💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarchist-communist-federation-obituary-albert-meltzer.… captured on 2023-01-29 at 06:39:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Obituary: Albert Meltzer Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1996 Language: en Topics: obituary, Albert Meltzer, Organise! Source: Retrieved on May 13, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130513234209/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue44/obit.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 44 — Autumn/Winter 1996.
Albert Meltzer who died on 7^(th) May this year aged 76, had been a
class struggle anarchist from the age of 16. He took part in work around
the Spanish Revolution and was a member of the editorial board of War
Commentary, (which changed its name to Freedom at the end of the war).
This anarchist fortnightly maintained a consistent revolutionary
anti-war stand, and an outstanding quality and level of writing. During
the fifties Meltzer retired from the movement, returning to edit a
number of pamphlets produced by his Coptic Press and to work with the
group producing Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review which addressed itself to
cultural as well as directly political issues. Together with Stuart
Christie he began producing the monthly Bulletin of the Anarchist Black
Cross in 1968 which later became Black Flag in 1970. This journal gave
coverage to news of the international anarchist movement, in particular
details of repression and info and support for class war prisoners.
Indeed Meltzer’s work in establishing the ABC has led to a legacy of a
number of local ABCs throughout Britain and ABCs in other countries.
Their support for class war prisoners is invaluable and their efforts
should be supported. One of Meltzer’s other achievements was his
sizeable contribution to the Kate Sharpley Library, a valuable resource
and archive of the British anarchist movement, as well as of course his
publishing of many pamphlets.
Albert’s commitment to class struggle Anarchism was an influence on
several generations (indeed, it contributed to this writer’s development
of class struggle ideas). His loathing of the liberals in the anarchist
movement, as he called them, particularly the likes of George Woodcock,
were understandable, but his verbal opposition to them was sometimes
vitriolic in the extreme, to the extent of calling them fascists. Now,
they may be many things, but the misnomer of fascist was not one of
them. His heartfelt disgust at the way that the revolutionary core of
anarchism was distorted by those who talked about pacifism, denied the
existence of class or class struggle, and espoused gradualism in
opposition to revolutionism, sometimes led him to write in terms guided
more by his heart than his head. This vituperative style of writing
sometimes spilled over into attacks on those who did espouse
revolutionary ideas. Albert was no friend of the Organisation of
Revolutionary Anarchists or the Anarchist Workers Association in the
seventiess and there were attacks on these groups in the pages of Black
Flag. At a time when the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists, then
inside the Anarchist Federation of Britain, was developing ideas about
the need for a revolutionary organisation Albert Meltzer was seen as a
natural ally. He had recently written on the need for organisation in
Black Flag. The ORA comrades were then told by Albert that he did not
mean a specific revolutionary organisation but a vague “workers’
organisation” based on non-existent workers’ clubs. The ORA saw this as
a brush-off, and that Albert had back-tracked on his previous
pronouncements. Some ORA comrades engaged in some stupid name-calling
with things like “Pope Albert” being thrown around.. He quite
understandably bore a grudge, when a search for possible areas of
co-operation and convergence might have been more useful (true for both
sides). Albert did not readily identify specifically with
anarcho-syndicalism in the sixties and seventies, perhaps influenced by
his friendship with Ted Kavanagh with whom he had collaborated with on
Cuddon’s, and who had profound criticisms of anarcho-syndicalism. His
later identification with anarcho-syndicalism translated into membership
of the Solidarity Federation where latterly his ideas on “workers’
organisation” have appeared to have been remarkably influential.
These criticisms should be weighed against Albert’s important
contributions to British revolutionary anarchism and to his lifelong
devotion to the vision of a stateless and classless society.