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Title: Anarchist Communism in Britain Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1996 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, United Kingdom, Organise!, history Source: Retrieved on May 7, 2006 from https://web.archive.org/web/20060507091635/http://flag.blackened.net/af/org/issue42/acbrit.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 42.
In this article we take a look at the development of Anarchist Communism
in Britain since the late 19^(th) century. In the first section we deal
with the early days of the Socialist League and of William Morris. In
the second part we look at the grouping around Sylvia Pankhurst and at
the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation and Guy Aldred. In the third
part we look at the groupings of the 70s, the Organisation of
Revolutionary Anarchists, the Anarchist Workers Association, the
Anarchist Communist Association and the Libertarian Communist Group. An
article on the first ten years of the Anarchist Communist Federation,
appearing in this issue of Organise!, ties in with this series.
The working class activists Frank Kitz and Joe Lane provided a link
between the old Chartist movement, Owenism, the British section of the
First International, the free speech fights of the 1870s and the newly
emergent socialism of the 1880s. Lane developed anti-state ideas early
on, even before he came to call himself a socialist in 1881. A real
power-house of an activist, he set up the Homerton Social Democratic
Club in that year and attended the international Social Revolutionary
and Anarchist Congress as its delegate. Kitz also attended as delegate
from the Rose Street Club. Kitz met the German Anarchists Johann Most
and Victor Dave there and was deeply influenced by them. With the help
of Ambrose Barker, who was based in Stratford in east London, Lane and
Kitz launched the Labour Emancipation League. The LEL was in many ways
an organisation that represented the transition of radical ideas from
Chartism to revolutionary socialism. The demands for universal adult
suffrage, freedom of speech, free administration of justice, etc, sat
alongside the demand for the expropriation of the capitalist class. The
main role of the LEL was that it was to offer a forum for discussion and
education amongst advanced workers in London, with 7 branches in East
London and regular open-air meetings in Millwall, Clerkenwell, Stratford
and on the Mile End Waste. Nevertheless, anti-parliamentarism was
already developing in the LEL.
The LEL succeeded in moving the Democratic Federation of Hyndman over to
more radical positions. The intellectual and artist William Morris had
recently joined this group and Lane was to have an important influence
on him for several years. The organisation changed its name to the
Social Democratic Federation.The autocracy and authoritarianism of
Hyndman repulsed many members and a split took place in 1884. Morris,
Belfort Bax, Eleanor Marx (Karl Marxâs daughter) Edward Aveling and most
of the LEL left to form the Socialist League. The League itself
contained both anti-parliamentarians and supporters of parliamentary
action, who had been united by their opposition to Hyndman. A draft
parliamentarist constitution inspired by Engels was rejected, but the
divisions continued. One of the results of this was Laneâs Anti-Statist
Communist Manifesto, which had originally been a policy statement that
had been rejected by the parliamentarist majority on the policy
subcommittee.
The Anti Statist Communist Manifesto is not a brilliantly written or
particularly well argued document. Nevertheless it stands as probably
the first English home grown libertarian communist statement . It spends
too long talking about religion. It rejects reformism through parliament
or the trade unions. It calls for mass revolutionary action. In the
Manifesto, Lane describes his ideas as Revolutionary Socialist or Free
Communist. He never publicly used the word Anarchist to describe his
politics, feeling that the word put too many people off, and wishing to
distinguish himself from individualists. In private he was sympathetic
to openly declared Anarchists and remarked about the Manifesto: âI do
not claim that I have expounded anarchy; it is for others to judgeâ.
Lane must be considered as one of the most important pioneers of
libertarian communism in Britain.
Whilst Anarchism was self-developing within the League, and attempting
to achieve coherence, other developments were taking place. The veteran
Dan Chatterton, who had participated in the Chartist agitations of 1848,
produced his own Anarchist paper Chattertonâs Commune-the Atheist
Communistic Scorcher. This ran for 42 issues from 1884, produced in
conditions of extreme poverty. Meanwhile one of the pioneers of
Anarchist Communism, the Russian Piotr Kropotkin, had arrived in
Britain. Kropotkinâs lectures to many Socialist League branches
reinforced the Anarchist tendencies among many of its members. Charles
Mowbray, a tailor from Durham, active in the London Socialist League,
was one of the first to specifically call himself an Anarchist
Communist. Kropotkin also helped set up the paper Freedom which was
specifically Anarchist Communist. The Freedom Group also undertook the
organisation of large public meetings and open-air public speaking. As a
result a number of workers, especially from the Social Democratic
Federation, were won to Anarchist Communism, like the compositors
Charles Morton and W. Pearson, whilst Socialist League members like
Alfred Marsh and John Turner joined the Freedom Group. Regrettably,
whist Socialist League branches distributed Freedom around the country
there was a certain antipathy between the Leaguers and the Freedomites.
As the Anarchist historian Nettlau was to remark, Kropotkinâs failure to
work within the Socialist League was:
âregrettable, for in 1886 and 1887 the League contained the very best
Socialist elements of the time, men (sic) who had deliberately rejected
Parliamentarianism and reformism and who worked for the splendid free
Communism of William Morris or for broadminded revolutionary Anarchism.
If Kropotkinâs experience and ardour had helped this movement we might
say today Kropotkin and William Morris as we say Elisee Reclus and
Kropotkin...There was a latent lack of sympathy between the Anarchists
of the League and those of the Freedom Group in those early years; the
latter were believed by the former to display some sense of superiority,
being in possession of definitely elaborated Anarchist-Communist
theories...if both efforts had been coordinated a much stronger movement
would have been createdâ.
By 1890 Anarchism had made considerable progress within the League. In
London there were 2 specific Anarchist Communist groups, one in St
Pancras mostly formed from Freedom Group members, the other in East
London, members of the Clerkenwell Socialist League in different hats,
which produced the free handout the Anarchist Labour Leaf.
1888 saw the withdrawal of the parliamentarians from the League. There
was still tension between those who like Morris, did not describe
themselves as Anarchists but as free communists. This tension was
aggravated by a pedantic approach among some of the League Anarchists.
The Anarchists insisted too much on philosophical principle and not
enough on social practice. Morris wrote: âI am not pleading for any form
of arbitrary or unreasonable authority, but for a public conscience as a
rule of action: and by all means let us have the least possible exercise
of authority. I suspect that many of our Communist-Anarchist friends do
really mean that, when they pronounce against all authorityâ . The
Anarchists H.Davis and James Blackwell were too ready to take issue with
Morrisâs phrase â the least possible exercise of authorityâ, failing to
see that the âpublic conscienceâ he proposed as the basis of Communism
was the culmination of the voluntary principle in a society where it had
become custom and habit. If Morris chose to call that a situation where
authority was exercised then the dispute was semantic. (The Slow Burning
Fuse, John Quail.)
Morrisâs tendency felt that far more propaganda and education needed to
be done before the Revolution could come about. Many Anarchists felt
that mass action was in itself educational, transforming those taking
part. Both were right , but only partially right. There should have been
a dynamic dialogue between these 2 positions. This was not to happen.
The dead-end of the advocacy of individual acts of âpropaganda by the
deedâ couched in fiery language meant the departure of Morris, not to
mention Kitz and Lane. It also meant the infiltration of the movement by
police agents, and a resulting clamp-down by the State. Some Anarchist
Communists, like Samuels were ferocious advocates of the âpropaganda by
the deedâ others like Tochatti, were just as ferociously opposed to such
tactics. The loss of Morris, the withdrawal of Lane and the temporary
withdrawal of Kitz were a disaster for the development of libertarian
communism in Britain. The Socialist League collapsed nationally.
A number of specific Anarchist groups emerged from the ruins of the
League. In fact despite the repression, in the period 1892â4 the
movement had a massive growth. For example, Morris had estimated the
membership of the League in London as 120 in 1891. In 1894, Quail
estimates the Anarchist movement in London as up to 2,000. (see work
cited above). The âbombâ faction had lost out, and the ârevolutionistâ
tendency was re-affirming itself. As a veteran of the League, David
Nicoll was to say in the Anarchist which he brought out in Sheffield in
1894: âWe are Communists. We do not seek to establish an improved wages
system like the Fabian Social Democrats.Our work for the present lies in
spreading our ideas among the workers in their clubs and organisations
as well as in the open streetâ. The revival was not to last. An attempt
to unite the fragmented groups â the Anarchist Communist Alliance â in
1895 was stillborn and the movement was in definite decline by the
following year. A period of reaction and lack of struggle within the
working class as well as bitter internal conflicts was sapping the
movement.
There was to be no revival till mid-1903. The growing industrial unrest,
the growth of syndicalism and industrial unionism, were to be
contributory factors to the refound vigour of the Anarchist movement.
Examples of the returning strength of the movement can be seen in the
secession of a group from the Social Democratic Federation in Plymouth,
the majority of whom set up an Anarchist Communist group in 1910, and a
similar secession from the industrial unionist Industrialist League in
Hull in 1913. That year was to see considerable agitation in the South
Wales valleys, where small propaganda groups were set up, called Workers
Freedom Groups. At a meeting in Ammonford with 120 present, a Communist
club house was opened. It was reported that: âThe Constitution and
programme of the Workers Freedom Groups have been shaped upon the model
of future society at which they aim, namely Anarchist-Communismâ. A
Workers Freedom Group was established in the pit village of Chopwell in
Durham, by among others Will Lawther(later to be a right-wing minersâ
leader.) The Chopwell Anarchists also set up a Communist Club.
Anarchists set up a Communist Club in Stockport in the following year.
In London groups mushroomed and agitation was intense. Here Guy Aldred.,
a young man who had started out as a Christian preacher, moving through
secularism and then the SDF to Anarchism, began to attempt to synthesise
his earlier Marxism with his Anarchism in 1910. He had set up a
Communist Propaganda Group in 1907 and he now revived this, and helped
set up several Communist Groups in the London area, as well as
travelling regularly to Glasgow and helping form the Glasgow Communist
Group there. He had serious criticisms of trade unions and had fallen
out with the Freedom Group because one of its members, John Turner, was
a leading trade union official. As Aldred noted: â...I gradually fell
out with the Freedom Anarchists...Their Anarchy was merely Trade Union
activity which they miscalled Direct Action. Their anger knew no bounds
when I insisted that Trades Unionism was the basis of Labour
Parliamentarianism.â
But now the First World War loomed and its outbreak and repercussions
were to have cataclysmic effects on the whole revolutionary movement,
not least the Anarchists.
The Anarchist movement, not just in Britain, but world-wide was shaken
to its foundations by the news that Kropotkin and others were supporting
the Allies against Germany and Austria-Hungary. To their credit, the
majority of Anarchists took a revolutionary abstentionist anti-war
position, including Freedom and the Spur, edited by Aldred. A fiercely
active anti-war propaganda took place within the North London Herald
League, where Anarchists worked alongside socialists from different
organisations.This joint activity was reflected right across Britain.
Indeed the Anarchists were beginning to have a growing influence among
the latter.
Aldred was to remark on the growing number of âMarxian anarchistsâ
within the movement, who accepted a Marxian analysis of the State and of
the importance of class struggle. These activists were becoming
impatient with those , who to quote Freda Cohen of the Glasgow Anarchist
Group, were satisfied with âfine phrases or poetical visioningâ.
Alongside this was the heritage of Morris and Co within the broad
socialist movement, which was asserting itself within the Socialist
Labour Party, the British Socialist Party, (the successor of the SDF)
and the Independent Labour Party. Antiparliamentary ideas were
re-emerging within these organisations- for instance, within the
Socialist Labour Party, members were questioning the pro-parliamentary
ideas of DeLeon who had founded the Party. Some left to become
Anarchists.
An attempt was made to unite the Anarchists around Freedom and the Spur,
edited by Aldred, with the anti-parliamentary dissidents of the SLP.
This initiative came from within the SLP and at a unity conference in
March 1919 the Communist League was founded, with a paper the Communist.
In it George Rose was to remark: â we know that there must develop the
great working class anti-Statist movement, showing the way to Communist
society. The Communist League is the standard bearer of the movement;
and all the hosts of Communists in the various other Socialist
organisations will in good time see that Parliamentary action will lead
them, not to Communist but to bureaucratic Statism...Therefore, we
identify ourselves with the Third International, with the Communism of
Marx, and with that personification of the spirit of revolt, Bakunin, of
whom the Third International is but the natural and logical outcome.â
Rose shows himself under the influence of Aldred, who looked for a
fusion between Bakuninism and Marxism, in the process glossing over some
fundamental differences. Indeed an initial report in Freedom on the
conference, whilst noting that the League was not an Anarchist
organisation, remarked that the ârepudiation of Parliament is a long
step in our directionâ, but on the other hand there was a sharp exchange
between Anarchists and League members over the idea of the dictatorship
of the proletariat and economic determinism. At a Conference of London
Anarchists it was remarked that, âThe anti-parliamentary attitude of
many Socialists and Communists was greatly due to our propaganda in the
past, and good results would undoubtedly follow if we worked with themâ.
A resulting conference was very friendly in tone, although controversy
over the dictatorship of the proletariat was not absent. However, this
initiative of cooperation between revolutionary anti-parliamentarians
was to evaporate when the Communist League disappeared without trace at
the end of 1919.
The attempts at cooperation and unity continued however, although the
whole process was clouded by the issue of the Russian revolution and
support for the Bolsheviks. Aldred himself was at first a staunch
supporter of the Bolsheviks, hardly surprising considering the lack of
any hard information about Leninâs Party in Britain. (This was reflected
in general ignorance in the revolutionary movement throughout the
world). A series of critical articles by an Austrian Anarchist which
were printed in the Spur in September 1919 were lambasted by Aldred and
others, although in time he came to the same conclusions as he gained
more solid information. Most revolutionaries, however were the slaves of
wishful thinking, despite evidence that all was not well in Russia. This
attitude, the unity -at-all-costs syndrome and âloyalty to the world
revolutionâ position (Translation=slavishly carry out whatever Lenin and
the Bolsheviks tell you to do) was to have disastrous consequences for
the British revolutionary movement. As Bob Jones says in his pamphlet
Left-Wing Communism in Britain 1917â21: âThere was, as happens
repeatedly in the history of British socialism in the twentieth century,
a complete abdication of critical judgement when basic principles and
beliefs are put to the test by supposed friends and alliesâ. This is
something that should be borne in mind at the present with various
âunityâ moves.
Despite the continuing growth of anti-parliamentarianism in both the SLP
and BSP, Lenin was to insist that: âBritish communists should
participate in parliamentary action... from within Parliament help the
masses of the workers to see the results of a Henderson and Snowden
government in practiceâ. In practical terms this meant affiliation to
the Labour Party and the call for a Labour vote, despite the (yes, even
then!) reactionary role and nature of Labour. This position, which
Anarchist Communists have consistently argued against in the 20^(th)
Century, is still very much an obstacle to the creation of a
revolutionary movement in this country.
Anti-parliamentary communism had also developed inside the Workersâ
Socialist Federation (WSF) . This had evolved out of the Womens Suffrage
Federation based around Sylvia Pankhurst in the East End of London,
above all in the Bow and Bromley districts. With her mother Emmeline and
sister Christabel she had led a vigorous and militant campaign for votes
for women. But differences developed between her and them over a number
of issues, including Sylviaâs emphasis for activity among the working
class, and for joint action between working class women and men for
common demands. This gap was widened by the War, which Emmeline and
Christabel fiercely supported, whilst Sylvia came out in opposition.
During the war the WSF were very active among the East London working
class, setting up free or cut price restaurants, day nurseries for
children of working mothers, and distributing free milk for babies. In
this period it dawned on Sylvia Pankhurst that capitalism could not be
reformed, but must be destroyed and replaced by a free communist
society. She saw in the Russian revolution the model for a revolution
based on workers councils, where committees of recallable and mandated
delegates would be elected and answerable to mass assemblies of the
working class. She rejected parliamentary action and the domination of
leaders, calling for the development of self-organisation and
self-iniative through class struggle. Indeed at the time of the 1923
General Election when 8 women M.P.s were elected she remarked: âWomen
can no more put virtue into the decaying parliamentary institution than
can men: it is past reform and must disappear...the woman professional
politician is neither more nor less desirable than the man professional
politician: the less the world has of either the better it is for it...
To the women, as to men, the hope of the future lies not through
Parliamentary reform, but free Communism and sovietsâ.
Unfortunately, like Aldred, Pankhurst was a headstrong and egotistical
individual. Like him, she often put the narrow interests of her own
group before that of the revolutionary movement as a whole. So, she and
the WSF rejected a merger with the Communist League because the 2
organisations were too similar for that to be necessary! The WSF then in
June 1919 transformed itself into the Communist Party. Lenin put
pressure on the Pankhurst group to arrange talks with other groups for a
unity conference, at the same time fearing the establishment of a
Communist Party that had pronounced anti-parliamentary positions. In his
attack on left and council communists Left Wing Communism: An Infantile
Disorder he singled out Pankhurst, along with the Council Communists
Pannekoek and Gorter. Another singled out was Willie Gallagher, who had
left the SDF to join the Glasgow Anarchist Group in 1912. Gallagher, an
admirer of Bakunin, was now a member of the Scottish Workers Council,
which promoted âcommunesâ. In his pamplet Lenin quoted Gallagher: âThe
Council is definitely anti-parliamentarian, and has behind it the Left
Wing of the various political bodiesâ. For his staunch
anti-parliamentarianism (not so staunch as it turned out) Gallagher was
chosen to represent the Scottish Workers Councils at the second congress
of the Third International in Moscow. Gallagher pleaded with the
delegates not to force on the Scottish revolutionaries: âresolutions
which they are not in a position to defend, being contradictory to all
they have been standing for until now.â Lenin singled Gallagher and his
associates out at this Congress, winning him over completely to his
positions. From then on Gallagher was a loyal servant to Lenin,(and then
to Stalin) working towards the establishment of a Communist Party of
Great Britain which appeared in January 1921. The manoeuvres of Lenin
and Gallagher were sharply attacked by Aldred in his new paper the Spur
and by Pankhurst in the paper of the re-established WSF the Workers
Dreadnought.
Pankhurst continued with her criticisms of Leninism. In 1924 she
condemned the new rulers of Russia as: âProphets of centralised
efficiency, trustification, State control,and the discipline of the
proletariat in the interests of increased production...the Russian
workers remain wage slaves, and very poor ones, working not from free
will, but under compulsion of economic need, and kept in their
subordinate position by State coercion.â The WSF was very close to the
positions of the Dutch and German council communists, evolving
increasingly Anarchist Communist positions by 1924, when it disappeared.
The collapse of the revolutionary wave of 1917â21, the Bolshevisation of
the movement, and the repression of 1921, during which time Pankhurst
and Aldred were both jailed had taken its toll. Many had been won to
Bolshevik positions, whilst many others dropped out including Pankhurst
herself, who ended up as a supporter of Emperor Haile Selassie of
Ethiopia, with a burial in Addis Abbaba.
The anti-parliamentary opposition to Leninâs positions coalesced around
the Glasgow Anarchist Group and Aldred. It was to express solidarity
with the Russian Revolution that this changed its name to the Glasgow
Communist Group in 1920. This became the nucleus of the
Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation set up in January 1921.
In many ways the APCF was an unstable alliance of those who accepted
Anarchist Communist views and those who took a Council Communist
position. Aldred and Co. still kept up illusions in the Russian
Revolution up till 1924, flirting with the newly emergent Trotskyism for
a while and launching attacks on Anarchist individuals and groups. As
one member of the APCF in Leicester remarked in a letter to the editor
of Freedom in 1924, Aldred was ârunning with Communism and hunting with
Anarchismâ. Aldred also insisted on what he called the Sinn Fein tactic
of running as an anti-parliamentary candidate in the 1922 General
Election. This was opposed in the APCF by Henry Sara, who left to join
the Pankhurst group, and Willie McDougall and Jane Patrick . Other
differences were over the question of economic determinism, with
economic development as the motor to social change, and over the need
for a transitional workers state.
The APCF had branches in London, the Midlands and North of England,
although its base was primarily Scotland. It published the monthly The
Commune from 1923â9. The seething differences over the use of
anti-parliamentary candidates erupted in 1933 when Aldred left over
these differences to form the Workers Open Forum.
Aldred claimed that the APCF stagnated after his departure. However,
this is not true as the activity of the APCF continued unabated. Further
splits were to come with the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. The APCF
uncritically supported the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT-FAI,
the notion of anti-fascism with its unity at all costs message, and the
false ideas of democracy versus fascism. They published, without comment
or criticism, a statement by Federica Montseny, one of the chief
Anarchist advocates of anti-fascist unity and Anarchist participation in
the Spanish Republican government. Jane Patrick was one of the first to
question these positions after her visits to Spain. She was disowned by
the APCF, and went off to join Aldredâs group, now called the United
Socialist Movement. The uncritical attitude continued in the APCF,
though it published several articles in its new paper Solidarity
including a statement from the Friends of Durruti (see Stormy Petrel
pamphlet on the Friends of Durruti). A split took place in the APCF in
1937 when some Anarchists left in 1937 to set up the Glasgow Anarchist
Communist Federation, although the reasons for this remain obscure. This
evolved into the Glasgow Group of the Anarchist Federation of Britain,
active during the Second World War.
The APCF for its part redeemed itself during the War by adopting a
revolutionary defeatist position, with opposition to both sides. However
as was stated in the Wildcat pamphlet on the APCF: â...the APCF was too
tolerant in allowing views fundamentally opposed to their own to appear
unchallenged in the paper. These included at various times, pacifism,
trade unionism, and âcriticalâ support for Russia...â. Wildcat also
noted that: â The APCF also seemed to suffer from a lack of proper
organisation. It appeared to be content to remain a locally based group,
with no interest in trying to form a national or international
organisation. It is sometimes argued that revolutionaries should only
organise informally in local groups, to avoid the dangers associated
with larger organisations...These dangers have to be faced up to, not
run away fromâ. These comments should be taken seriously by
revolutionaries at the present time.
The APCF with Willie McDougall as its leading light, transformed itself
into the Workers Revolutionary League in 1942, eventually becoming a
Workers Open Forum and continuing into the 50s.
As for Aldred and Patrick, their United Socialist Movement had become a
populist organisation, espousing things like World Government and
fellow-travelling with Russia after Stalinâs death. As Nicolas Walter
says in his article in the Raven No1., Aldred was an: âextraordinarily
courageous but essentially solitary man whose vanity and oddity
prevented him from taking the part which his ability and energy seemed
to create for him in the revolutionary socialist movementâ. Like
Pankhurst, Aldredâs egotism contributed towards hindering the
development of a libertarian communist movement in this country, as did
the differences between Anarchist Communists and Council Communists
which were at first swept under the carpet and then totally polarised
with no attempt to work out a practical synthesis.
Despite all this, the contributions of these groups and individuals were
important. They courageously pursued revolutionary politics at a time of
great isolation. They must be recognised as the forebears of present day
libertarian communism in this country.
A specific libertarian communist current did not re-emerge in Britain
until the sixties and seventies. Anarcho-syndicalism was to be the
dominant current within the Anarchist movement, alongside the newly
emerging âliberalâ anarchism that was developing through the likes of
people like George Woodcock. In one part, this was a response to the
major defeats of both revolutionary Anarchism and the working class
movement as a whole, in another part it was an uncritical adaptation to
the rise of the anti-war movement (Committee of 100 and Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament). It was , of course, correct for Anarchists to aim
their propaganda at mass movements, putting a revolutionary case against
capitalism and the State as the root causes of war. What was lacking,
however was a theoretical strength that allowed for the recruiting of
activists from C100 and CND that fought against the dilution of ideas
and transformed these activists into fully-fledged revolutionaries. This
was not the case, however, and the revolutionary core of Anarchism,
already deeply effected by the erroneous ideas of the Synthesis as
devised by Voline and Faure (which sought a fusion between
individualism, syndicalism and libertarian communism within the same
organisation) was further diluted in Britain.The development of the
hippy and alternative culture movements were to further dilute and
confuse the movement, as once again the Anarchist movement showed itself
wanting in ways of relating to these movements on a revolutionary basis
without surrendering to pacifism and marginalisation.
One healthy development was the group of activists who had been expelled
from the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League of Gerry Healy in 1959, many
of whom had served on its Central Committee. Revolted by the
authoritarianism of Healyism, this group began to develop libertarian
socialist ideas, continuing to base themselves on class struggle and
class analysis. They began to edit a journal, Solidarity, from October
1960, as well as a flurry of pamphlets, at first on a monthly basis!
They developed trenchant analyses of the industrial struggle as well as
the peace movement, and their analysis of the unions was a huge step
forward, as was their rejection of syndicalism. As time progressed
Solidarity began to identify themselves more and more as libertarian
communists. However, they had developed a distrust of organisation as
such as a result of their experiences of Healyism. Their unflagging
publishing programme and their perceptive analyses had gained a great
deal of respect among many activists. Their wilful failure to translate
this into the establishment of a national organisation was a disaster,
as International Socialism (the precursor of the Socialist Workers
Party) was able to build on this territory abandoned by Solidarity (and
by the Anarchist Federation of Britain). They failed to engage as fully
with the Anarchist movement as much as they could have, as their
contributions at meetings and conferences could have considerably
strengthened the class struggle current within it. Finally, there was
their use of the ambiguous term self-management (which could be open to
a number of interpretations, including one involving a market society)
and their assertion that the main differences in society were not so
much between classes as between order-givers and order-takers. In the
end the contents of the magazine became less and less distinguishable
from the contents of Freedom, with, for example, long articles on
Gandhi. Solidarity magazine stopped appearing in the early 90s and the
group is to all intents and purposes, dead.-failing to live up to its
promises of the 60s.
The Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) had slowly emerged in the
aftermath of the political dead-end and decline of the Committee of 100
and the growing new radicalism of the1960s, with its founding conference
in Bristol in 1963. There was an impressive list of group and individual
contacts featured in Freedom. National conferences began to be organised
that were well attended. On the face of it things looked very good
indeed, with the potential for an Anarchist movement to grow and once
again have some influence as the pre-WW1 movement had. In reality things
were far from rosy. Anyone could attend conferences, often to make
contributions and then never to be seen again. There was no structure of
decision-making, and therefore no decisions made at conference. There
was no paper controlled by the AFB, and often groups loosely affiliated
within it contained all sorts of âanarchistsâ from individualists,
pacifists and gradualists, lifestylists and agrarian communards, through
to syndicalists and anarchist communists. No clear analysis could be
developed because of the huge array of differing and opposing ideas.
Indeed the AFB only had an internal bulletin from late 1969.
The AFB was unable to respond to the huge potential offered to it, and
began to drift. Indeed there was a massive exodus of activists to
International Socialism (IS) and the International Marxist Group (IMG).
A group emerged in the AFB around Keith Nathan and Ro Atkins , the
former who had been a driving force in the very active Harlow Anarchist
Group. This group produced a document called Towards a History and
Critique of the Anarchist Movement in Modern Times as a discussion paper
for a conference of Northern Anarchists in November 1970. Militants in
Lancaster and Swansea (including Ian Bone, the future founder of Class
War) also had criticicisms of the AFB. â The people in Swansea dropped
out of the fray after their open letter was published, but their action
had encouraged people in Lancaster, Leeds, Manchester and York to put a
motion to to the AFB that it call a âreorganisation conferenceâ to
discuss the criticisms raisedâ (from The Newsletter, bulletin of the ORA
May 1971). The Critique and a joint statement produced by all the
critics was taken from the conference to the AFB conference in Liverpool
the same month. It should be pointed out that this critical current was
made up of both anarchist communists and anarcho-syndicalists as well as
those who had no specific identification other than Anarchist.
The Critique was a trenchant and deeply honest document. It is worth
quoting at length on the state of the Anarchist movement: â the omision
of an attempt to link present short term action with the totality of
capitalist society and with the totality of the future alternative
society, means that when the short term issue dies, as it will, then so
does the consciousness created by this short term action.....bitter
personal disputes based upon spuriously advanced positions; battles for
the soul of the revolution / movement / Individual / reified anything,
fought in reams of paper attacking and defending positions long since
overrun by time. This is our âtheoryâ. Usually it totally replaces even
the pretence of activityâ.
Following on from the Liverpool Conference the group in York decided to
set up the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists to act as a ginger
group within the AFB. The attention at this time was not to leave the
AFB. It wanted the AFB to open its doors to other libertarian tendencies
e.g. Solidarity. â...The ORA people do not want to form another sect-we
see our role as acting within and on the libertarian movement in
general, as well as initiating our own work...we hope it can act as a
link and a catalyst not only for ORA and the AFB but also to all
libertariansâ. (ORA Newsletter see above).
ORAâs objections to the traditional anarchist movement then, were more
on the level of organisation than of theory. Their advocacy of
collective responsibility, the use of a Chair and voting to take
decisions at meetings, formal membership and a paper under the control
of its âwriters, sellers and readersâ while warmly greeted in some
quarters for example the May 1971 Scottish Anarchist Federation
Conference was viciously attacked by others.
But the ORA itself was a hotch-potch including all sorts of anarchists,
including syndicalists and those who argued for a pacifist strategy.
When the ORA decided to bring out a monthly paper, Libertarian Struggle,
in February 1973, it proved to be a forcing house for the development of
the group, and these elements fell away. Also significant were contacts
with the Organisation Revolutionnaire Anarchiste in France which had
developed along similar lines within the Federation Anarchiste. Through
the French ORA the British discovered the pamphlet the Organisational
Platform of the Libertarian Communists which had been written by a group
of Russian and Ukrainian Anarchists, including Nestor Makhno and Piotr
Arshinov. This argued for a specific anarchist communist organisation,
and ideological and tactical unity.
The ORA produced a number of pamphlets and a regular monthly paper. At
first this was lacking in theoretical content, in the main consisting of
short factual articles on various struggles. Quite correctly,
Libertarian Struggle gave extensive coverage to both industrial
struggles and struggles outside the workplace, including tenants
struggles, squatting, womens liberation and gay liberation. By issue 8 a
greater analytical and theoretical content emerged. For example in an
article on the Spanish Revolution of 1936 in Libertarian Struggle 1973
we can read about: âThe failure of the anarcho-syndicalists who make a
far too ready identification of their union with the working class as a
whole. The way forward in a revolutionary situation is the rapid
building of workers councils...union committees are no substitute for
direct workers powerâ. These anarchist-communist criticisms of
anarcho-syndicalism were to be further developed within the libertarian
communist movement over the years.
Similarly, the analysis of Labour was to be a consistent feature of
British anarchist-communism over the following years. For example we can
read in Libertarian Struggle November 1973: âOnly by carefully
explaining and exposing the role of the Labour Party to the working
class can any progress be made to building a revolutionary anarchist
alternative...It cannot be done by first insisting we vote Labourâ. The
Labour Party was defined as a bourgeois party.
On the unions, however, the ORA was not so clear. The criticisms of the
union bureaucracies were clear enough, and this included the âleftâ NUM
leadership. Also clear was the call to create workers action committees
leading to the establishment of workers councils. However this was mixed
up with calls to democratise the unions(!) and to democratise the
various Rank and Files (all of which were IS fronts).
The events of 1974, the Miners Strike and the 3-Day week, led many to
think (falsely) that revolution was just around the corner. This led to
the formation of the Left Tendency inside the ORA. They concluded that
it was in the nature of anarchism that the attempts to form a national
organisation were bound to fail, and turned to Trotskyism. Most of this
group ended up in the horrific authoritarian Healeyite outfit, the
Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), whilst others joined IS. Nathan
himself, whilst not a supporter of the Left Tendency, also left at this
time to join the WRP.
The Left Tendency had called for an elected Editorial Board rather than
a paper edited in rotation by each group and for a âmore coherent
position on Irelandâ among other things. The organisation came to a
virtual standstill, as these members had been among the most active, and
many others, who were not prepared to take on the workload, dropped out.
Amongst those who remained, some took the initiative to revive the
organisation. A limited edition (1000) Libertarian Struggle was put out
in November 1974 and sold out in 10 days. There followed a period of
recruitment and consolidation, until May 1975 when the paper began to
appear again on a regular monthly basis.
At the beginning of 1975 ORA changed its name to the Anarchist Workers
Association, which it was felt implied more of a class committment,
although others criticised this change as a mistake, implying workerism,
and a too narrow obsession with the workplace. It was true that most of
the membership in this period were heavily involved in workplace
activity.
By 1976 the AWA had 50 members, most of them active, with 3 groups in
London, groups in Oxford, Yorkshire, Leicester, and Scotland. The paper
now called itself Anarchist Worker, was a regular monthly with sales of
1500â2000, mostly street sales. It was to some extent âa libertarian
version of Socialist Workerâ but the coverage was wider, for example
covering the struggles of claimants and squatters and provocatively
questioning the work ethic.
The organisation went through a vicious split between Spring 1976 and
Spring 1977. The Towards a Programme (TAP) Tendency was founded
primarily to change the 1976 Conference decision on Ireland, where the
majority, had argued for an abstentionist, anti-Republican position on
ireland, and that âTroops Outâ was only meaningful if they withdrew
through united class action. The TAP kept to the classic âTroops Outâ
formula as well as the leftist âSelf-determination for the Irish people
as a wholeâ. The TAP also argued for a less âultra-left â position on
the unions that is for âdemocratisation of the unionsâ, âextend
unionisationâ etc. This tendency included Nathan who had returned to the
fold.
The AWA did not have a tradition of political debate. Much of the debate
there was was conducted at a puerile level. The TAP tendency accused
their opponents of âtraditional anarchismâ and wishing to âlead the AWA
back to the days of the AFBâ whilst the TAP tendency was accused by its
opponents of âTrotskyismâ. The debate was clouded by controversy over
the issue of abortion with a leading opponent of the TAP tendency taking
an anti-abortion position., as well as some of the opponents of TAP
(though only a small minority) taking increasingly anti-organisational
positions.
Eventually at a conference in May 1977, on a motion sprung from the
floor expulsions against the opposition to the TAP tendency was carried
by 2 votes, with no prior notice or discussion at previous meetings or
in the Internal Bulletin. Others left the organisation in disgust at
these manoeuvres.
The expelled comrades committed to organisational politics regrouped
under the title âProvisional AWAâ which then changed its name to the
Anarchist Communist Association, producing a paper Bread and Roses and
an introductory pamphlet to the ACA. The internal disputes had proved
debilitating, however, and the ACA disappeared in 1980. The ACA had
attempted to carry on some of the better traditions of ORA/AWA
As for the TAP tendency and those others who remained in the AWA, the
coming period was to be one of complete capitulation to leftism. The
name of the organisation was changed to the Libertarian Communist Group,
there were defections to the International Marxist Group, and then the
LCG announced that it had moved from class struggle anarchism to a
âlibertarian, critical, Marxismâ. The LCG backed âUnited Front Workâ
which in practice meant working in the Socialist Teachers Alliance, and
the Socialist Student Alliance, fronts dominated by the IMG. This United
Front work which in practice meant collaboration with leftist political
formations, led to the LCG committing one of their most heinous
errors-entering an electoral front set up by IMG called Socialist Unity
(SU) and backed by other groups like Big Flame. Socialist Unity put up
candidates where it felt they had the strength, and advanced the slogan
âVote Labour But Build a Socialist Alternativeâ where it did not. The
LCG was supposed to be âcriticallyâ supporting SU, but failed to make
any serious criticisms of this support for Labour. The SWP for their
part, peeved by the SU running candidates, and perceiving this as a
threat, decided to stand their own candidates . The LCG endorsed these
candidates as well, completely forgetting all the criticisms it had made
of electoralism and of the nature of the Leninist groups. Finally, after
the IMG, in their usual fashion, got bored with SU as a way of
recruiting, it was wound up. The LCG failed to deliver any post-mortem
on this.
The end was soon to come. The LCG compounded these errors by supporting
a slate run by an anti-cuts group called Resistance (Keith Nathan and
friends) for council elections in Leeds.
The LCG moved for fusion with the âlibertarian Marxistâ group Big Flame
in 1980. This organisation had been previously described in Anarchist
Worker as âschizophrenic libertarians/Leninistsâ: âBig Flame leads in
uncritical copying of Lotta Continua in Italy, from their spontaneism to
softness on Stalinismâ. For its part Big Flame was unable to withstand
the instabilities of its politics. The âleftâ âvictoryâ orchestrated by
Tony Benn in the Labour Party resulted in the collapse of Big Flame as
most of its members decided to enter the Labour Party, where they
eventually wound up as apologists for Kinnock. The LCG had argued that
they were âtoo small to give us an acceptable forum for political
discussionâ and that there were âno serious political differences
between the two organisationsâ. The LCG had relinquished any idea of
constructing a specific libertarian communist organisation as well as
any serious political analysis. But in any case, the politics of the LCG
had transformed so much that there really was little difference between
their leftism and that of Big Flame.
This history of the ORA/AWA/LCG with its history of splits, defections
and gross political errors is far from inspiring. But these
developments, sometimes as unedifying as they were, signals the first
attempts of libertarian communism to re-emerge in the post-World War II
period. These attempts to re-emerge were as one member of the ACF noted
in 1991 bound to be effected by the âpresent comparitively weak state of
anarchist communismâ. Two âmagnetic poles of attractionâ would be at
work, he went on to say. One would be Leninism, which would exert its
influence through comrades moving physically and ideologically over to
Leninist outfits, or adopting Leninist style politics whist still
professing to be within the revolutionary anarchist movement as happened
with the LCG, and later with the Anarchist Workers Group.
The other pole of attraction would involve comrades committing some of
the errors associated with parts of the left communist
milieu-spontaneism, refusal to construct a revolutionary organisation,
and where theoretical elaboration was divorced from effective practice
and intervention, and seemed to involve finding as many differences as
possible between comrades.
The appearance of the Anarchist Communist Federation marked a dramatic
move forward, a significant development in both the strengthening and
elaboration of Anarchist Communist theory, as well as an ongoing
practice. In a separate article on the first ten years of the ACF we
will consider these contributions.