Review: 'Slow Burning Fuse' & Anarchist Aspects

by Brian Bamford
Reviews:  'The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of the British 
Anarchists' by John Quail, published by Freedom Press [2014] price £15.,

and 'Aspects of Anarchism' published by the Anarchist Federation price £1.  
 Both available from Freedom Press: 
84b, Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. 

IN concluding his book 'The Slow Burning Fuse; The Lost History of the British Anarchists', John Quail writes: 

'...the anarchists of England have paid for the gap between their day-to-day activities and their utopian aspirations.  This gap consists basically of a lack of strategy, a lack of sense of how various activities fit together to form a whole, a lack of ability to assess a general situation and initiate a general project which is consistent with the anarchist utopia, and which is not only consistent with anarchist tactics but inspires them.' 

Mr. Quail admits that 'Such general Anarchist projects have existed, perhaps the best examples being the anarcho-syndicalist trades unions of Spain and France.' 

In his Forword to the Freedom Press 2014 edition of Quail's book Nick Heath*[1] writes 'I would take issue, as very much an organisational anarchist, with some of (Quail's) comments on organisation in his conclusion.'    

John Quail's book fundamentally emphasises the reactionary nature of English anarchism:  only capable of responding in a series of fits-and-starts to specifically social and political conditions.  In contrast to Quail, Mr. Heath no doubt believes what is documented in his Anarchist Federation's pamphlet 'Aspects of Anarchism' (2003) that 'The structure (of an anarchist communist organisation) must increase the ability of the organisation to perpetuate itself while its ends remain un-realised'. 

The historical characteristic of the British left in general has been to react to the agenda set by the establishment and initiatives developed by governments.  The Anarchist Federation in Britain is well within this defensive tradition of reactionary responses as is shown in their pamphlet under review 'Aspects of Anarchism' in the closing paragraphs of this booklet under the subheading 'Our Role' the author writes:  'Large demonstrations and strikes can often turn to violence and we should accept the need for self-defence.' 

Or the author writes:  'In non-revolutionary periods anarchist communists will be a conscious minority with “the leadership of ideas”.'  

There is much talk of 'revolution' here, but the writer mentions 'self-defence' because the nature of British politics is so much about reacting to the authorities in a tactical way rather than developing a serious strategy for social change.  And in the very next sentence the writer continues:  'Groups like the hit squads arising from the miners strike (1984-5) are genuine expressions of working class resistance.'  And then the writer goes on to argue 'we will need to defend ourselves against the violence of our enemies.'  This is all about 'defence' and 'resistance'  not about a pro-active program for social transformation, what's so revolutionary about that? 

The fact is that this is typical of the British left over the ages, and of the most memorable struggles in this country from the General Strike of 1926, to the Peace Movement of the 1960s, to the Miner's Strike of 1984-5, have been reactionary in that they have been responses to the actions of governments. 

Much of the rest of the AF's pamphlet in an act of belief in commitment or act of faith and of solving the problem of 'other minds', or as the writer puts it: 

'Determination and Solidarity:  To create effective organisations we must know our own and other's  [sic] minds, therefore there must be a high degree of communication, of sharing. We must set about creating aspiration, setting achievable targets, celebrating success, rededicating ourselves again and again to the reasons why we have formed or participate in organisation.'

When at random I compare this kind of feeble analyse to an interview in 1977, between the Spanish anarchist, Juan Garcia Oliver entitled 'My revolutionary life' the nature of the abstraction of 'Aspects of Anarchism' becomes clear.  When the questioner, Freddy Gomez asks 'What were the circumstances in which you became active in the libertarian movement and the CNT?'

Garcia Oliver answers:  'We need to be precise about this.  The idea of the “libertarian movement” surfaced well after the period we are talking about.  The CNT, on the other hand, was a long-established battle organisation which in those days marshaled revolutionary syndicalists, especially in Catalonia and therefore throughout Spain.  I join as a 17 year old.  I was working in the hospitality trade, as cafe waiter.  We had just seen the “La Canadiense” strike which is still famous because it was handled to perfection and won by the CNT's Light and Power Union.'

For people like Nick Heath they want to create an organisation or anarchist movement before there are anarchists, were as Garcia Oliver realises that it is in the practical life of the social body of the working class that anarchists are formed and from which the political organisation may then arise. I became an anarchist out of my experiences in the national strikes of engineering apprentices in the early 1960s; those experiences showed me first-hand how the bosses operated, and how the trade union officials and the local politicians operated, just as Garcia Oliver learnt through his experiences in the strikes of waiters for the abolition of tipping.

The point is the theory and the ideas evolve out of the shopfloor struggle.   It is this half-baked idea of the struggle developing out of the theory that is wrong with the approach of the Anarchist Federation: theirs is a form of cookbook anarchism in which the chef knows best. 

The dispute over what Peter Kropotkin stood for 'anarcho-communism', and what Bakunin believed 'collectivism', according to the anthropologist Gerald Brenan in his 'The Spanish Labyrinth' (1962), divided the Regional Federation of Spanish anarchists in 1888:  the argument was about whether anarchist organisations should consist just of convinced Anarchists or if all workers should be included if they were willing to join.  Brenan writes: 

'...with the introduction of Anarcho-Syndicalism in 1909, it was finally decided in accordance with Bakunin's ideas, the question of the nature of the future form of society became less importance.'

It is necessary to mention that this Spanish experience because the history of anarchism there is significant as a consequence of its success in that country.  Garcia Oliver responding to a question about the time when in about 1920 he joined the anarchist 'Bandera Negra' about 'some sort of understanding between syndicalists and anarchists' said:  'We were still a long way from what came later – anarcho-syndicalism – which overcame this dichotomy.  Anarcho-syndicalism allowed anarchism to become part and parcel of trade unionist groups which were imbued with anarchist thinking'.  Garcia Oliver said that he had joined 'Bandera Negra' by mistake and implies that at that time he ought to have been more syndicalist or 'revolutionary syndicalist', because 'Bandera Negra' (Black Flag) 'spent its time liaising – nationally and internationally – with other groups and its main activity was reading incoming correspondence and replying to it.'  The Spanish 'Bandera Negra', according to Garcia Oliver, like the Anarchist Federation was firmly against trade unionism and the CNT.

John Quail recalls the International Anarchist Congress of 1881 in London thus:

'The International Congress was basically an affair of and for Continental and Russian revolutionaries.  The minutes ... reveal that the English delegates played little part; yet many of the people involved were ... exiles in London and the British socialists that a more sophisticated libertarian philosophy was to develop relevant to British conditions.'  

Brenan has written of the same 1881 Congress:

'The Spanish delegate, when he went back to Madrid, took several new ideas with him.  (But) Spaniards lived then at a great distance from the rest of Europe.  Besides, anarchism had still a large proletarian following.  Under such conditions terrorist action was madness and would not find any encouragement among workers.  The new Regional Federation had in any case no need to appeal for violent methods.  Its progress during the first year or two of its existence was rapid.  A Congresss held in Seville in 1882 represented some 50,000 workers, of whom 30,000 came from Andalusia and most of the rest from Catalonia.'

In England, John Quail has demonstrated in his conclusion:

'The anarchist movement in England has shown itself capable of a progression of initiatives taken according to circumstances.  Take, for example, the beginnings of the squatters movement in London.'

Quail realises that the English anarchists are prisoner's of historical circumstances when he argues 'it is only when anarchist strategies develop [and] move from pin-prick defiance and piecemeal defence to confront and change all this that the anarchist movement will make history instead of being dependent on it.'  But this is true of the British left in general and even the trade unions, nay especially the British trade unions in this country, in so far as they are always reacting to events.  Perhaps it is because he now sees change in this respect as such an hopeless expectation in this country that I understand Mr. Quail is no longer sees himself as an anarchist.  As one northern anarchist once said to me:  'Each new batch of English anarchists have to learn the same old lessons every few decades, until in the end some of them give it up as a bad job.'

Starting in 1881, Quail identifies 'the first systematic propaganda defining itself as anarchist that had any effect within the (English) socialist movement came from America the shape of Benjamin Tucker's paper Liberty'.  It seems that Liberty was a 'lively and far ranging and even (Tucker) was prepared to give space for the Anarchist Communist view', though according to Quail, Tucker had 'a good eye for revolutionary humbug'.  And, on the English left there is so much 'humbug' about.

John Quail then goes on to remind us that '[t]he introduction of specifically anarchist ideas into the working class  movement was thus going on well before the alleged Year One of English anarchism, 1886, which saw the foundation of Freedom.' (p37)  (Freedom was finally closed down in 2014, and since then there has been an ongoing disputes between those who scuttled the ship of Freedom and their critics).

In conclusion Quail [page 333] writes:

'The anarchists have since shown the same astonishing ability to suddenly come from nowhere when everyone had assumed that they were finished...  A new movement emerged out of CND and the Committee of 100 and to dispersed.  The student movement of the 1960s again showed strong libertarian proclivities.   And that too seems to have disappeared.  I do not propose to talk about these movements in this book...  A bare mention, however, is sufficient to bear out the general thesis that has emerged throughout the book that the anarchist movement grows in times of popular self-activity, feeds it and feeds off it, and declines when that self-activity declines.'

In contrast to Quail, Nick Heath wants to keep the anarchist movement alive in the fallow years with what he calls the 'leadership of ideas'.  John Quail's book is very London oriented and it fails to include what the northern anarchist  James Pinkerton sometimes called the 'anarchist fellow travellers':  for in the same way that some say 'Christianity doesn't depend on the Christians', so very often anarchism doesn't depend upon the anarchists, as people like Colin Ward seems to have been aware.  William Morris was close to anarchism politically but his influence was larger than mere politics and people like both Quail and Heath will both tend to overlook the 'Arts and Crafts movement' intellectually dominated by Morris, John Ruskin's ideas and the development of the National Trust, and self-help societies, and other kinds of cultural and intellectual spin-off. 

Colin Ward's ideas developed in around 1960 is a more recent example of this approach, which in those days he described as 'permanent protest' or as some claim 'revisionist anarchism'.   In a soon to be published memoir by the veteran anarchist Laurens Otter writes:  'Colin (while retaining the term Revisionist Anarchism) was by 1961 defining his aim as “widening the sphere of  freedom”.'    Mr. Otter then writes:  'Ward's then desired journal (which became “Anarchy: a journal of anarchist ideas”) would from its beginning reject any belief in progressive fundamental change.'

These ideas of Colin Ward contrast not just with the kind of intellectual bigotry of Nick Heath and the the more refine historical determinism of John Quail, but also with the whole of left-wing ideology in this country.  This rupture which Colin Ward developed in the 1960s can best be understood by considering what George Orwell has to say in his essay 'Writers and Leviathan' (1948):

'The whole of left-wing ideology, scientific and Utopian, was evolved by people who had no immediate prospect of attaining power.  It was therefore, an extremist ideology, utterly contemptuous of kings, governments, laws, prisons, police forces, armies, flags, frontiers, patriotism, religion, conventional morality, and, the whole existing scheme of things.'

Anarchism, like the rest of the British left, inherited a certain evolutionary faith associated with the Whig theory of history, or as George Orwell writes:

'Moreover the Left had inherited from Liberalism certain distinctly questionable beliefs, such as the belief that the truth will prevail and persecution defeats itself, or that man is naturally good and is only corrupted by his environment.'

Elsewhere, Orwell points out in his essay 'Inside the Whale' (1940) that no 'real revolutionary feeling' had not existed for years and that the 'pathetic membership of all extremist parties show this clearly'.  In that situation the British Communist Party became a subservient tool of Russian foreign policy and the rest of the left became for most part insignificant.

It seems to me that it is hard to see how English anarchists can escape the 'fate of history' or what Mr. Quail calls 'its pin-prick defiance and piecemeal defence' anymore than the British left can transform itself from the perpetual reactionary role of resisting changes imposed by the British establishment.  Mr. Heath and his Anarchist Fed. show no sign of capturing the public imagination with his own belief in what Wyndham Lewis once called the 'associational habit' of membership organisations.

The Spanish anarchists, as Garcia Oliver says, benefited from having the trade union 'battle ground' of the CNT, and British anarchism gained vast influence when it had the peace movement to work inside in the 1960s.  Today, anarchism lacks any focus or serious social movement to seriously promote its energies, in that situation some of us have found it more prudent to adopt politics with a regional tinge.

*    Nick Heath leads a small sectarian grouping called variously the Anarchist Federation or A.fed. which grew up in the 1980s.  Unlike John Quail, he does not embrace the broader Church of British anarchism.

[1]  Since this review was first written over a year ago the Anarchist Federation: 'fight[ing] for a world without leaders'  has split in two, with Nick Heath and what was the old class war trend have now formed a group called 'communist anarchism', leaving the more modern trans-tendency inside the A.Fed, with its distinguished international affiliations, to soldier-on under the old AF label.

It was once said that the old Liberal Party MPs could just about fill a taxi, but now Nick Heath and 'communist anarchism' tribe could just about get by on a tandem made for two:  Battlescarred in London and Serge Forward in the provinces.   

For example, we learn that on Saturday 17th February [2018], 'anarchist communist militants met in Leicester to found a new organisation, the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG).'

Anarchist Federation Splits!

by Chris Draper

REJOICE – the Authoritarian Fraud has been exposed and the AF come unstuck!  Once several AF branches issued an ‘Unauthorised’ statement on the disruption of the 2017 London Anarchist Bookfair we knew they’d be trouble.  

Sharp eyed observers spotted the pronouncement didn’t carry the imprimatur of AF’s Supreme Leader, KIM JONG HEATH and predicted he might press AF’s nuclear button.  Admittedly Northern Voices thought he’d incinerate the enemy – those branches and individuals who’d challenged THE PARTY LINE would be expelled but instead the worms revolted and the Supreme Leader along with his entire Politiburo were forced to walk the plank! – Rejoice!

This had to happen sooner or later.  In the words of 'Monty Python' this devastating split exemplified, 'The violence inherent in the (AF) system' for AF was never really Anarchist nor was it a Federation.   In reality, AF was nothing more than a small authoritarian political party, an ideological sect.

'Anarchist Federation' sounds very open and free – not only libertarian, but a federation composed of independent-minded local branches but the name was always a con, chosen for marketing purposes because the reality was deeply unappealing.  If we go back to 1980 the Supreme Leader’s sect called themselves the Libertarian Communist Group (LCG) with just 16 members who were regarded by most anarchists as at best, 'Anarcho-Trots'.

As if they were determined to rid themselves of the 'Anarcho' part of the label altogether LCG then fused with the Marxist 'Big Flame'!  By 1984 this Great Leap Forward had resulted in a party, BF, with a grand total of 17 members!

The next move was to abandon 'BF' and create the 'Anarchist Communist Federation', but as this moniker proved equally unappealing the sect adopted the more consumer-friendly but utterly deceptive 'Anarchist Federation'.   Anarchism is supposed to be a 'bottom-up' political philosophy, but this wasn’t AF practice.  Firstly there’s the Catechism or core of compulsory beliefs and policies, or 'Platform' as they prefer to call it.  

To join AF you not only had to fully embrace the Platform, but had to have your belief and sincerity tested.  Like the Moonies, a couple of party apparatchiks would call on prospective disciples to test out your worthiness before you were anointed with AF membership.  In a rare published interview, in 2003, the Supreme Leader, admitted,  'Each member has to agree with our ideas and is met by AF members before they join'.  Membership came at a cost, a compulsory levy on your income was demanded.  Lapses in regular payment or ideological deviation resulted in denunciation and expulsion.

Of course Comrade Nick Heath never referred to himself as, 'The Supreme Leader', he preferred instead to call himself 'Battle Scarred', but as his militancy was confined to a liking for abusive language and a career as a librarian perhaps he meant, 'Battle Scared'.

KIM JONG HEATH will doubtless come up with some new mini-political party although, rather amusingly, at the moment he calls his faction, 'Communist Anarchists',  whilst his Leicester ex-Politiburo associate names his faction, 'Anarchist Communists' !  A Federation of two.

There is a positive role for a genuine, open, bottom-up, 'Anarchist Federation' to play in Britain.  Perhaps the faction continuing the title, cleansed of the Supreme Leader’s sub-Marxist faction might fulfil that role but first they’ll have to ditch an awful inheritance of dishonest and authoritarian practice.  

Their published support for the violent disruption of the Bookfair suggests the new AF is no better than the old and in this instance Bakunin’s familiar aphorism seems appropriate:

 'The urge to destroy (the AF) is a creative urge.'

******

Identity Confusion in Anarchist Federation?

A Crisis of Cookbook Thinking

A recently expelled member of the now fragmented 'Anarchist Federation'  wrote a complaint about the group last August on libcom, he or she concluded the long epistle by describing the background of the organisation thus:

'Bureaucratic, formalistic, bereft of ideas, willing to accept a group of leaders because they have organisational power and its members do not, because they occupy all spaces within the Federation, allowing no space to other ideas.  When it attempts educational work it is like being in school: there are things that members must learn and learn to repeat back but never to discuss, to explore, to refute or reject; that is not allowed.' 

This individual account seems to form a basis for what is now happening in the AF, by suggesting the membership organisation was a sort of Sunday School for anarco-commissars who are only capable of cookbook analysis of an half-baked Marxist type..

Anarchist Bookfair Blues

Following the wild attacks on Helen Steel, and what have been described as the 'Radical Feminists' at the London Anarchist Bookfair last October, some elements of the Anarchist Federation outside London began issuing statements and signing open-letters condemning the organisers of the London Bookfair for their tolerance of critics of the proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act.  The provincial groups which put the names of their factions to the open letters attacking the Bookfair organisers calling for 'disassociation' included such bodies as the  'AFED TRANS ACTION FACTION'; 'Edinbugh;Anarchist Federation'; Liverpool A.F.; and South Wales A.F.

At the same time there was a deafening silence from the A.F. high-command around Nick Heath in London.   Clearly the open-letters published by the provincials were seen in London for what they clearly were, compositions of gross ineptitude.  

What very likely followed were attempts by Nick Heath and his Metropolitan elite to get things under control by urging  the bumbling provincials to withdraw their corny compositions attacking well respected anarchists like Helen Steel and the Bookfair organisers.  Events resulting in the recent resignations of the central core 'communist anarchism' faction, is now demonstrating that that the attempts to get a grip on the provincial supporters of the Trans hotheads failed.

In this way the A,Fed embrace of the exotic Trans identity tendency has resulted in a disaster which would have been a little local difficulty in a bigger body like the Labour Party, but among the tiny tribes of political anarchism it represents the virtual extinction.from the body politic.  By embracing gender politics Nick Heath and the AF have gained a few members, but ultimately it has bit them on the arse.*

 Fleas Pretending to be Elephants!

On the 20th, November 2017, just over 3-weeks after the London Bookfair debacle the Anarchist Federation issued a Statement which included the following observations:
'The AF regrets that the opportunity has probably been lost to transform the London Anarchist Bookfair – which in recent years has developed into one of the most important and representative anarchist events globally – into an environment where this situation cannot not reoccur.  Whilst the right of people to choose their gender identity is not up for debate, discussion about the relationship between different oppressions and their relationship to the wider class struggle are nonetheless important.'

This is the kind of froth that the general public, if they troubled to read it, will find wearisome, but to the people inside the bubble of the interpretive community it may sound impressive.  It's full of froth because their Statement is rooted in humbug and hypocrisy.  It's hypocritical because members of the AF have often been at the centre of the troubles at the Bookfairs up and down the country.

In October 2012, Nick Heath dismissed the theft of books from a book stall at the London Bookfair by some AF members as 'an unofficial action by some people in the AF'.  In December 2012, Nick Heath was at the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair orchestrating Barry Woodling expulsion through an Emergency Exit where he had to climb down a Fire Escape.  In October 2013, there was an AF reported altercation outside the London Bookfair against Ciaron O’Reilly accusing him of being a 'rape apologist' for supporting Julian Assange.  The Manchester Anarchist Bookfair took place without incident because of a deal struck between the management of the People's History Musuem and an editor of Northern Voices.  In 2014, the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair was hit with problems because it became apparent that Ronnie Marsden of the Sol. Fed., Peter Good (Cunningham Amendment) and others were operating a lifetime ban against Barry Woodling, a lad of Jewish origins, who Mr. Marsden from 2012 has accused of being an 'anti-Semite',  In 2015, the management of the People's History Museum, after Baron John Monks became involved, finally banned the anarchists around Ronnie Marsden from having any further Bookfairs, and as a consequence there was no Manchester Bookfair that year.

When in December 2017 Tony Wood, one of the distinguished organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, was interviewed on Dissident Radio in London** about the decision not to hold another bookfair in 2018, he referred to ongoing conflicts at bookfairs over the last 5- years.  It is noticeable that during that period the tiny Anarchist Federation with little political clout in main stream politics, has been close to the centre of the bookfair disputes with the possible exception of the Syrian / Kurd conflict in 2016.

See the AF blog article is also on the web: http://www.afed.org.uk/2018/01/01/2018-in-with-the-new/

For more:
http://www.afed.org.uk/2017/11/20/statements-following-london-anarchist-bookfair-of-october-2017/
Or more: 
 https://communistanarchism.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/class-struggle-anarchist-statement-on_1.html?m=1

Readers also ought to consider the following matterial by Milan Rai on Peace News:

https://anarchistnews.org/content/how-destroy-our-own-movements

  

 *  On the Moral Maze, it was estimated that the Trans constituency nationally represents about 0.1% of the population,  A relatively small social community, but one substantially larger than the AF membership, which must be very nearly two in one million or less than 100 in total.  In this situation it is not surprising that the gender politicians out-voted the Sunday School League class struggle types.
**  Listen to Radio interview on 

http://thebrilliant.org/podcast/episode-58-exclusion-iv/

http://thebrilliant.org/podcast/episode-58-exclusion-iv/

The Significance of Roberts Arundel in the 1960s

by Brian Bamford

Northern trade unionists confront police at Roberts Arundel

IN Nov 2006, the anarchist historian, Nick Heath* reflected upon his experiences in the UK anarchist movement since the 1960s, and the lessons on organisation and politics he finds valid for anarchists today.  His observations include the idea that '[o]rganisational responsibility and discipline should not be controversial'. [see 'The UK anarchist movement - Looking back and forward' posted on libcom].

Part way through his long account he ponders the problems of the failures of anarchists since its high point in the early to mid-1960s during the rise of the peace movement:
'One of the shortcomings that they had highlighted was the lack of industrial activity.  As Brian Bamford, whom I do not often agree with, has pointed out:  “At the time of disputes at Roberts-Arundel in Stockport**, Pilkington’s Glassworks in St Helens***, the strikes and stay-in occupations at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and in engineering, the miners struggles in the 1970s, the anarchist influence was tiny” (Freedom 6 August 1994)'

This year it is the 50th anniversary of the Roberts Arundel strike in Stockport, and Stockport Trade Union Council has put on an exhibition to commemorate the occasion.

At the time of the strike at Roberts-Arundel in 1966, mentioned in the above quote from Freedom, the Manchester Anarchist Group [MAG] was far bigger than the small International Socialist body with only 20 members locally and most of whom were students.   Both Colin Barker and his then friend and fellow sociologist John Lee, who later like me became an ethnomethodologist, were anxious to engage with me and some of the local working-class anarchists.  They knew that I had been involved in the national strikes of the engineering apprentices in the early 1960s, and still edited the apprentice paper Industrial Youth that came out of those disputes; both Colin and John were keen to collaborate with us with a view of building up their own I.S. group.  The trouble then was that most of the Manchester anarchists in the MAG didn't have any affinity with factory workers and trade unionists.  They were good on peace demos etc. waving their black and red flags, but it was as if they were frightened of engaging with genuine workers at their places of work.

When I was sacked for supporting the apprentices at Robinsons in Rochdale in 1965, the MAG refused to come down because they said they didn't want to be 'authoritarian', and tell the apprentices what to do!  Again in 1966, when I was given my marching orders at Tomlinsons up Milnrow the MAG held aloof yet again steering clear of the factory gates.  In similar circumstances I doubt that Colin Barker and I.S. would have been so timid, but by that time I had already decided to return to Spain, where I had a job waiting among the more practical and proletarian Gibraltar anarchists.

Under the influence of Ron Marsden, and Alan Barlow**** when the Manchester anarchists discussed the Roberts-Arundel dispute at a meeting at Mother Macs pub in central Manchester, the meeting was swayed and persuaded to not attend a support meeting called by the International Socialists [IS] to support the Roberts-Arundel strikers, the reasoning at that time being that they didn't want to swell the support for the trotskyists in IS.  This is significant and relevant to what Mr. Heath is saying, yet I believe both he and Colin Barker draw the wrong conclusions in arguing that the anarchists and international socialists needed a national organisation or party.

In an interview with Colin Barker, now a retired sociology lecturer, in 2015 in the publication RS21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century) vividly describes the situation he found himself with the IS in 1966 at the time of the Roberts-Arundel dispute:
'We were a group of about twenty people.  We’d got the building workers, and we were talking on very friendly terms with one or two CP engineers.  By then I think we’d recruited one or two.  We look as if we’re going to recruit significant numbers of militant workers to the branch – I don’t want to exaggerate, but we’re a little bit confident, a little bit rooted.  We’re distinctive.  We don’t know that you can’t do things – that’s quite important, we don’t know of any limits to what we can do.  So we take initiatives, try things out, sometimes they don’t work and sometimes they do.  This is in ’67 – the next year of course everything changed.'  (rs21onAugust 5, 2015)

Clearly the advantage that the Manchester International Socialist had in 1965 was not that of a mass organised party, but rather that of disciplined organised body but rather an imaginative tendency that was willing to act on its own initiative.  By acting outside the box the IS was enabled to have a great impact in regional industrial disputes such as Roberts-Arundel in Stockpost and at Pilkingtons in St Helens.  Meanwhile, the Manchsester anarchists who were so heroic in the peace demos in central Manchester were too timid when it came to turning up at the factory gates.

Drawing up a neat historical narrative

Like all historians Mr. Heath provides us with neat narrative to explain what was wrong, and how the anarchist decline could have been avoided in the past, but also how its continuing fall in the present and in the future can be stemmed:
i]  The historic issue, according to Mr. Heath, was that there was 'The increasing frustration with the swamp of pacifism, liberalism and vague humanism'.

ii]  Two now defunct bodies entitled ASA (Anarchist Syndicalist Alliance) and ORA (Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists) were potentially Mr. Heath's ideal tools for social change, but he writes the 'ASA ran out of steam pretty quickly'.
[I personally was one of the founding members of this short-lived ASA organisation, which was set-up around 1970 from remnants of the old Manchester Syndicalist Workers Federation, and went on to play a role in the Courtaulds Arrow Mill strike involving mainly Asian workers in Rochdale, and later to successful campaign for shop stewards in textiles inside the National Union of Textile & Allied Workers*****].

iii} On the other hand, Heath writes that 'The ORA had started moving away from the swamp as a result of the dockers and miners struggles and the influences of French libertarian communists.'

Mr. Heath quotes from an ORA booklet entitled 'Towards a history and critique of the anarchist movement in recent times' by K. Nathan. R. Atkins, C. Williams [ORA pamphlet no1. 1971] to support his diagnoses about the rise of Trotskyism and the fall of anarchism in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s:
'The IS [the International Socialists which later became the SWP] would not have attained their size and influence such as it is if a decent libertarian organisation had existed.  It is an unholy mixture of libertarian and Leninist groups.  The attempt by Cliffe (sic) to compete with IMG by out-trotting Mandel will make this alliance increasingly unstable. BUT do we have any capacity to attract these comrades?  In fact, the flow has been the other way. Good comrades (for the most part industrial militants rather than students) have been lost without anyone attempting to understand why.'

He argues that that was a true analysis and remains so today.   Hence, he claims, that in spite of what he calls 'the decline of Leninism' it was a 'lack of effective organisation', that has meant that anarchism will be at a standstill until we rectify this problem of organisation.

What this shows is that Nick Heath has a mechanistic Marxist approach to organisation that is rooted in a form of deterministic thinking that is part of the problem.  The main problem among the anarchists, which has been amply demonstrated in most recent times at the London Anarchist Bookfair etc., is a psychological inability to engage with real people in the real world.  Some of the left don't have an engaging relationship with working people.  This has been a long term problem which no amount of management, membership cards, statements aims and principle, mission statements, or tick lists can solve. 

Because Mr. Heath has been a white-collar office worker (a librarian) for much of his life he looks at the problem in a top-down way so that all he comes up with are cookbook solutions.  In the same way his close colleague Mike Ballard - now a retired local authority housing manager - has a similar cultural problem.  Commenting in another essay entitled 'Anarchist communism in Britain, 1870-1919', on the libertarian organisation founded in 1960 called 'SOLIDARITY', Mr. Heath writes:
'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.' 

Thoughts on aspects of northern anarchism

There were some protests from southerners and Mr. Heath's type of 'organisational anarchists', when on November 2011, Sidney Huffman wrote his interesting  'Message from a North East Anarchists' on libcom:

'We believe the anarchists may actually be the single largest radical tendency in the North-East and wider North, yet we remain largely invisible, rarely initiating action ourselves and instead just tagging along in ones and twos with events organised by the left and liberals.  We have repeatedly found anarchists who have joined Trotskyist parties simply because they couldn't find an organised anarchist presence here.  Older comrades coming out of premature retirement spend 6 months looking for political anarchists and cannot find any during that time.  It is not good enough.  If we are serious about change, we have to step up and make ourselves visible.'

What's interesting about this statement and some of the protesting comments that followed it, is the implied organisational and activist nature of what is being proclaimed.  Sidney Huffmann writes about 'tagging along in ones and twos' on other people's events tail-ending other left protests.

In response to Mr. Huffman, Tom Harrison wrote on libcom that the 'SF [Solidarity Federation] and AF [Anarchist Federation] have been turning out regularly at the sparks strikes/demos/blockades in London, bolstering picket lines and generally providing the much needed solidarity for these workers. There was a particularly good SF turnout at the sparks demo on November 9th ... just watch this vid and you can see their placards at many point.  We're also organising and attempting to link student militancy with worker militancy.'

Mr. Heath will recognise from this that despite his efforts nothing has changed today from the stagnant pond from which anarchists seems unable to escape.  Of course, anarchists in London may have put out more flags as seen on the video on the electrician's demo, but that is not news.  What would have been news would have been if like Tameside Trade Union Council they had been in the forefront of the campaign against the blacklist moving motions to the TUC, manning lonely picket lines in the early hours since 2003, in the DAF dispute or at the Manchester Royal Infirmary in 2009.  If Mr. Harrison is saying the anarchists are a kind of rent-a-mob available on street demos well that is part of the problem, because despite all the talk of organisating they don't seem to have the initiative to build serious enterprises themselves apart from bookfairs.  Now because of narrow-mindedness of some anarchists even bookfairs are becoming a problem for the anarchists to organise.

What Mr. Heath failed to grasp when he considered the Roberts Arundel strike (in his quote from Freedom above) was that the lesson from that strike was that the Manchester anarchists in 1967 failed to engage with the workers in dispute because they were afraid of real workers at the factory gate.  They didn't know how to address a real worker then, and they still have problems today.  Even in the run up to the campaign against the blacklist in the naughties people like Nick Heath's mate Mike Ballard, a former housing manager at Manchester City Council, was describing the Manchester electricians as not being involved in class struggle because they were taking 'individualuist'  actions by setting up pickets rather than collectivist actions.  Mr. Ballard came up with that claim at a meeting of the NAN in Burnley, of course it was before the Information Commissioner made his successful raid on Ian Kerr's office in 2009, and before Kerr pleaded guilty for keeping an illegal data-base at his trial at Knutsford Crown Court.

Abstract Anarchists & the ethnographic approach

The folly of the mechanistic managerialist approach of both Mr. Heath and Mr. Ballard is evident given that the subsequent development of the struggle of the 'Boys on the Blacklist' in Manchester, which Tameside TUC has been in the forefront of since 2003: had this handful of electricians often acting in opposition to the official union, using their own initiative not engaged in a series of small pickets around Manchester after 2003, the office of the Consulting Association, managed by Ian Kerr, would never have been raided by the Information Commissioner in  Droitwich Spa in 2009.  Consequently, the blacklist with over 3,000 names of building workers would never have been exposed.

In the mid-1970s, the criminologist Ian Smith and other anarchists used to talk about the contrast between the 'sectarian syndicalists' and 'shop-floor syndicalists' in the ASA,  Now we have very opportunistic 'abstract anarchists' like Mr. Heath and Mr. Ballard to contrast with more ethnographic approaches of others anxious to listen to the public.

What Nick Heath may have in mind when he envisages a future anarchist organisation is something like what Ken Weller and member of SOLIDARITY, talked about when he described the influence of the British Communist Party in 1956:
'People can’t realise how big an apparatus it was.  There were the embassies, the Friendship Societies, the printshops, the front organisations, the unions; 120 were employed by the Electrical Trades Union alone.  There were all the agencies of the Soviet government, Tass [the Soviet news agency], the Moscow Narodny Bank, all these sorts of things were full of people; I mean, the Soviet Weekly alone employed a network of people who were distributing agents for the paper, and so on.'

It must have been exactly like George Orwell said in the 1930s about it paying some folk to adopt a commie position, but to accomplish that kind of body among the anarchists would require something more substantial than what Nick Health has to offer with his own small-scale Anarchist Federation (AF) with all of its one hundred members paying their fees, and with perhaps a possible trans-gender platform to stand upon with its own estimated constituency of 0.1% of the national populous.  That would in any case be a very different approach from that experienced by anarchists in the early 1960s, when anarchism was at last part of a genuine social movement; that is the peace movement and the Committee of 100.

With the 'People in the Streets', as Vernon Richards described the peace movement in Freedom in the 1960s, the anarchists had a significant role to play on Ban the Bomb demos and in the Committee of 100 sit downs.  Yet when the social struggle moved to the picket lines, trade unions and factories after the Roberts Arundel strike in 1967, where the communists had the great advantage, the Manchester anarchists had very little grasp of what was required.  Only in the struggles for shop stewards up in Oldham and Rochdale in the failing textile industry such as at Courtaulds Arrow Mill in 1972, did the anarchists of Manchester have an impact, and then again in London in the building workers' struggles, anarchists like Peter Turner had a role to play.   None-the-less, in the significant disputes of the late 1960s at Pilkington Glassworks in St Helens, Upper Clyde Shipbuilding [UCS] and in engineering sit-ins, the miners struggles in the 1970s, the anarchist influence was tiny.

*     Nick Heath leader of the Anarchist Federation.

**   Roberts Arundel strike from 1966-68 of engineering workers against dilution and cheap labour.

*** Pilkington strike in St Helens of glass-workers in the Municipal & General Workers Union [now GMB] in which the workers, frustrated by both the union and the bosses, attempted to set up an independent union.

****  Ron Marsden and Alan Barlow came to Manchester in 1964 and joined the Manchester Anarchist group [MAG], which was then meeting st that meeting in the Lord Nelson in Salford.   The MAG had been founded earlier by Graham Lee and James Pinkerton, then International Secretary of the Syndicalist Workers Federation [SWF].  Marsden from Preston, and Barlow originally from Liverpool, had recently become members of the SWF, and were hoping with the help of the Liverpudlian Vincent Johnson also of the SWF, to form a faction within the MAG and drive it in a 'class struggle' direction. 

*****   COURTAULDS INSIDE OUT:  CIS ANTI REPORT No.10.  Produced in co-operation with The Transitional Institute.
******

Inevitable roughhouse at Manchester Partisan!

Background to anarchist bookfair antics

THE promoters of the Partisan venue in Salford on Cheetham Hill Road and within sight of Strangeways Prison, have declared in their mission statement as follows:

“The aim of Partisan is to create a space in Manchester for grassroots or DIY music, political and cultural events,” explains Kate Hardy, one of the founding members. “The aim is to make somewhere that everyone can go to, even when they don’t have much cash.”

Not so at the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair today when a few folk hitherto associated with the Northern Anarchist Network, attempted to gain entrance and enjoy the event at around 1pm.

First of all the veteran anarchist Barry Woodling and several others mingled peacefully with folk buying books untroubled, but then the tall man Barry who stood out like a sore thumb with his garish black and red fleece was spotted by one of the organisers.  Since the 2012 bookfair, when this same bookfair bod, who hides behind the name 'Veg', had accosted and abused Barry accusing him of being an 'anti-semite', there has been much bad blood between anarchists in Manchester over the events at this 2012 event.  This was entirely provoked by the 'Veg' attack on Barry Woodling and particularly because having called Barry an 'anti-semite' and pushed him, Barry had to leave the premises of the bookfair venue, the People's History Museum, using a fire escape.  The manager of the People's History Museum later told me that Barry had to leave the premises by this strange route in the interests of 'his own safety', a baying mob having assembled including the leader of the local Solidarity Federation, Ronny Marsden and the national leader of the Anarchist Federation, Nick Heath.

Today's events followed the usual uproar seemingly now common at anarchist bookfairs nationally, and which this year, following a confrontation between radical feminists and trans activists, has led to the organisers of London Anarchist Bookfair to abandon plans to have a London bookfair in 2018.

This is the background to what happened at today's Manchester Anarchist Bookfair, and we hope to have more news on today's events as soon as we have more information of what went on.

Meanwhile, the Marxists in Manchester and beyond are laughing their socks off.

Libcom, Nationalism & the Cultural Dope!

  Cookbook Thinking on the Left

READING on the so-called 'anarchist' website libcom their recent analysis of the Manchester Arena Atrocity and an article on the rise  of  nationalistic popularism, I was impressed initially by the rapidity of their response to events.    But on closer examination we see the architecture of the arguments are built on sand.  Such exotic assertions as the pretentious Internationalist Communist Tendency [ICT] and its affiliate the CWO [Communist Workers Organisation]** presented on libcom can clearly be seen to be nonsense if we boil them down to their basic propositions:

The Brexit vote = [a] green light for bigots and racists everywhere. 

IMPERIALIST AGRESSION ABROAD =  INCREASED RACISM AT HOME.

The Turkish referendum = [a] green light for bigots and racists everywhere. 

Trump becoming President = [a] green light for bigots and racists everywhere. 

Our job = [to] undermine racism by stressing the fact that wage workers [world-wide] are in the same boat

The working class = a class of migrants and has been throughout capitalist history

 “Workers have no country”

Whatever other differences we have, we are united as a class by the fact that we are all the exploited victims

 'No war but the class war'.

Now read the orIginal piece entitled 'NATION or CLASS?' in full in all its drama:

'Imperialist aggression abroad means increased racism at home. The Brexit vote, like the victory of the AK party in the Turkish referendum, or Trump becoming President, have given the green light for bigots and racists everywhere. Attacks on people perceived to be outsiders have escalated dramatically. Some of this has been orchestrated by the state. Under the umbrella of “the war on terror” regimes around the world have a perfect excuse to lock up and murder anyone whose very existence might spoil the official picture of ‘the nation’.
'The working class is a class of migrants and has been throughout capitalist history. Let’s not fall for “nationalist” claptrap or defence of any country. When capitalists call on us to “defend the country” they are really calling on workers to die in defence of their property. “Workers have no country” as Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Whatever other differences we have, we are united as a class by the fact that we are all the exploited victims of capitalism. This makes the working class the international and internationalist class. Collectively it is the only force capable of putting an end to the infernal cycle of crisis and war. Today it’s not so much that we have a world to win – we have a world to save from a system which offers only social and environmental devastation.'

The basis of this so-called Marxist class analysis is that it treats working people as if they are cultural dopes and are constantly being tricked by events.    This can be understood by perusing the propositons they propound below:

Why should 'Imperialist aggression abroad = increased racism at home'?  
Why does 'The Brexit vote = [a] green light for bigots and racists everywhere'?
 Why does 'The Turkish referendum = [a] green light for bigots and racists everywhere'?
Why does 'Trump becoming President = [a] green light for bigots and racists everywhere'? 
Why is 'The working class = a class of migrants and has been throughout capitalist history'?
Why is there 'No war but the Class War'?  and if so how does it help us in our current situation?

Nothing is really explained for us in the text of either of the articles 'Nation or Class?' or 'The Manchester Arena Atrocity' account.

The problem with this kind of writing and analysis is that it is about using a formula or recipe to spin a tale so that the critique almost writes itself.  

Why is libcom, an anarchist website, publishing this kind of vulgar Marxism?  Why is it offering us this half-baked anarcho-marxism sometimes called anarcho-communism?

Simply because the anarchists around this website lack intellectual rigor.  Few of them seem to have served  a serious apprenticeship in practical anarchism or factory conditions.  Consequently, they have fallen under the influence of a kind of Sunday School League types like the former Manchester housing manager, Mike Ballard (revolutionary communist) from Chorlton or is it Didsbury?, and the former London librarian, Nick Heath of the Anarchist-Fed. These are both white-collar office staff creatures who promote the kind of clap-out thinking which prevails in the International Communist Tendency above, and which now dominates the libcom website. 

It makes no attempt to grasp why nationalism is so attactive to many working people, and why it represents something they are often prepared to die for in a way they are unwilling to throw down their lives in the class struggle. 

 *    The Internationalist Communist Tendency is a political international whose member organisations identify with the Italian left communist tradition. It was founded as the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party in 1983 as a result of a joint initiative by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) in Italy and the Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) in Britain. Its other affiliates are the Internationalist Workers Group / Groupe Internationaliste Ouvrier in the United States and Canada, the Gruppe Internationaler SozialistInnen (GIS) in Germany and a small French Section.
**   The Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) is a British left communist group and an affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. It publishes a quarterly magazine, Revolutionary Perspectives and distributes an agitational broadsheet Aurora.

Thoughts on the @narchist London Bookfair

Some thoughts from 'Battlescarred' Nick Heath:

Below we have the distinguished observations of the leader of the 'Anarchist Federation' Mr. Nick Heath on the London anarchist bookfair.  Mr. Heath is immediately recognizable for the remarkable head-gear he dons on such occasions as the London Anarchist Bookfair.  When he turn-up in 2012 at the Manchester & Salford Bookfair he came disguised as Williekerslike complete with a cloth cap.  When the trade unionist, Derek Pattison, confronted Nick outside the venue to that event at the People's History Museum, Mr. Heath hesitated before mounting the staircase questioning Ron Marsden about Derek who was armed with a handful of leaflets.  In the end Heath allowed his girlfriend to ascend the stairs before him, and she deftly took the leaflet from Mr. Pattison in her teeth and spit it out.  What is worrying is that Mr. Heath, apart from being somewhat narrow minded politically, is one of the few anarchists with any intellectual qualities in the 'anarchist' affiliated organisations in London.

Steven.

 

 

Oct 24 2015 14:54

What did you get at the 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair?

Well, today it's the "anarchist Christmas": the bookfair.

So what did everyone get and how was it for people?

Battlescarred

 

 

Oct 25 2015 18:03

Nothing. Was given latest Black Flag and latest Freedom Bulletin,
which I have yet to read.
Chased that mofo Brian Bamford a few yards up the Bookfair
when he had the nerve to greet me with a shit eating grin.


A more considered e-mail about last year's Bookfair was sent
to me below:
Dear Brian,

 

Here are some thoughts about the bookfair that I didn’t really feel were
worthy of documenting but which have helped me to understand a couple
of paradoxes that had been on my mind – and which I probably unwisely
promised that I would send you!!

 

My overall impression of the attendees was negative.  Overall, they
struck me as being self-centred, which I felt was evidenced by the
obvious attention that they had given to their hairstyles and apparel,
some of which was conspicuously co-ordinated.  Obviously, self-centredness
precludes concern for the other.

 

You might ask ‘What has this inference got to do with anarchism?’ 
Well, if one constructs anarchism solely as being against, the inference
has nothing at all to do with it. However, if one constructs anarchism
as being emancipatory (not perhaps the best word I could choose) the
inference has a lot to do with anarchism because a commitment to
emancipation implies concern for the other.  Moreover, the two previous
constructions of anarchism imply two converse ways of being an anarchist,
in the case of the former, being reactive and in the case of the latter, being
proactive.  

 

My impression of the attendees and the inference from it that I have drawn
contrast with my appreciation of the bookfair programme.  With the sole
exception of what I regard as its extremely unfortunate front and back
covers, I think that its design is extremely good. In addition, the component
of information about disability is extremely commendable.

 

This brings me to the issue about the information in the programme about
the meetings. Initially, the subjects of the meetings look impressive. 
However, so too did the subjects of the meetings of the previous bookfairs
that I attended.  The large majority of the subjects give me the impression
of being one-offs or attempted start-ups.  This impression has prompted me
to imagine an anarchist event in which the large majority of the subjects of
the meetings are reports of works-in-progress.  That type of event might be
attended by far fewer attendees and attendees of a very different type.    

 

Just a couple of thoughts.