The Managerial Revolution & Trump's evolution

Editorial Comment:

EIGHTY YEARS AGO James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution, which in 1941 caused a stir both in the USA and in this country. It recently occured to me as I struggled to make sense of what was going on now, that what was happening in the United States with Trump had something to do with the phenomena of managerialism. In this book Burnham took the view that capitalism was on the way out, but that Socialism was not replacing it, and that what was emerging was a kind of planned, centralized society which would be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.

In such a society what may be called the new boss class was arising, and was to be composed of, in Burnham's view; business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together as 'managers'. What it gave us in 1945 with in the UK, under the Labour government, was nationalisation and the NHS, and the New Deal in the USA.

Below is an account by Timothy Shenk on what lies behind the developments which have led to what has now come to be called 'Trumpism'.

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The Dark History Behind Donald Trump

'The Republican intellectual establishment (in the USA) is united against Trump – but his message of cultural and racial resentment has deep roots in the American right' so wrote Timothy Shenk, in an article in The Guardian (Tue 16 Aug 2016) entitled 'The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt'.

And he added: 'Trump is a unique character, but the principles he defends and the passions he inflames have been part of the modern American right since its formation in the aftermath of the second world war. Most conservative thinkers have forgotten or repressed this part of their history, which is why they are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown today. Like addicts the morning after a bender, they are baffled at the face they see in the mirror.'

Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.

But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.

This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.

'The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World' was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”.

The son of a wealthy railway executive, Burnham graduated near the top of his class in Princeton in 1927 before studying at Oxford and then securing his post at NYU. But the Great Depression radicalised him, and he began a double life, lecturing on Aquinas by day and polemicising against capital by night. By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat. While Trotsky denounced his erstwhile disciple as an “educated witch doctor”, Burnham started work on the book that would justify his apostasy.

According to Burnham, Marxists were right to anticipate capitalism’s imminent demise but wrong about what would come next. Around the turn of the 20th century, he claimed, the scale of life had changed. Population growth surged, immense corporations gobbled up smaller rivals, and government officials struggled to expand their powers to match the growing size of the challenges they faced.

These structural changes fundamentally altered the distribution of power in society. In the 18th century, authority had rested with aristocrats; in the 19th century with capitalists; in the 20th century it had passed on to the managers, whose authority derived from their unique ability to operate the complex institutions that now dominated mass society.

Technocrats had become the new ruling class. According to Burnham, fascism, Stalinism and Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal were all products of this transformation, and there was no use struggling against the world that was coming into being – a world where state ownership of the means of production had become the norm, where sovereignty had shifted to a bureaucratic elite, and where the globe was divided into rival superstates.

Burnham was not the first to foresee a society run by managers, but the arguments he borrowed from others took on a different meaning when brought together in this form. His sweep was global, his narrative reached back centuries, and he almost seemed to welcome a totalitarian future. For Burnham, the only sensible response to the managerial revolution was to recognise that it had occurred and accept there was no point in trying to bring back a world that was already lost. This bleak forecast captured the public imagination. Fortune called it “the most debated book published so far this year” and it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.

For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.

Burnham’s new found zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.

Soon Burnham was Buckley’s ranking deputy. But in an editorial staff riven by abstract debates between ardent libertarians and devout Christians, Burnham was the pragmatist who urged his colleagues not to ask politicians for more than the electorate would accept. For the right to win over working-class voters, Burnham argued, the movement had to embrace a more populist economic policy – contrary to the wishes of his anti-statist colleagues and their corporate backers, who wanted to lower taxes on the rich and roll back the welfare state. “Much of conservative doctrine,” Burnham wrote in 1972, “is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obviously obsolescent.” Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was president, and it was Burnham who seemed like a relic of the past.

For a long time, the only major study of Burnham’s work was a slim volume published in 1984 by a minor academic press under the title Power and History. The book’s author, Samuel Francis, seemed a typical product of the insurgent conservative movement Burnham had helped to create – though by the late 1990s, when Francis published an updated version of Power and History, it made more sense to speak of a new conservative establishment. Outsiders who arrived at the White House with Reagan had become senior executives in Conservatism Inc. With the end of the cold war, the right had lost the glue that had bound its coalition, but there were still battles to be waged, and the money was better than ever.

Francis was never going to become a star in the emerging rightwing infotainment complex. Shy and overweight, with teeth stained from smoking, he had difficulty making it through cocktail parties. After completing a PhD in British history at the University of North Carolina, Francis left academia for Washington – first working at a rightwing thinktank, then serving as an aide to a Republican senator, and finally joining the editorial staff of the capital’s influential conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times.

Francis retained his academic interests while he ascended into the ranks of the conservative establishment. He published six books in his lifetime, but he worked in private on one massive volume that he hoped would bring together all the disparate strands of his thought. Finished in 1995 but not discovered until after his death a decade later, the result was published earlier this year under the title Leviathan and Its Enemies. It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor.

It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American right in a generation – and the most frightening. It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.

Like much of Francis’s writing, Leviathan and Its Enemies began with Burnham – in this case, quite literally. “This book,” Francis announced in the first sentence, “is an effort to revise and reformulate the theory of the managerial revolution as advanced by James Burnham in 1941.”

Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised. Not everyone had benefited from the rise of the experts – and Francis saw this unequal distribution of rewards as the managerial regime’s greatest weakness.

For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity”. These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

According to Francis, this cohort had supplied the animating spirit of rightwing politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. They had supported Goldwater – but Francis regarded Goldwater’s programme, like the “movement conservatism” of the National Review, as a “quaintly bourgeois” throwback to the oligarchic politics of the 19th century, with nothing to offer the modern working man. Their tribune was not Goldwater but George Wallace, the notorious segregationist and Democratic governor of Alabama – who won five southern states as an anti-civil rights third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had appealed to this group, too, but neglected their interests after taking office. Despite having elected multiple presidents, the post-bourgeois proletariat had yet to find a voice.

But not all of the right’s intellectuals have been so blind. While keepers of the conservative flame in Washington and New York repeatedly proclaimed that Trump could never win the Republican nomination, in February a small group of anonymous writers from inside the conservative movement launched a blog that championed “Trumpism” – and attacked their former allies on the right, who were determined to halt its ascent. In recognition of the man who inspired it, they called their site the Journal of American Greatness.

Yet Francis had difficulty explaining why managerial society would generate so much opposition in the first place. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, he argued that resistance to the cosmopolitan elite would be driven by “immutable elements of human nature” that “necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning”.

He was more candid in a speech he gave while working on the book. “What we as whites must do,” he declared, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” Where mainstream conservatives depicted the US as a nation whose diverse population was linked by devotion to its founding principles, Francis viewed it as a racial project inextricably bound up with white rule. The managerial revolution jeopardised this racial hierarchy, and so it must be overthrown.

Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism. Years earlier, Francis had struck up a friendship with Jared Taylor, who went on to found the magazine with Francis’s encouragement. From their first encounter, Taylor recalled, he and Francis “understood each other immediately”.

Francis’s employers at the Washington Times were not as sympathetic. The paper fired him after his comments were released, a move that was part of his larger expulsion from the respectable right. Buckley himself dismissed Francis as “spokesman” for a group that had “earned their exclusion from thoughtful conservative ranks”.

Yet Francis would not be so easily purged. For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan, a one-time Nixon protege who had become one of the country’s most recognisable conservatives thanks to his role as co-host of CNN’s popular debating programme Crossfire. In 1992, Buchanan launched a long-shot campaign against incumbent president George HW Bush that, against all expectations, garnered almost 3m votes in the primaries. While all this was going on, Buchanan was growing closer to Francis, whom he later called “perhaps the brightest and best thinker on the right”.

Francis and Buchanan were linked by their association with a breakaway faction on the right known as paleoconservatism. While mainstream conservatives had taken advantage of cushy gigs in New York and Washington, paleocons depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996, this time as the candidate of the post-bourgeois resistance. That campaign would be based on three issues: protectionism, opposition to immigration and an “America First” foreign policy that repudiated global commitments and foreign interventions in order to focus on defending the national interest.

Buchanan listened, and he went on to a surprise win in New Hampshire’s pivotal early primary, convincing Francis that the managerial elite was more vulnerable than at any point in his lifetime. While mainstream Republicans and Democrats celebrated forecasts that the US population was on track to become less than 50% white as a sign of America’s capacity to adapt and grow, Francis believed that the members of his post-bourgeois proletariat regarded these shifting demographics as another reminder of their dwindling power.

Buchanan’s campaign fizzled after New Hampshire, but Francis had a ready explanation for the collapse: Buchanan was too loyal to the Republican party to seize the opportunity he had been granted. “Don’t even use the word ‘conservative,’” Francis told Buchanan. “It doesn’t mean anything any more.” The managerial class had absorbed Buckley and his followers. They, too, were the enemy.

After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik”. He was a regular contributor to outlets promoting white racial consciousness – becoming, in Jared Taylor’s words, “the intellectual leader of a small but growing movement”. Francis denied that he was a white supremacist, but he condemned interracial sex, warned of “incipient race war” and drafted a manifesto for a white nationalist group arguing: “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.”

When he looked ahead, Francis was especially concerned with the threat that one rising political star posed to his vision of the future. Barack Obama, he remarked in 2004, was “the model of what the New American is supposed to be”. Ivy League-educated, effortlessly cosmopolitan, promising to transcend barriers of race – Obama was the embodiment of the managerial elite. He represented everything Francis loathed about the contemporary United States.

The fact that Obama, Francis’s symbol for American decadence, became one of the most popular figures in the country brought the great contradiction of his thought into relief. The 19th century belonged to the bourgeoisie and the 20th century to the managers, he argued, because these rising classes had performed necessary social functions. His post-bourgeois proletariat, by contrast, were on the decline.

So was Francis. The supposed realist who cast hunger for power as the driving force of world history spent most of his time writing for journals with subscribers in the low five figures. In his last years, he was a lonely man. Before his sudden death from a cardiac aneurism in 2005, he had begun a study of conservatism and race. His masterpiece, Leviathan and Its Enemies, was still tucked away in a box of floppy disks; when it was published 11 years later, it would be under the auspices of a white-nationalist press. The right-leaning Washington Examiner ran one of his few obituaries. “Sam Francis,” it said, “was merely a racist and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything less.” It seemed just as likely that Francis would not be remembered at all.

"You want you to really listen to this,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in January this year. The king of rightwing talk radio was lecturing his audience, which averages around 13 million people a week, on Samuel Francis. Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” Before abandoning the subject, he added one point. Francis, Limbaugh noted, “later in life suffered the – acquired the – reputation of being a white supremacist”, a reputation Limbaugh insisted was undeserved.

The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life disagree on that point, but they also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration. “Sam would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do,” maintains Jared Taylor, who made news in the primary season when it was revealed that he had recorded automated phone messages endorsing Trump. (“White Supremacist Robocall Heartily Urges Iowa Voters to Support Trump,” reported a headline in the conservative Daily Caller.) According to Taylor’s American Renaissance, “Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”

Even liberal commentators are looking back at Francis – whose prediction of a white working-class backlash against a globalist ruling elite seems to be coming true not just in the US but across Europe. “If you just drop the white nationalism a lot of Francis makes sense,” says Michael Lind, who once worked as an assistant to Buckley but now describes himself as a “radical centrist”. According to Lind, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency – the mostly white working class”, creating space for the rise of Trump.

Francis was also an inspiration for the team at the Journal of American Greatness, who called him “the closest thing to what could be described as the source of Trumpian thought” in their very first post. They admitted that Francis’s writing “overtly indulges various Southern nostalgias”, but insisted that his “deservedly criticised statements on race” could be separated from the core of his analysis. The managerial class was still the enemy, and only Trump seemed even dimly aware of what it would take to mount an effective challenge.

Trump the candidate, they admitted, was at best an imperfect messenger. But it was the message that counted: “The American regime – like nearly all its cousins in the west – has devolved into an oligarchy.” JAG was not just arguing that Trump’s campaign had a coherent agenda – a controversial assertion, given that many on both the left and right have dismissed Trump as an unhinged demagogue jabbing randomly at pressure points in the electorate. It was arguing that Trump succeeded because of his platform. Without those ideas, he would have been just another novelty candidate. Armed with them, any of Trump’s more disciplined rivals might have stolen the nomination from him – but instead they opted for recycled bromides from the Reagan era.

The site could be fiery in its defence of Trump, but the best moments came when its targets were the grandees of the right. There are plenty of scathing articles about rightwing thinktanks written from the left, but none of their authors could write a sentence such as “Seeing conservatives court billionaires – which I have had occasion to do dozens, if not hundreds, of times – is like watching dorks tell cheerleaders how pretty they are.”

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Charles Charalambous & his response to NV.

  by Brian Bamford

CHARLES CHARALAMBOUS, Editor of Labour Internationalist, questions my treatment of the argument set out in his editorial:  '“Thinning out the herd”: austerity kills'.  He is responding to my posted critique 'ON CERTAINTY' IN THE Coronavirus'.

He asks:  'what do you (Northern Voices) think of the basic argument set out in the statement?'
He says:  'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions, which Labour Internationalist endorses.'

He confirms:  'We cannot (nor would we want to) predict the medical impact of Covid-19, but what we can say is that the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.'

He further asks:  'Do you disagree with the argument that the deliberate underfunding of the NHS over many years, designed to encourage the creeping privatisation of various components of the NHS and the promotion of a healthcare "market" that involves profits and shareholder dividends, is a major reason for the NHS's lack of resources and capacity to respond to the virus's impact in a timely and appropriate way?'

What is wrong with this form of reasoning?

We have got to distinguish between the effects caused by government policies  from other effects outside their control.  The political scientists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, have demonstrated 'Democracy for Realists (2016)' that often shows voters punish politicians for outcomes that are clearly not under their control, including natural events such as shark attacks, droughts and floods.  To these we might, I suppose, add pandemics such as the current Coronavirus.

Mr. Chahalambous wisely qualifies his position by saying he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19' none-the-less he says the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.

The Origins of the virus

What we do know is one doctor in China tried to warn the world in December, and he, too, is now a statistic after dying from the virus in January.
 
A sad and disturbing part of this epidemic is the story of Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, which is the epicenter of COVID-19.
Dr. Li found seven confirmed cases of respiratory disease and coronavirus infection in his hospital in late December 2019.

He messaged his medical school classmates in WeChat, the Chinese social network, on Dec. 30, 2019. His WeChat post was shared in multiple internet platforms and gained wide attention.

We also know that the local authorities in Wuhan reprimanded Dr. Li for making false comments on the internet. He was then forced to sign a letter of admonition and promised not to repeat the transgression.

After the admonition, Dr. Li went back to work in Wuhan Central Hospital where he examined a patient, who was a storekeeper at Huanan Seafood Market with glaucoma and fever.  Sadly, he became infected with coronavirus, which eventually took his life.

That was the initial sequence of events that led to the medical development of the virus throughout the world.  The virus is presumed to have an animal origin with animal-to-human transfer at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.  The infection became human-to-human and is now a global pandemic.

It suggests that in a strict hierarchical system such as in China that the local authorities in Wuhan sought to do what they thought would please their bosses in Beijing, and thus their first reaction was to clamp down on the whistle-blower Dr. Li.  Consequently the underlings misread the situation.

Cookbook Explanations & Remedies 

Whenever I engage with a tract based on a Marxist perspective such as Mr. CHARALAMBOUS offers here from the Fourth International, I feel as if I'm reading a book on French Provincial Cookery.    I feel that something's being cooked-up for me that comes from some rigid recipe from a tired cook, who can't be bothered to think outside the ideological box.

I'm not saying Mr. CHARALAMBOUS hasn't thought through his analysis.  Indeed not, as he has a closely considered position, and he is modest enough to admit that he can't predict the 'medical impact of Covid-19', but he insists the 'evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system'.  Nor would I say that our government was well prepared for a pandemic such as Covid-19.  Clearly it wasn't.  Especially when compared with Germany that was so much better prepared to tackle the virus and has checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report.  Germany also benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.


Germany has a powerful weapon in the battle to contain Covid-19: a wealth of private laboratories that are helping it test more than 50,000 people a day.
The country had already tested about 920,000 people through late March and checked more than 350,000 people in the past week alone, the Robert Koch Institute public health group said Tuesday in a report.  That may still understate the country’s total effort, since not all the laboratories that have done assays have yet submitted numbers for last week.

Germany’s widespread testing -- still not as comprehensive as many there would like -- has enabled better tracking of the coronavirus’s spread than in many other European nations. The country benefits from other health-care advantages, including one of the continent’s highest rates of hospital beds in relation to population size.

The fact is as Wittgenstein wrote:   'It is hard to tell someone who is shortsighted how to get to a place.  Because you can't say “Look at that church tower ten miles away over there and go in that direction".'

We should all by now be coming to realise that in the current crisis we are all shortsighted!

Claims & Predictions

What we at Northern Voices hold to, as I tried to explain when I wrote my post 'ON CERTAINTY' in the Cronavirus', is that maybe 'Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs..'

Yet, Mr. CHARALAMBOUS writes:

'what we can say is that the evolution of the virus outbreak into a pandemic was enabled by a capitalist system that prioritises profit and the interests of big business over the well-being of the population, and that those wrong priorities will probably continue to result in deaths which could have been avoided.  So, the alternative to capitalist barbarism is socialism, which starts with defending the interests of the working class against the interests of the capitalists.'

He insists:  'the argument is based on a Marxist perspective over three pages, and the statement draws definite conclusions'

But which version of the Marxist perspective is he and his followers employing here?  Most thinkers these days realise that the social sciences can't prophesy future historical developments with any degree of accuracy because of the many variables involved in human affairs and the unintended consequences of human actions.  A pandemic had been predicted; five years ago, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates gave a TED Talk had been warning that the world was not ready to take one on - but no one could prophesy that it would come from a wet market in Wuhan and how it would then develop.

Karl Popper* has written:  'It should be mentioned.... that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences of these unintended consequences.'  And he writes that '[i]n his more mature utterances, he [Marx] says that we are all caught in the net of the social system.  Popper adds:  'The capitalist is not as not the demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than the proletarian.' 

This sociological view of Marx has been disregarded by Marxists and Popper claims it has been replaced by a 'perhaps for propaganda reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it - and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy Theory  has replaced it.'

 Conspiracy Theories

Charles Charalambous in his editorial “Thinning out the herd” writes:   The UK government 'chose a strategy based on the theory of “herd immunity”, which means survival of the fittest: let the virus work its way through the population, who will gradually build up immunity, and if hundreds of thousands of older and weaker citizens die, well tough luck.'

He said:  '[the] initial response to the crisis (for at least one month) was to ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists around the world who were calling for urgent practical measures to limitand confront Covid-19.'

This is not true because on March 27th, Tim Harford wrote in his column in the FT:  

'When I read about a new disease-modelling study from the University of Oxford, I desperately wanted to believe.  It is the most prominent exploration of the “tip-of-the-iceberg hypothesis”, which suggests that the majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even un­noticed by the people infected.  If true, many of us — perhaps most of us in Europe — have already had the virus and probably developed some degree of immunity.'

Clearly Charles Charalambous had seemingly overlooked the Oxford University model when he wrote that the Johnson government chose to 'ignore the views of epidemiologists and immunologists'.  Clearly initially the government chose to follow the 'tip-of-the-iceberg' Oxford study rather than the grimmer Imperial College study which has now been adopted of a current 'lock down'.
This then leads to a kind of conspiracy theory based on a kind of catastrophic gradualism that allows in a form euthanasia in which is an attitude of "let it thin out the herd" and so, for him, it ultimately proves 'the bankruptcy of the capitalist system: let the older and weaker citizens die, which ultimately will lighten the burden on the NHS and the pensions system.'
Karl Popper does not assert that conspiracies never happen, but he does say 'they are not very frequent, and they do not change the character of social life.'  If Charles Charalambousis is asserting that people with a taste for eating pangolins or bats in a wet market in Wuhan, China is evidence of a capitalist conspiracy, then I think the Labour Internationalist are scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

*  Conjecture and Refutations:  The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) by Karl Popper

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'Bitch-Godess Success' at M/c Royal Exchange

review by Brian Bamford

Above, is the original cross, Viburnum x bodnantense, flowering at Kew earlier this week.
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BEFORE I went to review the play  'Death of a Salesman' at the Manchester Royal Exchange, I went to put out the rubbish bins in the backyard, and I was delighted to see the Viburnham Farreri in bloom with its pink and white clusters.  It is mid-Autumn and the fragrant shrub flowers at its best now.  It was Autumn when Arthur Miller began to work on :'The Death of a Salesman' (1949), and  Miller says:  'A morning in the spring.  And everything was starting to bud.  Beautiful weather.  Like this, except now it's fall.'

Before Miller began writing the play he constructed a cabin in which he wrote the play to be on his own.  He says it was an impulse to do a practical act before addressing the problems of a man who was impractical:  a salesman called Willy Loman who struggled to make a sale.  He's a salesman who in the first lines in the play tells his wife that 'It's all right.  I came back.'

Arthur Miller in an interview told John Lahr:  'It's a denial.  I mean, imagine a salesman being unable to get past Yonkers.  It's like the end of the world.'  

Yonkers is the fourth most populous city in the U.S. state of New York.

It's a play about human failure of someone confronted with an ideal 'the American Dream' which he somehow can't live up to.  Yet in his mind he deludes himself and he unsuccessfully tries to recruit others to share in his delusions. 

Here is a man who is deluded to some fixed ideas of what it means to be successful by become a different person from what he really is.  In this version of the play at the Royal Exchange he is presented as a black man Willy (Don Warrington) who is not only uneasy in his own skin but who is envious of Charley played by Tom Hodgkins, the white man, who offers him a position that could have saved him.

Here is a fixed body of cultural values which we could call the 'American Dream':  perhaps a false belief system of what the philosopher William James called 'our national disease' or the 'exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success'.

Sarah Churchwell writing in the programme for the play almost inevitably relates the play to the present day, and she writes:  'The deterioration of American ideals from meritocracy into selfish entitlement' and she adds, 'the damage such a loss of values presents to a society, is the real moral arc of Miller's play; if Willy Loman is an American everyman, then his tragedy is not that of one man, but of a nation he represents.'

Is Willy's problem one of 'Bad Faith', such as Sartre might have called it, or do we see it in the context of Marxist 'False Consciousness'?  Is the play about a state of one man's mind or about a reaching out to a social ideal?

The moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, who died only last week wrote:  'The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more.  The trouble is simply that they don’t love others enough.'

The trouble with Willy is that he's not at home in his own skin.  Miller told John Lahr he wanted to have Willy in the play, so 'We should literally see, or be conscious of, his mind working elsewhere, with other people.'   

With Sartre it was the idea of the wine waiter banging the glasses down on the table, while his mind is elsewhere or the woman having sex and imagining she's with someone else.  With Willy he's hearing his brother Ben's voice in his head going on about the gold and wealth in Alaska.  Or as Miller says:  'I think we all think on two, three or four different levels at the same time.'

Sarah Churchwell, the literary academic in the programme writes of the subtitle of the play as being 'Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem'.  She claims the play condemns the 'superficial fetishization of objects and rationalization of selfishness and greed.'  The materialisn that leaves the American dream 'rotting from the inside out'.

Miller based Willy on a family friend, Manny Newman, but the director of this Royal Exchange play, Sarah Frankcom, has staged 'Salesman' around a black family with what could well be a cultural coconut - brown on the outside and white on the inside, in the central role.

Towards the end of the play Willy tells his brother Ben 'I'm worth more dead than alive!'

And in almost the final utterance of his wife, Linda Loman, ejaculates over his grave is 'I've just paid off the final payment on the mortgage!'

When I got home I checked to make sure the Viburnham Farreri was still in flower and still fragrant..

 Go see the play!

*******

Ersatz Anarchists and Fake 'FREEDOM'

by Chris Draper

THERE’s a lot of fake “Anarchy” about these days.  Authoritarians wrapped in the black flag proclaim the pseudo-science of Marx whilst practicing the politics of Trotsky and Lenin.  Their “class-struggle” rhetoric replaces the rejection of authority that properly defines Anarchism.

Kapital' Idea Vicar!

THE rot first set-in at 'Freedom', the movement’s erstwhile newspaper, with the bizarre appointment of a Marxist editor who found Jesus and was reborn as a Vicar.  

Closing the paper down in 2014 with the triumphant declaration, 'Kropotkin Might Have Started it but We Fucking Finished It!'  the ersatz 'anarchists' refused to vacate the building and now run the premises as rentiers issuing occasional press statements like their 6 March 2018 celebration of the violent suppression of free-speech. 

 

'Freedom’s' response to my reasoned critique betrays an utter absence of anarchist values.  In place of a thoughtful, cogent, closely-argued libertarian response all Northern Voices received from 'Zofia Brom' of 'Freedom' was a random string of abusive invective;

• ‘I couldn’t care less what you think’…
• ‘can not (sic) be arsed to read Northern Voices’
• ‘nobody cares what your shitty blog has to say’………etc.

Essential Anarchism

Regrettably this behaviour is all too common. Free-speech, truth and reason are essential ingredients of anarchism.  Other varieties of socialism accept 'means-to-an-end' politics; Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism demands party-discipline, subservience and uniformity whilst Labourism eschews principles in pursuit of popularity. 

For Anarchism 'the personal is political', to build an anarchist society you need citizens with a libertarian psychology. Communists might imagine they can smash capitalism and mechanically rearrange the pieces to re-engineer citizens in a chillingly instrumental fashion but anarchism’s bottom-up approach demands patience and humanity. 

Old-school anarchists Colin Ward and Gustav Landauer remind us:  

 'The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.'

Ignoring, insulting, censoring, no-platforming and even physically assaulting critics reinforces the sort of authoritarian relationships anarchists oppose and ultimately strengthens the state.  Rather than expound on the sociopathy of ersatz anarchists I prefer to articulate a positive alternative. 

To offer a practical guide to 'everyday anarchy in action', originally compiled by A K Brown and, incidentally, published in 'Freedom' in the years before the authoritarians took over.  Of course, there’s more to Anarchism than just these eight bullet points but if you’re uncomfortable adopting them you’d probably be more comfy under the duvet with the Commissars.

 

Everyday Anarchy

1.  Say what you honestly think, not what some theory says you ought to think.  If the evidence of your eyes contradicts your theory (and I include anarchist theory under this), ditch the theory, don’t go blind.

2.  Don’t join organisations whose ideals you don’t share simply because they are bigger than you. Campaign openly and honestly whenever you can and if you can’t form your own organisations and have to join someone else’s (eg a union at work), don’t try to take it over unless the majority agree with you and you want to help. Argue for your ideas instead.

3.  Never ask for something you don’t really want in order to take 'workers' through the experience. Campaign for things which are worth winning (and preferably which may be won soon).

4.  If you are in an organisation, don’t be scared to disagree with each other in public and to accept varieties of opinions. You don’t have to split every time you disagree over what’s happening in Nicaragua.

5.  Respect the rights of minorities. Listen to what others have to say and try to avoid imposing the majority will on them until there’s no alternative.

6.  Participate in campaigns and actions when you want to, not when others make you feel guilty. This will lower your political activity in the short term but enable you to be active for much longer and be more effective (you will sound like you mean what you say not like you would rather be at home).

7.   Accept that no one organisation has a monopoly of the truth. Just because other people belong to other organisations doesn’t make everything they say wrong.

8.   Trust people who are putting forward sensible ideas now (they are the only leaders we need). Never trust anyone calling themselves a leader and thus assuming the right to have all their ideas treated as if they were all good ones.

Christopher Draper (March 2018)

******

Studies in the Anatomy of the British Left

by Brian Bamford

IT is now almost 50 years since Harold Garfinkel wrote his book 'Studies in Ethnomethodology' in 1967.  Garfinkel's book was a systematic attack on the kind of sociological and ideological thinking that was prevailing in much of the social sciences at that time, and which amounted to 'cookbook analysis'.  With a  functionalist or Marxist cookbook one didn't need to think critically or empirically about social phenomena or real life events; all one needed to do was to produce a suitable recipe to deal with the world.

In his essay in The Independent on the current thinking of the 'radical left' Bailey Lamon seems to have uncovered the latest facet of the phenomena of 'cookbook thinking' among some of the current half-baked student community of scholars at the beginning of the 21^st century.   Claiming to have been 'involved in activism since the Occupy Movement of 2011', Bailey Lamon makes a perceptive observation in which he contrasts the world of what he calls the 'oppressed groups,... such as the homeless, abused, addicted' with that of the half-baked students and activists, who in their wisdom claim to be able to diagnose the problems of those that suffer and to prescribe cures and generally to cleanse us all of our imperfections.  Mr. Lamon addresses the challenge to such clever-dick thinking which besets seemingly most of the British left:

'If you’ve ever worked with oppressed groups, such as people who are homeless, abused, addicted or suffering from mental health problems, there's one thing you learn straight away. They usually don't frame their worldviews in terms of academic theories students learn in gender studies classes in university. For the most part, they tend to not analyse their experiences in terms of systemic power and privilege, concepts such as “the patriarchy”, “white privilege”, or “heteronormativity”.

'While many of these folks know that they're directly impacted by class inequality, they don't sit around pondering capitalism, reading Marx, or tackling the effects of “problematic behaviours”. They are not concerned with checking their privilege.  No.  They are busy trying to survive. Getting through the next day. Meeting their basic needs. They don't bother with policing their language and worrying about how their words might unintentionally perpetuate certain stereotypes.  They are more concerned with their voices being heard.'   
Young students today are desirous of passing exams and the easiest way to accomplish this is in finding some ideological formula or recipe knowledge to spout out pretentious doctrines and slogans such as 'patriarchy'; 'white privilege' or 'heteronormativity'.  What these bumptious people lack in experience of poverty; life in the workplace; the prison yard or living on the streets, they try to compensate by pseudo-intellectual blather.
Mr Lamon writes about some of the people he encountered in the Occupy Movement: 
'Yet I witness so many “activists” who ignore the realities of oppression despite saying that they care about those at the bottom of society.  They think that being offended by something is equal to experiencing prison time or living on the streets.  They talk about listening, being humble and not having preconceptions.  Yet they ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are.'
These people are so convinced that they, and only they, have the key to the universe and that what they believe must be self-evident that they do not accept that their views should be subject to any form of forensic examination.  Consequently as we have noticed on many occasions they believe that they have the entitlement to coerce others to swallow whatever fashionable fad that they have embraced.
God help the British Left!
See http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-this-radical-activist-is-disillusioned-by-the-toxic-culture-of-the-left-a6895211.html 

Radical Women at Working Class Library

RADICAL WOMEN:  1880-1914 CONFERENCE Saturday 17 September  9.30am-4pm This one-day conference will celebrate the battles and achievements of working-class women in the drive to achieve a fairer and more balanced society. The decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century saw an upsurge in female activism as women began to organise themselves into trade unions, take part in the socialist debates on social and economic change, and demand the vote. Radical women not only battled against the gender- conservative males within their family or community but also those who claimed to be fighting for equality. There will be keynote addresses by Professor Sheila Rowbotham, University of Manchester and Professor Karen Hunt, Keele University. Papers include the Cabin Restaurant waitresses strike of 1908; the life of Crewe tailoress, campaigner, activitist and author Ada Neild Chew; the forgotten history of domestic servants in women’s suffrage; radical women and the bicycle; suffragette Constance Lytton # and the cause of prison reform; plus many more. Full programme details:  http://www.wcml.org.uk/whats-on/events/radical-women-18801914/. Tickets: £20 (£7.50 unwaged) including lunch and refreshments Book in advance from trustees@wcml.org.uk Saturday Library Opening  Don't forget we're open on the first Saturday of most months - the next one is Saturday 6 August 2016,  10am to 4pm. FREE TALK Wednesday 14th September 2pm  Pit Props: music, international solidarity and the 1984/85 miners' strike A new book from the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, edited by Granville Williams, marks the end of an era in coal mining in the UK and highlights how the year-long struggle by the miners in defence of jobs and communities still resonates today. Details here. This free talk is part of our autumn Invisible Histories series. All welcome.   EXHIBITION 'We Only Want the Earth' 28 September - early 2017 On the centenary of the Easter Rising an exhibition exploring the life of one of its leaders, James Connolly, will be on display here at the Library.    No Power on Earth - Living History performance Based on the true story of Salford man, James Hudson, this monologue tells the story of an ordinary school teacher at the start of the First World War who finds himself at odds with the popular mood. The story, written by Sue Reddish, celebrates his courage to stay true to his beliefs despite considerable pressure, and asks the audience to consider what they would do in such a circumstance. This was performed at both the Library and in local schools earlier this year. The script is now available for download from this page on our website. Although the copyright is ours, we would be delighted if others use it and put on their own performances; just let us know so we can help publicise it.   CALLS FOR PAPERS  Radical Footnotes Radical Footnotes is an independent typographic space committed to bring forward the printed expression of the Working Class. Call for proposals: submit a short discourse addressing problems, analyzing developments, points of contention, methodologies, approaches and insights concerning: ‘DAS KAPITAL’ the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its publication Deadline: December 2016 Details here http://www.socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/308422 The Women and Girls of Crewe, the North of England, and Beyond 1880-2016 One Day Conference - Wednesday 7th, December 2016 Manchester Metropolitan University, Crewe  Proposals are invited for this free one day interdisciplinary conference inspired by the life and works of the suffragist, author and labour rights campaigner Ada Nield Chew and the forthcoming centenary of the Representation of the People Act. Deadline: 7 August 2016 Details here: http://www.localyouthengagement.org/uncategorized/call-for-papers/

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George Julian Harney: Radical Chartist

Hegel vs Wittgenstein's approach 

DAVID Goodway gave a talk on Saturday the 7th, February 2014, at the Peoples' History Museum on George Julian Harney, one of the leading Chartists.  He was introducing the book that he edited and published in 2014, and was entitled 'The Chartists Were Right' on Mr. Harney's contributions to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, which is the first selection of Harney's journalism to be published.  Mr. Goodway taught sociology, history and Victorian studies to mainly adult students at the University of Leeds.  His first book had been London Chartism, 1838-1848 (1982).  Elsewhere Mr. Goodway has written mostly on anarchism and libertarian socialism.

David Goodway gave a brief history of Chartism and the general background of the times mentioning the Newport uprising, as well as other attempted uprisings in Dewsbury and Sheffield, and later in Manchester and Birmingham; the 1832 strike in Stalybridge; the murder of a policeman in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1848.  He insisted that there had been no link or continuity with the labour movement and that ultimately Chartism had been replaced by trade unionism.  He posed the question as to why Chartism failed after some 50 years of agitation.  He didn't seem to answer this precisely, but pointed out that the demand for the Charter was for more specific reasons to do with the New Poor Law, and also concerns about the factory system and it had been confronted by an alliance of the propertied classes. 

The main intellectual influence on Harney was the Irishman Bronterre O'Brien, the editor the Poor Man's Guardian, who was an enthusiast for the French Revolution identifying with Robespierre.  Harney was more drawn to Marat and often signed himself 'L'Ami du Peuple' (Friend of the People).  In April 1839, he wrote for the London Democrat, but during his travels in the north of England he was seen as one of the foremost spokesmen of physical-force Chartism, and in May 1839, soon after the Convention moved to Birmingham, a warrant was issued for his arrest for a seditious speech he was reputed to have made there.  He was arrested at Bedlington in July, and held for a time at Warwick Gaol, but in April 1840 the case was dropped, because his speech had not been properly witnessed.    

He was appointed Northern Star correspondent for Sheffield and later became its sub-editor in July 1843 when O'Connor,  its proprietor, dismissed the Rev. William Hill and replaced him with Joshua Hobson.  Hobson started to give Harney a free hand.  By the time he was formally appointed editor in October 1845 Harney had already taken-over as editor in practice.  From then on through the 1850s his influence was at its height as although O'Conner was the proprietor of the Northern Star, to begin with he gave Harney editorial independence.   

In the 1840s, the Northern Star was based in Leeds, and Friedrich Engels had visited there in 1843 when he met Harney and they became lifelong friends,  Engels was to write:

'We kept in touch with the revolutionary section of the English Chartists through Julian Harney, the editor of the movement's central organ, the Northern Star, to which I was a contributor.'

Engels thought Harney should push himself into the Chartist leadership over O'Connor but Harney disagreed responding:

'A popular leader should be possessed of magnificent bodily appearance, an iron frame, eloquence, or at least a ready fluency of tongue.  I have none of these.  O'C. has them all – at least in degree. ...'

Then very perceptively Harney argued that the qualities that Engels claimed for Harney were, in fact, in English terms defects:

'...the very qualities you (Engels) give me the credit of possessing, and which you emphatically sum up in the sentence “You are the only Englishman who is really free of all prejudices that distinguish the Englishman from the Continental man” are sufficient of themselves to prevent my being a leader.' 

Goodway writes that 'Harney, a Londoner and indeed a proletarian, was then insufficiently English in outlook, whereas O'Connor, who belonged to the Irish gentry, exerted a mesmeric appeal on the English working class, many whom were, of course, either Irish-born or of Irish origin.' 

Harney fell out with Marx and Engels over the issue of social inclusiveness which Harney proclaimed:  'I stay not to enquire whether they were of the aristocratic [sic], bourgeoisie, or the proletariat.  Enough for me that they were men of earnest convictions, which they maintained through every kind of adversity, including bonds, exile, and to death.' 

Essentially Marx and Engels were Hegelians or some may say 'monomaniacs', while Harney's writings in his publications were as Mr. Goodway says: 'vigorously polymathic, ranging across literature, contemporary politics and world history of all periods.'   

Wittgenstein wrote:

'Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same...  Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.' 

George Julian Harney in his editorship of the Northern Star was not engaged in producing a mono-maniac tract for Marxists, hence David Goodway was able to say that  the Northern Star sold well and was 'not boring' and was definitely 'not a sectarian paper'.  Basically Harney, according to Mr. Goodway, was all for inclusiveness while 'Marx and Engels couldn't stomach that'.  Mr. Goodway also insisted that the Chartists were in no way 'Socialists' and that no direct line could be drawn between the Chartist movement and the formation of the Labour Party at the end of the 19^th Century.  O'Connor believed in peasant proprietors, according to Goodway; and when I asked if this meant he was more in the tradition of the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mr Goodway agreed with me on this. 

Anarchist Fed.: Under the Pavement Politics

 by Chris Draper.

 LENIN urged the Communist Party to support the Labour Party 'like a rope supports a hanged man'; the 'Anarchist Federation' (AF) provides a similar facility for the British anarchist movement. AF’s conspiratorial politics are a destructive threat and an ethical affront to all fair-minded anarchists.

AF employs bans, censorship and violence to silence its critics as it pursues a 'semi-secretive' party-building strategy aimed at unifying and dominating the British anarchist movement. Fortunately AF has had limited success and its claimed membership only equals the number of libertarians that in 2013 signed a letter deploring AF violence.

The organisation’s title is the original deceit. Until 2001 AF was more accurately labelled ACF, the 'Anarchist Communist Federation', an organisation whose declared, 'emphasis was on building a Platformist style organisation in Britain'. The name change might have signalled a move towards undiluted anarchism but it didn’t, it was a cynical marketing ploy to ditch a tainted brand. 'It should be noted that the decision was not unanimous and some ACF members argued against the name change because of fears of dilution of our politics' but were reassured, 'this does not reflect a change in political direction'. 'We didn’t change our Aims and Principles!' (nb. text within quotes is taken directly from AF documents, unless otherwise indicated). 'With the name change we hope to create dialogue with those new to revolutionary ideas.'

AF hoped to conceal its continuing Platformist policies in order to attract, 'those new to revolutionary ideas' because, as members of the Direct Action Movement (DAM) observed at the time; 'The Platform was rejected by most of the anarchist movement and denounced as an attempt to Bolshevise anarchism'.   AF appeared to concur as they adjusted and extended their marketing, 'to attract those disillusioned by Leninism'.  The AF’s 'Platform' incorporates the 'Manifesto' of French Libertarian Communist George Fontenis, a proponent of the 'vanguard party' as well as the Council Communist politics of Anton Pannekoek despite admitting, 'the ideas of Anton Pannekoek are situated clearly within the Marxist tradition.  True Pannekoek was never an anarchist but the ideas he espoused hold much in common with and have greatly influenced the ideas of the Anarchist Federation of today.' 

ACF’s second, undeclared, aim in modifying its name was to establish market dominance. Neophytes would assume that this new “Anarchist Federation” embraced the whole spectrum of British anarchism, so why look elsewhere? In 2005 Dave (McLibel) Morris identified AF’s habit of airbrushing from history the work, and indeed the very existence, of anarchist activists outside AF. Responding to a typically jaundiced account published in AF’s journal, “Organise”, Morris wrote to AF to insist, 'there’s a very wide range of anarchist and anarchist-influenced activities which could and should also be acknowledged.'

The third aim in dropping the “C” was to give overseas anarchists the impression that ACF is an inclusive federation representative of the 2,000-3,000 or so anarchists in Britain (Morris’s estimate). This facilitated the organisation’s affiliation to the “International Anarchist Federation” (IAF) enabling the clique running AF to attend IAF meetings and misrepresent the views of the rest of us.

AF might have had legitimate claim to the label if those pushing the name change originated from the Anarchist rather than the Communist wing of the ACF but the founding members of the ACF in 1985 came from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Libertarian Communist Group respectively. The AF planned to establish a single, “specific, unified libertarian communist organisation…with a unified strategy and practice”. Anyone unsure whether this is Anarchy in Action or vanguardist party-building might refer to the organisations “Manifesto and Programme” (I kid you not). Inside AF’s party manifesto we learn their plan is to establish, 'semi-secretive…groups of dedicated revolutionaries'.

These self styled 'semi-secretive revolutionaries' hide their real names and operate either anonymously or behind aliases. Only the names of non-members appear in AF publications, otherwise all articles are unsigned. Their claimed logic is the threat they pose to the system would otherwise make them prime targets for the security services but if they really believe this confounds the State they are even more deluded than I think. Without names there is an obvious distancing from readers and others who come across the organisation. Hierarchies are hidden and accountability absent. The truth is that behind the scenes Nick Heath writes most the stuff and pulls most of the strings.

Ruth Kinna’s excellent “Introduction to Anarchism”, accurately identifies AF as “London-based” and “semi-secretive” but missed comrade Heath’s latest cunning plan for extending his party-building empire. Hints appeared in a 2011 edition of “Organise” where AF claim responsibility for “getting regional bookfairs off the ground in Sheffield, Manchester and Bristol”. Exploiting the well-established reputation of the London Bookfair for unsectarian promotion of all forms and interpretations of anarchism AF bankrolls local fairs to provide sectarian recruitment opportunities.

The recent Manchester Bookfair (November 2014) illustrates AF practice. Whilst a range of libertarians were allowed stalls (Vegans, Anarchist Voices, Cunningham Amendment etc) the “talks” (nb. not workshops or discussion groups) were dominated by AF and their stooges. Everyone attending the “Introduction to Anarchism” talk was handed a free 48-page booklet, not a general intro to the spectrum of anarchist ideas and organisations, such as Kinna’s book or Nicholas Walter’s pamphlet. It was an “Introduction to Anarchist Communism: The Anarchist Federation”. This isn’t anarchist consciousness-raising it’s “semi-secretive” party-building.

A member of the Northern Anarchist Network (NAN) known to be critical of AF politics was denied entry to the bookfair by a member of the venue’s (Pump House Museum) staff on the instructions of organisers “Veg” and “Dave Under the Pavement”. Staff had, apparently, been instructed to also refuse entry to another un-named anarchist. The organisers refuse to state openly the justification for these bans or their intended duration. It remains unproven whether “Veg” or Mister “Under the Pavement” are members of AF or, in Lenin’s (alleged) words, “useful idiots” but it is certain that AF is behind the ban.

At the 2012 London Bookfair an AF gang launched a premeditated violent attack on a lone anarchist tallholder that was witnessed by independent publisher, Ross Bradshaw of “Five Leaves” who reported the incident on his blog:
'Early in the day a small group from Manchester asked the one person at Northern Voices to leave. It was not clear to me at that moment why. It turned out that the magazine had some time ago written a rather unfavourable, and indeed rather unpleasant, obituary of the Manchester anarchist Bob Miller. Some time later in the morning a large group of people, from Manchester and elsewhere, returned to the stall, and when the stall holder refused to leave, wrecked it, stealing most of the material on display and covering the stall-holder and the stall (and one unrelated stall-holder behind NV) with salad cream. Though the stall-holder was uninjured, save for a bruised face when he fell and some irritation from the cream getting into his eyes, he was pretty shocked, as was anyone seeing the incident. I have no doubt that his original article was unwise and should not have been published – the best critique of it appears on NV’s own rather good blog.'

Another independent witness to the incident was a rather frail 78-year-old, Mr Ilyan Hugh Thomas of Carmarthen who happened to be passing just as the AF thugs struck. Mr Thomas kindly, and rather bravely, followed the gang back to their AF stall where he remonstrated with them and attempted to retrieve some of the literature stolen from Bamford’s stall. Despite his obvious age Mr Thomas was punched to the floor by the AF thugs.

A 'Burnley Declaration' deploring AF bans and violence was circulated and rapidly gained 150 signatures. AF characteristically failed to respond. In fact AF action immediately prior to and following the event served to further underline the organisation’s authoritarianism and contempt for the wider movement. (Incidentally I share Mr Bradshaw’s criticism of the obituary and note that NV itself published criticism of editor Bamford, a characteristically libertarian response so evidently absent from publications, organisations or events controlled by AF).

Cumbrian anarchist Martin Gilbert recalls that, on 'The day before the 2012 London Anarchist Bookfair I went to Freedom Bookshop. By chance I met Brian Bamford. After a short time Nick Heath (AF founding father) entered the shop emitting a string of verbal abuse against Brian. Freedom bookshop is visited by comrades from all over the world as well as people who are quite new to our ideas and actions. Nick’s outburst, whatever the cause could only give the worst of impressions.'

Despite this unrestrained public aggression when presented with an opportunity to politely state its case in clear rational terms so the rest of the movement could understand and judge for itself AF prove worse than unresponsive. Consider what happened when the “Burnley Declaration” was submitted to the anarchist newspaper Freedom in December 2012. Freedom’s editor emailed back:
'I am just letting you know that your statement will be appearing in the Jan issue of the paper. I am a bit behind at the moment, but would expect it to be ready to print in a week – ten days from now. I also wanted you to know that in the interests of fairness/not taking sides, I have contacted the Anarchist Federation and asked them whether they would like to write a response to your statement. If they choose to respond then that would also be included in the same issue.

Kind regards,

Matthew.'

AF responded alright but not in a nice way. Presented with an opportunity to either denounce the violence as the isolated acts of a rogue element or to justify their actions AF did neither. As veteran anarchist and member of the newspaper collective, Donald Rooum explains, Freedom 'got a nasty letter from Nick Heath saying if your letter was published, he would withdraw co-operation, including the offer of a book.' Although Donald explains he didn’t approve of AF’s conduct, along with the rest of the collective he gave in to AF threats. Freedom should have made a principled stand and gone ahead and published details of the attack and allowed the anarchist movement to judge the facts for itself but instead Freedom effectively colluded with AF. This was not Freedom’s finest hour but the rot had already set in. The paper was already on the verge of collapse having in recent years systematically driven away most of its regular writers and subscribers through its ever-increasing indulgence in crude, unthinking, confrontational AF-sponsored propaganda. The anarchist movement might have detected the writing was on the wall for FREEDOM as early as 2004 when AF boasted in their house magazine:
'FREEDOM NOW UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT! - MORE ANARCHIST COMMUNIST'!

After so cravenly caving in to Heath it was unsurprising that, the Freedom collective then bowed to his request to formally become an integral member of the editorial group. Heath had previously stated his wish to see the number of anarchist journals reduced to create a 'unified voice' and in 2014 Freedom ceased publication. Freedom continues to publish books and its most recent production is the one referred to above, by a certain Mr N Heath.

AF is not a federation of anarchists but a sectarian, vanguardist party. You are either with them or against them. Fellow travellers are tolerated, even encouraged, but anarchists who reject the revealed truths of the AF creed are fair game for anything from insults to physical attack with censorship, bans, and exclusions all part of the armoury. A disillusioned AF member revealed 'Federation members would routinely ridicule other anarchists' (nb. text in bold italics are the words of disenchanted or ex-AF members). Despite most chroniclers describing the 1960’s and 1970’s as a high watermark of anarchist influence AF characteristically denigrates, distorts and dismisses the constructive work of highly regarded anarchists like Colin Ward and Nicholas Walter; 'Of course, the humanist and pacifist elements that rejected class struggle continued to peddle their forms of radical liberalism within the pages of Freedom and Anarchy.'

'Lifestylist has become a derogatory smear for anyone who does not follow the neo-Platformist party line.'  'Sometimes people would just resort to crass stereotypes about squatters and hippies.'   Mutual respect for comrades pursuing alternative visions of anarchism is alien to AF whose vanguardism is formally denied although their 'leadership of ideas' is loudly and officially proclaimed. AF also modestly claims to embody the 'memory of the working class'.

In 2011, Comrade Heath declared:
'We have to be seen as a serious movement, not one viewed as ineffectual and passive, riddled with dilettantes and cranks.'

Almost a century earlier Henry Hyndman the autocratic founder of Britain’s first Marxist party denounced the iconoclastic libertarian influence of gay pioneer Edward Carpenter and his friends in chillingly similar terms:
'I do not want the movement to be a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them, we are scientific socialists and have no room for sentimentalists.'
Tolstoyan anarchist editor Charles W Daniel responded to such prejudice by renaming his own periodical The Crank and lest that title appeared too modern he later renamed it Ye Crank. As Henry George artfully observed, 'A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions.' Cranks are the very essence of anarchy and the intolerance of AF’s policy and practice the antithesis.

Not every Tom, Dick or Harriet is allowed to join this elite organisation. Although AF members conceal their own identities you can’t join unless you first email your name and address to party HQ. Then follows the vetting procedure; a member of the party faithful first visits your residence to assess whether you’re ideological sound and likely to be loyal. Then you have to sign over a sizeable, regular levy on your income to party funds. Any ideological deviation, unacceptable level of activism, disloyalty or non-payment and you’re out, expelled. 'I just tried to check my emails one day on the AF account and found out I had been deleted'.

Leaving voluntarily is akin to apostasy and much resented with one ex-AF member reporting:
'I wrote a resignation email to explain why I was leaving and share my critique of the organisation’s inactivity and informal hierarchy. The response I got was someone asking me not to post my melodramatic Shakespearian soliloquy on the list. Nice way to respond to someone who has worked in the organisation for five years.'

Fortunately the party building isn’t going too well. AF are a bit like the saloons in the old cowboy films, the frontage looks big and impressive but round the back it’s really just a ramshackle shed. 'I imagined the Anarchist Federation was a lot bigger than it turned out to be…it never seemed to grow in the few years I was associated with it.' The maximum membership claimed by AF is 150 and when 10 members attended their Scottish conference AF considered this a good result. The published list of branches appears quite extensive until you realise that AF considers 3 members constitute a branch and in terms of activism, “many branches barely exist”.

As self-proclaimed anarchists, AF won’t admit the reality of an informal but effective hierarchy but it doesn’t take recruits long to realise AF’s professed democratic structure is a fiction. AF is effectively controlled by an informal group; 'a small friendship clique of the longest serving members…these Elders seemed to have decided long ago to crush youthful initiatives… just like the Trotskyists they claimed to be so different from'.

Writing in 'Total Liberty' in 2007 Peter Good identified this approach:
'Following the collapse of global Marxism…anarchists sought meaning in class-struggle organisations.  Many of which are little different from stereotypical revolutionary groups…the spirit that created them soon gets subsumed under a need to arrive at a unified orthodoxy. In doing so the organisation loses contacts with the context of the everyday.  Before long a system of administration kicks-in and we are witness to all the paraphanalia of bureaucracy, subscriptions, membership, meetings, mail-outs, exclusions.'

A disenchanted AF member reports:
'I am not exaggerating when I say that the vast majority of the time spent at national conference went on discussing internal administrative problems.' A 'unified orthodoxy' is well established and an,
'overly defensive group-mentality exists in AF'. 'It would be better if the whole thing was abandoned and a new organisation formed.'

Good’s analysis shouldn’t be misconstrued as opposing all forms of organisation as he goes on to claim, “The affinity group is the fundamental unit of any Free Society”. Good’s critique does however demonstrate how the ideology of AF dovetails with its authoritarian practice. He goes on to explain, 'The great fallacy of revolutionary organisation is a belief that the root of oppression lies in defective institutions. In demanding a new set of institutions it fails to address the need to change individuals. History is replete with descriptions of how institutional practices of the former society get carried across through personalities of the revolutionaries.'

Or as Gustav Landauer put it:
'The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but it is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.'

Contrast this approach with AF’s:
'Once capitalism has been destroyed, we can set about the exciting task of fulfilling our individual potential and shaping this new community' (AF “Manifesto”, 5th edition, pg 15).

Attacks on comrades, 'semi-secrecy' and 'Under-the-Pavement' politics have no proper place in our movement and I publish this open letter as a challenge to all members of the Anarchist Federation to come out of the woodwork and debate your politics in public. I write as an individual but know from conversations with comrades that many share my perception of AF. I challenge AF to debate, 'Semi-secret Politics versus Open Anarchism' at the next Manchester Bookfair although I suspect AF will simply add my name to the banned list and continue operating under the pavement.

For Peace, Love & Anarchy,

Christopher Draper, Llandudno (December 2014)