was able to stop Cores and other anarchists using the Ossulston Street office as a social meeting place at around that time. Other letters show that Keell had a close group of friends who constituted the new group that produced Freedom. So Cores had some justice on his side. But the overriding question at the conference was the war, and Keell’s emphasis on the anti-war reasons for his action unanimously won the approval of the anarchists nationally.[474] It cannot be denied that in ignoring this Cores showed something of a pettiness of spirit. But it must be stressed that Cores was not leading a pro-war faction at the conference and his later activities showed it.

Kropotkin’s pro-war sentiments did not only shake the Freedom Group. Aldred’s paper, now renamed the Spur, devoted much space in the autumn and winter of 1914–1915 to detailed rebuttals of Kropotkin’s position, some from Aldred, others from Malatesta and Rocker. Yet, in one sense, the fact that so much time could be spent on discussions of pro- or anti-war positions was an indication that the fight had not yet become desperate; it was a time when there was room still to attempt to persuade rather than to grit the teeth and endure. From August 1914 into 1915 there was voluntary recruiting into the army. The Defense of the Realm Act (D.O.R.A. for short) was not introduced until March 1915. This made it an offense, among other things, to try and ‘obstruct’ recruiting by words or deeds ‘likely to disaffect’. The fact that it was introduced at such a relatively late stage is an indication that voluntary recruitment was working. The opposition to the anti-war agitators by patriots was constant and largely spontaneous before this point. Meetings were attacked with monotonous regularity, sometimes platforms were smashed, sometimes the speakers were violently handled. Meetings were banned by the police and free-speech fights were fought.

Yet it was noticeable that the influence of anti-war propaganda was growing. The circulations of anti-war papers like Freedom and the Spur grew rapidly. The North London Herald League, in which many anarchists and libertarians were involved, was holding meetings in Finsbury Park and had its share of difficulties. But its opposition to the war struck a sympathetic chord. In response to official appeals to the upper class to release servants for army service one of them asked the crowd, “Have you got a sweating employer or a rack-renting landlord you can spare? Let him join up to fight for humanity, for civilization, for democracy, for the women and children, for all those causes in which he has always been so enthusiastic.” Before D.O.R.A. came into being the North London Herald League had grown from 50 to 500 strong.[475] James Tochatti, speaking against the war in Plymouth, was asked what he would do if the country were invaded. He answered that if the people wished to fight then let them and if the government really trusted the people they would be armed. But no, the government wanted the war to be under their control, for their ends which were not the people’s ends. He was cheered. Gallagher was to recall a piece of verse pasted up next to every poster in Glasgow with its picture of Kitchener saying ‘Your King and Country Need You’. The verse ran:

Your King and Country Need You

Ye hardy sons of toil

But will your King and Country need you

When they’re sharing out the spoil?[476]

It was both in response to the growing influence of anti-war propaganda and the beginnings of difficulties over recruitment that led to the passing of D.O.R.A. From this point on there were increasing numbers of arrests and fines and jailings for statements or literature likely to prejudice recruitment. The homes of private individuals were raided and literature seized all over the country. The offices in London and Manchester were raided in the summer of 1915. There was increasing propaganda in the ‘respectable’ press for conscription. The activities of jingo crowds became more dangerous, and they were being progressively urged on and — it was suspected — paid by the country’s ‘leaders of opinion’. Conscription was introduced in January 1916. From this point on the struggle took on a new bitterness. Almost immediately arrests were made for refusal to register for conscription. Meetings against conscription were broken up by jingoist crowds at Finsbury Park and by the police in Harlesden where anarchists were active. Henry Sara, Meacham, Cores, to mention but three names, were arrested several times and given short terms of jail or fined. Arrests were being made for private conversations where people made statements ‘prejudicial to recruiting’.

Those arrested first for refusal to register were forcibly put in khaki. Henry Sara was arrested on 13^th April 1916, savagely beaten, put in khaki, beaten again for refusing to take orders and finally transferred to Parkhurst jail. He was luckier than the thirty-four conscientious objectors who were arrested, put into khaki, taken to France and there sentenced to death for refusing to obey orders. The sentences were eventually commuted at the last minute. And the game with the conscientious objectors began. They were at first given sentences in prison of some months, then returned to barracks where they would again refuse to take orders. This time they would receive longer sentences. Then the process was repeated, and they would get a further, longer sentence. Many took the option of the ‘Home Office scheme’. This was working at jobs not connected with war production, though officially they had accepted induction into the army by accepting such work; Guy Aldred refused to register, appeared before a court in April 1916 and was sent to prison. (Rose Witcop now took up the editorship of the Spur.) In August, Aldred decided to take the Home Office scheme and was sent to a granite quarry at Dyce near Aberdeen. Here he continued his anti-war propaganda and became a member of the camp committee with Bonar Thompson. Aldred and Thompson spoke on anti-war platforms after work and at weekends all over Scotland. Aldred also issued two numbers of an anti-war paper from Dyce entitled the Granite Echo in October and November. Yet Aldred was haunted by the fact that he was not resisting the war to the fullest extent and in November voluntarily ceased work at Dyce and returned to London where he was arrested and sent back to prison.

Meanwhile Freedom and the Voice of Labor had been raided and Keell and Lilian Wolfe had gone to prison. The Voice of Labor, a monthly since the outbreak of war, in April 1916 printed an article called ‘Defying the Act’. This was “written by ‘one of those outlawed in the Scottish hills,’ claiming that ‘a number of comrades from all parts of Great Britain have banded themselves in the Highlands, the better to resist the working of the Military Service Act’. Lilian [Wolfe] later recalled being in bed with influenza when the group met to discuss the article, ‘and me, of all people, dissuading them from cutting out part of it, which a few thought a bit too much’. In May the Voice of Labor reported the arrest of most of the outlaws, and there is no evidence that there were more than a few people involved for more than a few weeks. But the idea was dangerous.”[477] A leaflet was made out of the article, 10,000 were distributed and some were intercepted by the police. As a result the office at Ossulston Street was raided and Tom Keell and Lilian Wolfe were arrested and charged with distributing a leaflet which would prejudice recruiting. They were both fined, and refusing to pay the fine they were sent to prison, Keell for three months, Lilian Wolfe for two.

As a result of the raid printers refused to print further issues of the papers. Nevertheless the papers were continued. P.S. Meacham, who had been doing the donkey work round the Freedom office for some years, describes how this was done.

I went with F. Sellars and A. Mancer to the Freedom Press for nearly four months (April, May, June, July 1916) daily expecting arrest under the ‘Military Service Act’. I spent one week, amid the friendly chaffing of comrades, clearing the printing machine and getting it in order. Comrade Sellars the compositor could find no printers who would machine Freedom. He came downstairs looked at the machine, sighed and said we shall do nothing with that. I thought otherwise.

With emery cloth, oil can and spanner I spent from 8am on Monday morning till 6pm on Saturday — one week — I spent doing nothing but turn the handle in half-hour to one-hour shifts to make the machine run smoothly. After one week it did and we were able to defy the attempts of the authorities so that Freedom and the Voice of Labor were printed whilst Keell was in prison. F. Sellars, A. Mancer and myself. No one helped us those 14 dreary weeks, daily expecting arrest, to bring out Freedom. Sellars laid on the paper, I turned the wheel for one-hour spells which Mancer took off. Mancer gave me ten minutes’ rest. In this manner the papers were brought out. On July 27^th 1916, we printed 4,000 sheets on one side. Cut in half these would have made 8,000 4-page Freedom papers. Of these over 7,000 were ordered but alas A. Mancer had a nervous breakdown on the Friday and could not turn up till on the Saturday am. At 9am we were raided and it was a finish as far as we were concerned. Four months — 18 months — 2 year sentences for refusing to become soldiers (the hired assassins of the propertied class) was the fate both of Comrade Sellars and myself — Mancer’s case was tragic. We found he had been taking drugs to bony himself up — alas too much did he take — with the result — a nervous collapse. He put on Khaki but the lamp still flickered. He deserted from time to time — walking to London seeking the help of comrades to hide from the military.[478]

In this raid the press was seized. Had it not been for the friendly services of the I.L.P. press Freedom would have been stopped. The Voice of Labor ceased production after August as result of the raid and the thinning of the ranks by arrests under the Military Service Act. Freedom, though it was raided twice more during the war, managed to continue to appear and trenchantly oppose the war.

The movement in the workshops, factories, etc. during World War One has for the most part been the preserve of Bolshevik influenced historians. Even one of the most recent and detailed accounts, Kendall’s The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, shares not so much a Marxist as a Leninist perspective. The problems raised by this movement still remain unexamined by libertarians, and the massive research groundwork necessary remains undone. Since the purpose of the present book is to consider the specifically anarchist movement such a massive project has not been undertaken. Nevertheless some remarks are in order. There is no doubt that important sections of the wartime movement formed the nucleus round which the Communist Party was formed. That this represented a clean break with their previous anti-electoral, anti-leadership stance is underlined by Kendall. Yet while the movement in wartime was clearly an extension of the pre-war direct-action movement it is still too much regarded as a staging post between the Syndicalist Revolt and Bolshevism. One of the major difficulties for the libertarian historian is that the militant anti-war stance of the anarchist movement as a whole meant that many anarchists were in prison as conscientious objectors and their struggles and treatment were a major concern of the anarchist press. The decentralized development of anarchism in the pre-war years, particularly in South Wales and Durham but in other places too, meant that its activities were overwhelmingly local in orientation. It did not report to the anarchist press with any regularity. Thus its activities are hidden in a welter of local occurrences. We are generally given only tantalizing glimpses of anarchist activity. One of the men arrested in Glasgow in February 1916 at the same time as John Maclean was Jack Smith, an engineering worker anarchist associate of Aldred’s. The strike committee in the Clyde February 1915 strike met in an anarchist bookshop run by a man named McGill and his wife. They ran a paper and played an active propaganda role with the distribution of libertarian propaganda. Such examples indicate that further research would give positive results.

Yet this research would of necessity have to be a general study of the industrial working-class movement as a whole. This was as taken by surprise by the outbreak of war as any sections of the left. The union leaders reacted variously. In the mining industry they made strenuous efforts to prevent conditions being undermined. In engineering, things were very different. Here the union leaders, in the name of patriotism, threw up all the conditions hard won over decades of struggle. There was no sign of a comparable throwing over of profits. Yet between the outbreak of war and February 1915 prices rose 23 per cent. Whereas a strike by miners was through the union in March 1915 and won a wage rise commensurate with the cost of living, the Clyde strike of February 1915 was against the union as well as the employers. The result of the undermining of the standard of living of the working class and the pusillanimous attitude of the trades union leaders in the engineering industry led to a massive increase of influence of the shop stewards’ movement. This was further underlined by the extremely low level of unemployment caused by the wartime shortage of labor. The engineering industry became the storm center of rank-and-file opposition, first to the effects of the war and progressively to the war itself. Firstly, they fought to preserve some sort of standard of living in the face of soaring profits and prices. Secondly, they fought against the effects of conscription. This took the form of trying to keep as many men as possible exempt from conscription. The fact that skilled men stood the best chance of escaping did lead to an element of craft elitism. Nevertheless a massive strike in Sheffield which began to spread to other centers in November 1916, when an A.S.E. member had been ‘illegally’ conscripted, was able to force his return from France.

This led to a counter-attack on the part of the state. A strike in Barrow in March 1917 was defeated before support could be organized by the threat of mass arrests. Trade card exemption was withdrawn by the government in April 1917. A small strike over a local example of dilution in Rochdale set off a wave of strikes which spread over many centers in England — though not to Barrow and Scotland — until by mid-May over 200,000 men were on strike. This was fundamentally against the withdrawal of exemption. The government determined on a strong line and at the point where the London stewards were attempting to contact their Glasgow comrades the ‘ring leaders’ were arrested. Rather than create martyrs, the government threatened them with life imprisonment, and they signed an agreement to abide by a ‘yellow dog’ arrangement made by A.S.E. officials with the government. The strike wave rather fizzled out. Yet it was evident that discontent was widespread. The seemingly never-ending demand for cannon fodder for the battlefields, the meaningless slaughter, the privations of the home population had all led to increasing war-weariness. On the other hand, there was the astonishing news from Russia. The most reactionary government in Europe had been overthrown by a revolution!

The impact of this event should not be underestimated. Aneurin Bevan was later to recall “the miners when they heard that the Czarist tyranny had been overthrown, rushing to meet each other in the streets with tears streaming down their cheeks, shaking hands and saying: ‘At last it has happened’.”[479] (When the news reached conscientious objectors in the prisons there was great excitement. Almost immediately strikes were organized in Wormwood Scrubs.) A wave of strikes which took place in May 1917 almost certainly owed something to the news of the Russian Revolution for their origins. A Royal Commission on Industrial Unrest in June and July showed that discontent in the country was at a very high level. In South Wales, for example: “The influence of the ‘advanced’ men is growing very rapidly and there is grounds for belief that under their leadership attempts of a drastic character will be made by the working classes as a whole to secure direct control by themselves of their particular industries.”[480] A convention was called in Leeds in June 1917 to discuss the setting up of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Though little came of it, it is worth mentioning because in the speeches of such unlikely Bolsheviks as Ramsay MacDonald we can clearly see the stirring of revolutionary ideals in the previously most moderate of the delegates as a result of the news from Russia.

As the war ground towards a conclusion the threads of war-weariness, revolutionary pacifism, industrial unrest, mutinous rumblings in the army and navy and the promise of the Russian Revolution began to come together. They were never to be fully integrated; the unrest was decentralized though massive; but there was an increasing sense of the connections between these phenomena. In 1918, the last year of the war, over 1,100 disputes were recorded, costing nearly six million man days. (Among the strikers were the London police.) Open mutiny was reported among British troops in France and the last loads of conscripts for France had to be under armed guard to prevent desertions. All the anti-parliamentary, direct-action sects were growing in numbers and influence and others were forming.

In 1919, with the peace, this simmering unrest boiled over. Nearly 35 million man days were lost in disputes in which 21 million workers were involved. Mutinies to accelerate demobilization were a regular occurrence. The loyalty of troops returning from France was so low that it was considered impossible to rely on them should civil disorder break out. The conscientious objectors in several prisons were completely out of control. After cell wreckings and hunger strikes they were released, at first on parole and then unconditionally. Revolutionary sentiments were widespread. Basil Thompson, the Special Branch man in charge of surveillance of domestic unrest, writes of February 1919 when a large ‘Hands Off Russia’ meeting took place: “There was a large strike on the Clyde at the moment, and many of the speakers really believed that it was the beginning of the General Strike which was to merge into Revolution. At that moment we were probably nearer to very serious disturbances than we have been at any time since the Bristol Riots of 1831.”[481]

That there was no revolution at this time can be put down to several factors. Revolutions are seldom consciously planned, they happen. And usually the spark that sets them off is some crass act of oppression or an attempt at it by the authorities. The mood of the people in 1919 was bellicose. Yet while the atmosphere was thick with talk of revolution, the strikes and the mutinies were overwhelmingly for immediate demands that could be settled. As long as no general confrontation was allowed to develop from which neither side could withdraw, the government was safe. The government, furthermore, could rely on the majority of members of trades union and Labor Party hierarchies to accept piecemeal settlements. The authorities played this most difficult situation with consummate skill, delaying, testing out the opposition, withdrawing from negotiations, reopening them, arresting people here, buying them off there. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, though they saw with varying degrees of clarity the revolutionary potential of the activity around them, and saw in Russia an example of what was possible, were nevertheless only able to articulate general aspirations rather than concrete methods. In any case most of them were too busy “making a strike when we should have been making a revolution” as Gallagher was later to remark. One result was that the spirit of revolt ran down the plughole of electioneering. In the autumn of 1919 the municipal elections gave Labor a series of sweeping victories which were to be the foundation for the parliamentary victories of 1923 which confirmed the Labor Party as the new Opposition. By 1924 the first ever Labor government was coming into office. The situation had slipped from near-revolution to Ramsay MacDonald in five years.

It can also be argued that the Russian example, initially so inspiring, was to prove more of a hindrance than a help in the crucial three-year period at the end of the war. Hard news from Russia was rather difficult to come by in the years between 1917 and 1919. The newspapers of the time, particularly those of a more epileptically right-wing tendency, were full of stories describing the random slaughter of foreigners, the plots of the Elders of Zion, the nationalization of women and so forth. The October (Bolshevik) Revolution was reported initially as anarchist. It is not surprising then that a certain confusion reigned on the left as to the differences between, for example, the soviets (the spontaneously formed people’s councils) and the Bolshevik Party, which had captured some of the more important ones and on whose behalf it claimed to speak. Though the left could easily unite to oppose intervention by Britain to obstruct the Revolution, an opposition shared by many soldiers and sailors itching for either insurrection or demobilization, the nature of the Revolution itself remained something of a mystery. Freedom remarked that “Our great difficulty nowadays is the lack of information about the working men and women of Russia. Even in Bolshevik Russia there are 80 million … besides Lenin and Trotsky, and we want to know how they are using their new-won freedom.”[482] It was to take some time to prove just how cruelly untrue were, for example, Jack Tanner’s words when he asserted of the Bolsheviks in early 1919: “The common ownership of the land is part of their program, hence they derive full support from the peasants. … Industry is also controlled by committees of workmen who receive the products of their labor … one of the best features of the Bolsheviks is their plan of ‘decentralization’ which in essence is a form of ‘local autonomy’.”[483] This, at a time when the labor force on the Russian railways had been put under what amounted to army discipline, one-man management was being introduced into the factories, peasant insurrections were widespread and the Bolshevik policy of War Communism called for the strictest control from the center!

The anti-parliamentary, direct-action-oriented left, including the anarchists, were tending to see in the Russian Revolution the consummation of their own hopes in the absence of solid information. Some anarchists, perhaps the more abstractly sectarian of them, were asserting that the Bolsheviks were a government and as such were no better than any other government. Some information on Bolshevik anti-anarchist activities was beginning to emerge in mid-1919 (though the first attacks had been made over a year before). But the bulk of the movement, including most of the activists, took a lot more convincing. And that is not hard to understand; with the class war raging around their ears and with so many lies being told about Russia, they were most unwilling to denounce a revolution that their dreams clung to. In reply to an anti-Bolshevik letter from an Austrian anarchist, Guy Aldred, for example, wrote in his paper:

I understand comrade Grossman is opposed to Bolshevism whereas I am definitely Bolshevik. Grossman contends that the dictatorship of the proletariat is unnecessary. I suggest to him that it is inevitable. … My comrade fears that, even under a Soviet administration, a fight must take place between intellectual and manual upstarts for power and bureaucratic posts. … This would be a serious objection, if the dictatorship did not work for its own overthrow and by destroying property society, make directly for the day when the control of persons shall give way to the administration of things.

Aldred even went so far as to say that “those Anarchists who oppose the dictatorship as a transitional measure are getting dangerously close to supporting the cause of the reactionaries. … If abstract Anarchism is opposed to the social revolution … it must be repudiated by every soldier of the red flag.”[484]

He was to re-emphasize this point in the issue of the following month (October). As if to stress where the attention of many anarchists was being directed he also wrote: “At the present moment the entire revolutionary movement is drawing closer and closer together on a platform of practical revolutionary effort. The Workers’ Socialist Federation, the Socialist Labor Party and the Communist League, including a large section of the Anarchist movement, are seeking some organized and disciplined means of expressing their Communist convictions and Bolshevik aims.” At the same time he was calling for a “disciplined boycott of the ballot box.”[485] But in December an article by Grossman was published in Aldred’s paper which spelled out anarchist objections to the Bolshevik regime, noting its suppression of the anarchists, its arbitrary authoritarianism, its government by decree, etc. Significantly, the article went unanswered. By August 1920, Aldred’s commitment to Bolshevism began to waver. He began to qualify his use of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, making it clear that he meant by it only the actions of the proletariat necessary to defend their revolution. Moves towards communist unity were being made by the central cliques of various groups, and this Aldred criticized on the grounds that unity should be made at the grass roots and any other process could only contradict the principles of local autonomy and mandated delegates. He qualified his use of ‘discipline’, asserting that for him it meant only the right of people in revolutionary groups to expect all their members to work hard and to exclude those who did not: centralism was not implied. Aldred, it would seem, was not a proper Bolshevik at all.

Yet the major question was to become that of electoral activity. This has been described as ‘only’ a tactical question. Yet the British socialist movement, if it had a tradition at all, had one of being low on general philosophy but intensely concerned with day-to-day tactics. These were a matter of principled commitment. In British socialist politics it was a change of tactics that by implication forced a change in general political commitment rather than the other way round. And of these tactical considerations, electoral activity had marked, by implication, the boundary that separated reformists from revolutionaries. This had been asserted by the Socialist League and confirmed by the career of the S.D.F. It had been reaffirmed by the syndicalist rebels in the face of the Labor Party’s career after 1906. For revolutionaries in Britain anti-parliamentarianism was an article of faith. It is with this in mind that we should consider the shock wave that passed through the revolutionary groups when the Third International, founded in 1919, announced that all member-parties should take part in elections and when Lenin underlined this in his Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and insisted furthermore that any English Communist Party should affiliate with the Labor Party. This was the cause of much resentful debate among British would-be Communist Party members with the Moscow seal of approval. Sylvia Pankhurst crossed swords with Lenin in her Workers’ Dreadnought. Aldred denounced what he called Lenin’s fatal compromise.[486] At the Second Congress of the Third International in Moscow in August 1920, Gallagher pleaded with the delegates not to force upon the Scottish revolutionaries parliamentary “resolutions which they are not in a position to defend, being contradictory to all they have been standing for until now.”[487] Tanner told the congress: “Most of the active men [in the shop stewards’ movement] have been members of the political socialist parties but have left them because they were not traveling along the right road.”[488] Nevertheless, in the face of Bolshevik insistence and prestige, the congress unanimously endorsed the Russian position. Indeed some delegates, like Gallagher for example, seem to have come back completely brainwashed.

For those libertarians who were incapable of swallowing electoral politics the progress of the unity negotiations in 1920 did not encourage participation. The involvement of the B.S.P. was an insult as far as they were concerned, tainted as it was, in their opinion, with opportunism and elections. The hole-and-corner politicking that was going on, with Russian money to ease any change of principles; the strange bed fellows that this began to attract all this left a bad taste in the mouth. Rose Witcop commented in a bitter article, designed in part as an answer to a correspondent who inquired why Aldred was not playing a prominent part in unity negotiations: “The pioneers of Communism in this country who stood for the ‘Coming Social Revolution’ and understood what they meant while these eleventh hour converts were urging municipal pawnshops, have struggled against parliamentarianism for years.” But now “you may be a communist and believe in all the exploded Social Democrat theories; the chief thing, indeed the only thing, is that you must belong to the Communist Party. Instead of asking why Aldred’s name is not included in the list of Communist Party leaders, our comrade should have asked why the names of Arthur Henderson and Mrs Snowdon were omitted.”[489] (The latter two were prominent right-wing Labor Party hacks.) By January 1921, Aldred and the groups connected with him were firmly against affiliation to the Third International. Yet the desperate seriousness with which the problem had been considered was significant. It was now clear that the Russian Revolution had become a central concern of the revolutionary left and that now it was impossible to get on with the matters in hand without continuous glances over the shoulder at the Russian example. It marked the beginning of a change in the terms of left-wing politics which in the end could only be destructive of libertarianism. And perhaps not only of libertarianism. The Communist Party formed at the end of 1920 was still, in form, representative of the English left-wing tradition. It was rapidly to be Bolshevized; with strict centralism enforced by 1923. But already the disputes and bad feeling which its formation had given rise to had had their effect. An industrial correspondent of the Times was to remark with some satisfaction in 1921: “It is not too much to say that Bolshevism, has become a source of weakness rather than strength in the revolutionary movement. And not in this country only. Everywhere it has been a source of embittered discord and rather a hammer to break up rather than a cement to unite.”[490]

The number of groups who remained outside the Communist Party and the level of their activity has been, perhaps, underestimated. (After all, it had been claimed that 20,000 people were represented in unity negotiations, while in 1921 the party only had a membership of between three and five thousand.) But the prestige of the Russian Revolution was not with them and this, taken together with a lack of subsidy and sudden changes in the economic and political situation, was to make their work well nigh impossible. For the postwar boom collapsed suddenly. By the end of 1920 there were three quarters of a million people unemployed; by June 1921, two million. By the end of 1921, wage cuts had been forced on six million workers. There were defensive strikes, bitterly fought. But the mood had changed; people who in 1919 had been shouting for revolution were now looking for work. The unemployed, it is true, rapidly became a problem to the authorities through their turbulence but they had no economic pressure to bring like strikers have. In the atmosphere of gnawing anxiety that any slump induces, no matter how much it is mixed up with anger and bitterness, the authorities felt confident enough to suddenly move against the ‘dangerous agitators’. The authorities had been badly frightened in the summer of 1920. The Russian successes in their war against interventionist Poland had brought about the threat of war on the Russians from the British government. In an almost reflex action the whole of the labor movement had responded to the threat of war with the threat of a general strike. It was this threat as much as the subsequent reverses of the Russian fortunes that ensured that war was not declared. The slump gave the government its chance to take its revenge — or to “crack down on subversive elements” if that version is preferred. In 1921 over 100 ‘communists’ were arrested and jailed for variations on the theme of sedition. One of them was Guy Aldred. He and Rose Witcop had run the Spur (the successor to the Herald of Revolt) as individuals, and the Glasgow Communist Group had decided that a ‘party’ organ was required. This duly appeared as the Red Commune in February 1921. Aldred and three others were arrested and charged with sedition for its declarations in favor of the “destruction of Parliamentary government and the substitution of the Soviet or revolutionary workers’ system of administration.” Aldred was kept in prison for four months awaiting trial and was eventually sentenced to a year in prison. His companions were jailed for three months. The Red Commune and the Spur never reappeared.

Where the government repression could not do the job the economic depression was more effective. Revolutionary morale dropped catastrophically. Willy Gallagher was later to say that whereas in 1918 100,000 people had marched on May Day in Glasgow, in 1924 only 100 could be mustered. The effect of this on the revolutionary left outside the Communist Party was predictable. The Workers’ Dreadnought, for example, which survived the repression and the jailing of Sylvia Pankhurst, quietly folded in 1924 — interestingly enough on a progressively anarchist note.

During the postwar period we have described the ‘official’ anarchist movement round Freedom proceeded along well-worn grooves. Freedom remained more or less disconnected from events, but anarchists continued to speak on street corners and take part in the activities around them. The attraction of Russia was strong, particularly when the Revolution was viewed as Soviet rather than Bolshevik. An unwillingness to play into the hands of reactionaries also led them to stifle criticism. Even when overwhelming evidence became available that the Bolsheviks were systematically persecuting all their political opponents it was nevertheless possible for John Turner to go on a T.U.C. delegation to Russia and, despite private doubts, sign the report which represented a glowing advertisement for the Bolshevik regime. Not that the anarchist movement was ineffective; it still found an audience. One activist was to write:

When we resumed in 1919 and had opposition from paid speakers … I was surprised to find that our propaganda previous to the war and during same till April ’16 had been so effective. The questions put by sympathizers made these meetings ineffective, so much so that we did not refer to the opposition when speaking. Locally our groups meet indoors at different comrades’ houses, some weekly, some fortnightly, some monthly. … I always find the Communist Party attacking the Anarchist Communist ideas in various parts of London. At our meetings it is only 1 in 10 times that the audience can stand on the pavement. Every year, regular as clockwork we get agents provocateurs trying to break up our meetings and trap us ‘into making statements liable to lead to arrest’.[491]

Yet the optimism of this account (written in 1928) must be compared with the account Emma Goldman gives. She arrived in England from Russia in 1924 with the intention of rousing protests against the Bolshevik persecution of anarchists — which she had seen at first hand. A small committee of people grouped round Freedom attempted, on her initiative, to publicize the situation but with little success. Perhaps she concentrated too much on ‘prominent personalities’; perhaps her Freedom associates were not closely enough attached to the movement at large; yet she convincingly portrays the anti-Anti-Bolshevik mood of the times. One socialist told her: “It would spell political disaster to my party to declare to its constituents that the Bolsheviks had slain the Revolution.” Of the British anarchist movement she says: “The older rebels were disillusioned by the collapse of the Revolution. The younger generation, as far as it was interested in ideas (which was little enough) was carried away by the Bolshevik glamour.”[492] Meetings organized by her committee met with little response. “Not even in my pioneer days in the United States,” she said, “had I found it so bitter to break new ground as I did in this venture.”[493]

The collapse of anarchist self-confidence in the l920s was as rapid as it had been in the mid-1890s. By 1924 the movement was in deep depression and disarray. By the time of the General Strike of 1926 the movement was so fragmented that anarchists were only able to take part in that struggle on an individual basis. The General Strike represented the last resurgence of the spirit of 1910–1920; as if from slumber people organized themselves and that organization was still developing when the trades union leaders called off the strike after a little more than a week. Indeed one reason for the calling off of the strike was that the trades union leaders saw their grip on the situation slipping. That their grip had not completely slipped is illustrated by the way the order to return to work was obeyed. But the defeat of the General Strike had catastrophic consequences for anarchism. “The unions were beaten. Syndicalism — ‘direct action’ — were dead for a generation and more.”[494] And the spirit which the popular commitment to direct action as a general principle represented was the essential element which the anarchist movement needed to sustain it. In 1927, it appeared to contemporaries, anarchism was dead. As if to mark its passing Freedom ceased publication.

This caused a great flurry in the chicken coop — though the word ‘chicken’ is perhaps inadvisable, since most of the participants were aging veterans. Keell, who had edited the paper up to this point, wanted to remove to Whiteway colony, taking the pamphlets of the movement with him and continuing to keep in postal contact with the movement. Freedom, he declared, had to be closed down due to lack of support. A group of veterans which included George Cores, Ambrose Barker and John Turner (people who had been anarchists, be it noted, from the time of the Socialist League) demanded the right to take over the paper and were prepared, they said, to pay the debts involved. Keell said that “For many years these people have never come near us to help and have never lifted a finger, let alone their voice in Anarchist propaganda. … We have a right and we shall exercise that right to decide where Freedom Press literature shall be housed.”[495] His enemies replied in turn that Keell had made it impossible for any of them to work with him, that he had made Freedom his own family affair. They further alleged that Keell was now due for retirement but could only draw his pension from the Society of Compositors if he no longer worked at his trade. He was being dog in the manger about the whole affair, they said, if he could not run Freedom then he was not going to let anybody else do it. All the mutual recriminations of 1914–1915 when Keell had allegedly ‘seized’ Freedom were revived. Nevertheless Freedom did close down and Keell retired to Whiteway taking the pamphlets with him. From 1928 to 1932 he issued an occasional Freedom Bulletin from Whiteway. The veterans were only able to restart Freedom in 1930. It was to continue until 1933, though only against great odds which, for example, caused it to reduce its size in 1932. It is a curiously depressing paper with memories of the old days interspersed with obituaries.

In holes and corners the anarchist movement survived. There were occasional street-corner speakers — my friend George Cummings remembered George Frost speaking on ‘Penniless Hill’ in Hunslet, Leeds.

Albert Meltzer, who came into the movement in the mid-1930s, was to come across the last remnants of the once powerful Welsh miners’ anarchist movement. He mentions Jim Colton — who married Emma Goldman to give her British citizenship — once one of a number of “popular Welsh and English speakers [who] were ostracized, thrown out of their jobs and had to fight grimly to keep their place in the Union — because they opposed the dictatorship in Russia.” He describes how he went in 1938 “to speak at a local I.L.P. meeting on Spain in a Welsh valley. ‘Take care of those at the back,’ whispered the chairman. ‘Those are the Wrecking Brigade.’ They were a group of Welsh-speaking women who took great pleasure in ‘giving hell’ to the Labor and C.P. speakers — especially with ‘toffee-nosed’ English accents. But to their, and my, delight we proved to be fellow-Anarchists. The ‘Last of the Mohicans’ in the valley were four women, and two elderly miners.”[496] Albert Meltzer told me that when he became an anarchist he was the only young person in an old people’s movement. It is on this rather depressing note that this history closes.