Freedom: Anna Kleist & Spring Cleaning

by Brian Bamford

ON the 30th, October, a writer called Anna Kleist wrote on the FREEDOM website complaining of 'anarchist smugness' following the defeat of what she called 'the first mass movement for socialism this country has seen in decades': the Corbynista experiment which seemingly ended last December after the General Election. She was refering to the gloating of London anarchists in the FREEDOM bookshop following the result coming through.

According to Anna it amounted to a good dose of 'I told you so'!.

This is how she colourfully described the scene in the FREEDOM BOOKSHOP at the time:

'While these bilious has-beens represent a particularly grotesque extreme of anarchist opinion, their unabashed joy at Corbyn’s defeat is not so far different from the smug “we told you so” that has, for the most part, constituted “the anarchist response” to December’s election results. One might have hoped that anarchists would have had something useful to say following the defeat of the first mass movement for socialism this country has seen in decades. Sadly, with one or two minor exceptions, all we seem to have produced are some rather tiresome Urban 75 posts about how we’re so wise and everyone else is pathetic and naïve.'

Following a brief consideration of the history of British anarchism she bitterly concluded:

'

'My contention is that we in the British anarchist movement are way overdue such a period of radical reassessment. Capitalism is in crisis, fascism is in the ascendency and yet we have never been more politically irrelevant. Now is not the time for smugness or schadenfreude. It is time for us to turn our “ruthless criticism” back upon ourselves.'

JON BIGGER Knows Best: Having the Key to the Universe!

SUCH criticism couldn't go unchallenged by those clever dicks who reckon to know better; one such 'Jon Bigger'* only the very next day scolded Anna thus:

'Yesterday, Freedom published a piece encouraging anarchists not to be smug, instead looking inwards at how we have failed to build a mass movement. I agree, but standards and principles matter. Let the last few years be a lesson about principles, as much as it is a lesson in building a mass movement.'

Yet to the non-partisan observer British anarchism is a political non-entity, as indeed Ms. Kleist described it in her brief contribution: the best thing it used to be able to do was to run bookfairs, but nowadays it can't even accomplish that. Despite what the Community of Scholars at Loughborough University claim, seldom has British anarchism been more ineffectual. Only if you count Extinction Rebellion can it claim any significance or real relevance today.

FREEDOM and SPRING CLEANING ANARCHISM

CURIOUSLY the editor of FREEDOM [Vernon Richards?] writing on the January 31,1953 in an editorial entitled 'SPRING CLEANING ANARCHISM' asked:

'IS anarchism, the denial of the State, of the right to rule, a merely negative doctrine? Should it not put forward also a positive contribution to political, social and economic theory? Such questions have periodically been asked since the time when the parliamentary Marxists of the eighties and nineties first accused anarchism of being a negative conception.'

At that time, almost 60 years ago, the FREEDOM editor was responding to a correspondent, R. A. M. Gregson, who had called for 'a Revaluation of Ideas' making a plea for 'recapitulation. for a re-evaluation of M basic ideas, and evolving new ones'. Mr. Gregson wrote: 'Destructive criticism, is easier than the expression of posit!ve beliefs and proposals.' Following this up with the claim: 'The literature of the movement . . .intents itself with protestations on the one hand and yearnings after past revolutionaries on the other.'

The FREEDOM editor then asks:

'How does such criticism apply to FREEDOM? To keep ideas up to date is an important function of a paper such as this, and it is always important to be on guard against the hardening of ideas into dogma, of their losing their significance through mere repetition. To do so all the more necessary since fundamental anarchist ideas have to changed much over the years, much that Godwin wrote over a century and a half ago could not usefully be added to to-day.'

Here the Freedom editor recognises the real dilemma for an editor who has sat perhaps too long in the editor's chair and is in danger of a cookbook approach to every unfolding event. Many of the publication on the left fall into this trap of repetitous cliques and dogma. Anna Kleist may not have fully grasped the real problems, but I venture to say, she can see things more sharply than the more mature than Jon Bigger with his plea for 'standards and principles'. The Direct Action Movement [DAM] to which I was once affilated in the 1980s spent time endlessly debating its 'Aims & Principles' but i never had a policy directed at the real world. The Anna Kleist approach is refreshing as the Gregson analysis was in 1953 because their assessments detect some seen but unnoticed features of the current crisis in the anarchist tribe.

* 'Jon Bigger' was a post-graduate at Loughborough University.

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