Freedom: Anna Kleist & Spring Cleaning

by Brian Bamford

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

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

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

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

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

'

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

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

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

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

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

FREEDOM and SPRING CLEANING ANARCHISM

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

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

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

The FREEDOM editor then asks:

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

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

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

***********************************************************************

REVIEW: The Spanish Revolution 'Explained'

Review:  'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 1936-39' 

by Vernon Richards (introduction by David Goodway). 

£15.00 ($21.95) Published by PM Press / Freedom Press.

reviewer Brian Bamford

Spanish Civil War &  

Sinful Post-Hoc Reasoning *

VERNON RICHARDS, a former long-term editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, in his introduction to the First English Edition (1953) of his 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' made a modest admission of his own limitations as he tried to counter his  critics:  'Some have cricised me for being wise after the event and for writing on events of which I was but a spectator from afar.  I mention these criticisms as a warning to the reader of my limited qualifications for dealing with such a complex subject.  But I feel I should in my defence also point out that that most of the criticisms I have made in this book were expressed by me in 1936-1939 in the columns of the journal Spain and the World.'

When recently I spoke to the historian David Goodway, who wrote the introduction for this current PM PRESS edition, he suggested that his distance from the events in Spain allowed Vernon Richards to be more 'objective' in his analysis. His remark did not entirely surprise me both because it reflected the view of other people in the Freedom group with whom I have discussed this matter, but additionally this approach fits with what Dr. Goodway argued when I attended one of his lectures at a Northern Radical History Network event in Bradford in April 2013, where he passionately argued that historians in the nature of things all develop a narrative, and then go on to relentlessly pursue the advocacy of that perspective.  Thus, history becomes a form of the art of advocacy and polemical presentation. 

'History is what historians do'?

'History is what historians do', declared Isaiah Berlin in his book 'The Proper Study of Mankind'.

Post-hoc reasoning is the fallacy where we believe that because one event follows another, the first must have been a cause of the second.  In some cases this is true, but other factors may be responsible.

Did the decision of the CNT to participate in the governments first in Barcelona and later in Madrid lead to a degeneration of the integrity of the whole of the Spanish anarchist body politic?  Was the leadership to blame for the compromise of principles or was it also a dereliction of duty on the part of the rank and file in the CNT?

In Chapter XX Vernon Richards responds to some of the critics of the original English edition.who claimed he had 'over-emphasised the faults of the leaders of the CNT-FAI' and 'had been "over-charitable" to the rank and file members of the revolutionary organisations.'   Richards admits these criticisms are 'valid, though we (he) also believes that we (he) has erred in the right direction!'

He argues further:  'The rank and file saw - or "instinctively felt" - more clearly than the leaders, and we (he) have no doubt in our mind that the action of the workers in raising the barricades in Barcelona in May 1937 was a last desperate attempt to save the revolution from strangulation by the Jacobins and the reactionary politicians who had insinuation by themselves once more into positions of power.  Barcelona in May 1937 was to the Spanish Revolution what Kronstadt, sixteen years earlier, had been to the Russian Revolution.'

The seeds of the 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution'?

VERNON Richards admits in his Introduction (1953) that his historical account would never have been written but for the publication of the first two volumes of La CNT en la Revolution Espanola by Jose Peirats.  Other sources he gives are Diego Abad de Santillan's Por que perdimos la guerra and Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth.  

Recently Stuart Christie told me that Vernon Richards had written this history in response to Felix Morrow's Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pathfinder, 1938).  I haven't been able to confirm this but in his Biographical Postscript in 1972 Vernon Richards welcomed 'more material.... from.all quarters on the left' including Felix Morrow's  book.  

Stuart Christie e-mailed me to say:  'My recollection of Vero’s book was that it was an attempt to respond to Felix Morrow’s half-decent 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain’.

What is notable about Felix Morrow's Trotskyist account here is that he, like so many Marxists, focuses on the correct  political leadership and he argues that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT 'had changed little since its origin in the Cordoba Congess of 1872' and being 'Hopelessly anti-political, it played no role in bringing the Republic', adding  'Spain would not find its ideological leadership here'.  

Mr. Morrow concludes his analysis:  'Thus, the (Spanish) proletariat was without leadership to prepare it for its great tasks, when the republic arrived.  It was to pay dearly for this lack!'

What Morrow is doing here is using apriori or cookbook thinking in which he and Leon Trotsky use to make sense of the Spanish context in the historical background and development of the Spanish Civil War and to create a blueprint for what to do.  He takes the view that what was needed in the Spanish conflict was a 'Bolshevik methodology' (p6 of 'Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain' pub. by Pathfinder) arguing:
'The making of the Soviet Union and its achievements - a peasant country like Spain - were extraordinarily popular in Spain.  But the Bolshevik methodology of the Russian Revolution was almost unknown.  The theoretical backwardness of Spanish socialism had produced only a small wing for Bolshevism in 1918.'   

And yet most of the Spanish anarchists rejected the Bolshevik model.  Indeed, one of the main concerns of the adherents of the CNT and the anarchists in the FAI in July 1936, was to avoid what they saw as the errors associated with the development of the Russian Revolution.   Vernon Richards presents it thus in Ch. IV entitled 'ANARCHIST DICTATORSHIP OR COLLABORATION AND DEMOCRACY':
'The dilemma of the "anarchist and confederal dictatorship" or "collaboration and democracy" existed only for those "influential militants" of the CNT-FAI who, wrongly interpreting their functions as delegates, took upon themselves the task of directing the popular movement. '

Mr. Richards begins by saying:  'The first mistake, it should be remembered, was made in the early days of the struggle, when an ill-armed people were halting a carefully prepared military operation carried out by a trained and well-equipped army, which no one, not even some of the "influential members" of the CNT-FAI, imagined could be resisted.'

Richards concludes:  'The slogan of the CNT-FAI leadership - "the war first, the revolution after" - was the greatest blunder that could have been made.'
He supports this with a quote from Diego Abad de Santillan:
'We knew that it was not possible to triumph in the revolution if we were not victorious in the war.  We even sacrificed the revolution without noticing that that sacrifice also implied the sacrifice of the objectives of the war.'

Against this there is the view of Paul Preston, perhaps currently the most widely read historian in the English language on the Spanish Civil War, who argues:
'While exhilarating to participants and observers such as George Orwell, the great collectivist experiments of the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine.... The May events witnessed by Orwell in Barcelona were provoked by the need to remove obstacles to the efficient conduct of the war.  Despite incorporating the working class militias into the regular forces and dismantling the collectives, Negrin's government still did not achieve victory - not because its policies were wrong but because of the international forces arrayed against the Republic.'

Shortly before I embarked on this review one of  Preston's former students sent me this e-mail:
'The bottom line is Paul’s (Preston) fundamental and unshakeable belief that the absolute priority on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War should have been to focus on the conventional war effort and not on the Revolution, which was detrimental to that effort — and his total support for the actions of the Negrin government and the integrity of Negrin himself.'

On the 15th, July 2016, during an interview with the historian Ian Kershaw, entitled 'The Last Days of the Spanish Civil War', Paul Preston had even claimed that Negrin was 'the Churchill of the Spanish republic - the great War Leader.'   

The main danger in philosophy, as Lars Hertzberg identifies it, is the danger of apriorism, the idea that we can tell how things “must be”.  It strikes me that some English historians like Sir Paul Preston and Dr. David Goodway readily embrace apriorism: Preston in 'The Spanish Holocaust'** and Goodway in his claim that all historians pursue and advocate a preconceived narrative.*** 

Yet Isaiah Berlin in his monumental book The Proper Study of Mankind wrote:  'History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events.'   

In Sir Paul Preston's interview above with Ian Kershaw, Preston said that he intended to write a book about the 'guilty men' and specified Largo Caballero as a principle culprit in this respect.  Similarly Mr. Richards reveals his own bias when commenting on Burnett Bolloten's book, which he otherwise admires, he writes:  'The new material I think presents the socialist/trade union leader Largo Caballero in too favourable a light - as a victim of intrigues - whereas he was an old fox, as are all trade union leaders - not least the anarcho-syndicalist variety, such as Lopez, Peiro, and Pestana.'

I remember Jim Pinkerton, the former International Secretary of the old Syndicalist Workers' Federation, once told me that Vernon Richards would never join a trade union because it was not in his nature to do so.  At one point in this book he even describes a trade union as if it were what the sociologists call a 'total institution':  
'And trade unions just like other self-contained concentrations of human beings, such as prisons, armies, and hospitals, are small-scale copies of existing society with its qualities, as well as its faults.' 

Like Vernon Richards I've spent some time in prison in the UK, and in the summer of 1963, I was even held in a dungeon in a small village in the province of Segovia, and I can tell him that there is a vast qualitive difference in these experiences to being a rank and file member of a trade union in either the UK, in the T&G in Gibraltar, or in the La Linea branch of the CNT in Spain.  
 
Mr. Richards demonstrates his apriorism in the section subtitled 'Anarchism and Syndicalism' which begins by declaring:  'In organisations with a mass following, the small anarchist minority can only retain its identity and exert a revolutionary influence by maintaining a position of intransigence.' 

Then Richards concludes by telling us and the Spaniards struggling to tackle the privations of the Civil War, that:  'Thirty years earlier, Malatesta, with that profound understanding of his fellow men which inspired all his writings, had clearly seen the effects of the fusion of the anarchist movement with the syndicalist organisation...'  

In reviewing this book it is clear that it is well worth reading the present work, for as Jose Peirats in 1954 wrote:  'It is important to anarchists to draw the lessons of the facts and actions of their own movement.'    Yet Peirats argues Richards's book which extols Malatesta and anarcho-communist insurrection over the anarcho-syndicalist General Strike has flaws as well as virtues.  Indeed I seem to recall that Peirats book on  The CNT in the Revolution Espanola arguing that the anarchists were in fact 'too insurrectionary' in so far as they seized the towns and then neglected the small pueblos.

And yet, though I would have you read these histories I am mindful of what Peirats said about the Vernon  Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, he declared:  
'este obrita' (small work) is too 'severo' and 'demasiado lateral' (too bias) and 'selectivo'.  Peirats concludes that 'none of his (Richards's) statements will be contradicted by history' but it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance.'

We must be aware that all these historians Richards, Goodway, and Preston are guilty of  apriorism.  Both Richards and Preston, have criticised Orwell for his original naivety about both the situation in Spain when he went to Spain.  That, in my view, makes Orwell's observations more reliable because it helps him to observe the unfolding of events without the clutter of preconceived notions.

Lars Hertzberg takes up this question 'apriorism' by addressing an issue that was absolutely fundamental for a philosopher like Wittgenstein: the question of honesty.  According to Hertzberg, Wittgenstein always regarded honesty as an issue in philosophy, and the question of what it means to “try to keep philosophy honest” is unavoidable for anyone working in the Wittgensteinian tradition.  Hertzberg is not saying that philosophers in that tradition are more honest than others.  His point is rather that for Wittgenstein “a concern with one’s intellectual honesty is internal to the difficulty of philosophy”. 

In the case of the historians like Richards, Goodway and Preston, their primary concern is the art of advocacy. 

When Peirats writes it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance' it is because he is conscious that Richards has undervalued the experience of the heat of the moment in the context of the Spanish Civil War.  When I wrote in Freedom an obituary for Frederica Montseny**** in January 1994, Vernon was critical complaining to Charles Crute that it was too sympathetic to 'someone like her' and that that I hadn't refered to his own book.  Frederica had joined the republican government as a Minister but had later admitted that it was a mistake.

Helenio Capellas, the Catalan anarchist whose father was in the same Los Solidarios group as Durruti and Garcia told me in the 1990s that while Durruti was not so bright, Spanish anarchism had a lucky escape when Garcia Oliver didn't succeed in dominating the anarchist movement, because he would have proven to be a bit too much like an anarchist Lenin.

This is what Peirats means when he claims Richards is too severe on 'individuals' by which Richards means those guilty folk who joined and supported the republican government: I remember in 1964 reading in a  glossy Spanish Civil War history publication on a news-stand, that was produced by people sympathetic to Franco, and it claimed that the effect of anarchists joining the government was shocking in its effect on Spaniards in the 1930s.  

“Propuesta Premio Nobel de la Paz al Generalísimo Franco”

In 1964, General Franco's Spain commemorated 'XXV años de paz franquista : sociedad y cultura en España hacia', and I was with my family in the Andalucian town Ronda in the August of that year when the festival was in full swing; indeed 1964 was also the year that Franco was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace.  At that time I was just discovering Ronda a town which Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner spent time, but it was also where my one-year old eldest son caught a dose of hay fever and started to vomit and failing to keep his food down.  A visit to the local Chemist - we could't afford a doctor - who gave us suppositories (Spain at that time depended on imported French medicine and it meant using suppositories for more ailments than constipation) which cured him within a couple of days.

But such everyday problems are trivial to the historian who works on a grand scale.  The problem with the historians according to Tolstoy is that 'Everything is forced into a standard mold invented by the historians:  Tsar Ivan the Terrible,... after 1560 suddenly becomes transform from a wise and virtuous man into a mad and cruel tyrant.  How?  Why? - You mustn't even ask...'  

This is what Dr. David Goodway has already admitted above and it is something which truly represents the poverty of the historians.  At least Goodway was honest about that,   But Vernon Richards, unlike his companera Marie Louise Berneri, never went to Spain during the Civil War.  He later, after 1958 helped to set-up a resort on the Costa Brava.  In that way he had contact with the Catalans and found that in the rural areas the people in the villages 'talked openly, because they knew who could not be trusted in the community, whereas in Barcelona, for instance, you did not know your neighbour at the next cafe table and therefore talked openly at home or outside away from the crowds.'  That seemed  consistent with my own experience in Alicante in 1963 and later in Andalucia; I remember what a shock it was in 1967 when I went to live briefly in Portugal, in Elvas, and found the Portuguese talking freely in bars about politics.

The texture of life & 'unreal histories'

or how historians get fat?

When Isaiah Berlin***** addressed what Tolstoy had to say about the historians he quoted from the War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1:  'If we we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.' 

According to Berlin: "Tolstoy wanted to write a historical novel whose 'principal aims was to contrast the 'real' texture of life, both of individuals and communities, with the unreal picture presented by historians.  Again and again in the pages of War and Peace we get a sharp juxtaposition of 'realty' what 'really' occurred - with the distorting medium through which it will later be presented in the official accounts offered to the public, and indeed be recollected by the actors themselves - the original memories having now been touched up by their own treacherous (inevitably treacherous because automatically rationalising and formalising) minds.  Tolstoy is perpetually placing the heroes of War and Peace in situations where this becomes particularly evident."

What we have in these histories of the historians is what Tolstoy calls the 'great illusion' which he sets out to expose.  The historian Paul Preston in the interview already referred to with Ian Kershaw,  related about when he went to Spain:  'Of course the Spain of the late 1960s, was much nearer to the Spain of the civil War than the Spain of today, ... original memories.'  He also made a joke to Kershaw:  'I was thin when I went to Spain'.  Since then he's made a good living writing about little else.


It is because of this defect attributed to the historians so clearly perceived by Tolstoy, that explains why George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' with all its limitations is in the end is so much more a populat and influential to the work of the professional historians of the likes of Paul Preston.   As I write this Sir Paul Preston himself is having to admit his debt to Gerald Brenan, formerly a member of the Bloomsbury Group; with  ‎Lytton Strachey,  Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster, and later author of The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social & Political Background of the Spanish Civil War.  Brenan was more of an anthropologist than a historian and besides the Spanish Labyrinth wrote about village life in Andalucia, as was  Julian Pitt-Rivers who wrote People of the Sierra a study of the village of Grazellema a short bus ride from Ronda.  Franz Borkenau  produced an eye-witness accounts in the The Spanish Cockpit as a sociologist who visited Spain in the midst of the war in 1936 and 1937.  Even Vernon Richards and Jose Peirats were really autodidacts rather than professional historians, and I believe they were better off for this.

I together with my young wife lived for over a year in the home of a recently widowed seamstress and her two daughters, Conchita and Pepita, in the fishing village of Denia.  It was there that my eldest lad was born in August 1963.  Vernon Richards refers in his biographical postscript to Margarita Balaguer, an eighteen-year-old seamstress in a haute.couture fashion house 'which she had attempted  unsuccessfully to collectivize found the liberation of women the most rewarding of all the revolutionary conquests.  For as long as she could remember she had fought the accepted notion that 'men and women could  never be friends.'  Now she found she had better friends among men than among women.  A new comradeship had arisen."  I don't know what my seamstress landlady, Senora Lola, in Denia, would have had to say about that all those years ago when we went to tidy-up her dead husband's niche in the cemetery on All Souls Day in 1963.  Last month, some 65 years after General Franco was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the socialist goverment of the acting Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez has had the remains of its former dictator from the state mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, where he was buried in 1975, for reburial in a private grave, and  Sanchez claims it is a step towards national reconciliation, the exhumation was the most significant move in years by Spanish authorities to lay the ghost of the general whose legacy still divides the country he ruled as an autocrat for nearly four decades.  Meanwhile Catalonia is in crisis over the imprisionment of the Catalan nationalist leaders, and a poll by the pollster 40dB for EL PAÍS is suggesting that Spain which will be holding its fourth general election in four years his coming Sunday, and yet the new vote is not likely to break the prolonged political stalemate, according to a survey by the pollster 40dB for the newspaper EL PAÍS.


*  Logic and Sin in the writings of LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN by Philip R. Sheilds:  Bertrand Russell was fond of relating the following story about Ludwig Wittgenstein's student days at Cambridge:  "he used to come to my rooms at midnight and, for hours, he would walk backwards anf forwards like a caged tiger.  On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?'  'Both,' he said, and then reverted to silence." .'

**Danny Evans in the Bibliographical Postscript to 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' writes:  'Paul Preston, has moved in the opposite direction to the drift of specialist historiography, providing increasingly caricatured depictions of Spanish anarchists in his later work, most notably 'The Spanish Holocaust' (London: Harper Press, 2013).'

***  Dr. Goodway in his portrayal of the job of the historian at the 4th Northern Radical History Network meeting held on Saturday 20 April 2013, in Bradford

****    In November 1936, Francisco Largo Caballero appointed Montseny as Minister of Health. In doing so, she became the first woman in Spanish history to be a cabinet minister.^[2] She was one of the first female ministers in Western Europe (but preceded by Danish Minister of Education, Nina Bang and Miina Sillanpää of Finland). She aimed to transform public health to meet the needs of the poor and the working class. To that end, she supported decentralized, locally l-responsive and preventative health care programs that mobilized the entire working class for the war effort. She was influenced by the anarchist sex reform movement, which since the 1920s had focused on reproductive rights and was minister in 1936 when Dr. Félix Martí Ibáñez, the anarchist director general of Health and Social Assistance of the Generalitat de Catalunya, issued the Eugenic Reform of Abortion, a decree that effectively made abortion on demand legal in Catalonia.  Once in exile took the view that it was an error for the anarchists to have participated in the republican government in 1936.

***** The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays by Isaih Berlin (PIMLICO) 1998.

  

'Fuck May 1968'.& Anthropological Illiteracy

by Brian Bamford
THE distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor once wrote that he was a vain rather than ambitious historian. Radical historians, one would have thought would be vain rather than ambitious, yet my dealings with the radical historians recently suggests that they are both vain and ambitious. My review below reflects upon how the new wave radical historians may have become corrupted in their own studies to a degree in which they are now becoming part of the problem:

******

ACADEMIC righteousness prevails most among those of us to whom the truth is revealed.  So many PhD's doing papers on this and that, so many historians in receipt of grants and bursaries. Vernon Richards, the former editor of Freedom - 'the anarchist weekly', once called for exporting the PhD's.

Ian Gwinn, who was organising the event Liverpool on the 8th, June which was rather coyly entitled 'F*ck May 1968, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Past from 1968 to Today', welcomed participants at the CASA Club. The first session was 'History is a Weapon' addressed by Christopher Garland on 'Circumnavigating the past, foreclosing the future: commemoration of the radical past in the amnesiac present'. The title of the event, I learnt, was based on a bit of graffiti from Athens in 2008.

In his book 'DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE: A history of Anarchism', Peter Marshall talked of graffiti on the walls of Paris in 1968 declaring: 'NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS; THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE; ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION; IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID; BE REALISTIC DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE.'

Marshall claimed that unlike other French revolutions, which had been mainly concerned with overcoming economic scarcity, 'the French revolutionaries in a society of abundance [in 1968] were preoccupied with the transformation of everyday life.'

As General De Gaulle correctly noted, they were 'in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West'.

The then editor of The Times, William Rees Mogg, came to the same conclusions in his editorials at that time, and had supported the Rolling Stones, who according to Keith Richards, would have been destroyed at the height of their notoriety more than 40 years ago if The Times under William Rees Mogg had not not launched its famous attack on their jail sentences for drugs offences.'

The program for the Liverpool event quotes Walter Benjamin’s maxim that ‘nothing that has ever happened can be regarded as lost for history...’.  With in Spain the ‘Memoria Historico’ movement drawing on evidence from the Spanish Civil War that the families of victims of that war are still trying to recover.

Eric Azera from Barcelona talked about the recent threats to squatting in Catalonia and elsewhere. Tim Briedis addressed the 1994 National University occupations in Australia, and student radicalism which had developed beyond the 1960s.

Piotr Paszynski and Joaquin Armanet spoke on Jacques Ranciere’s concept of ‘Radical History and Proletarian Experience’. Jacques Ranciere was a student of the Marxist thinker Althusser, but clashed with his teacher over the events of May ’68. While Althusser and other Marxists were asserting the importance of Marxist academia in the French student revolts, Ranciere began to break away from this traditional mode of thought. Marxist intellectuals accused the revolts of being bourgeois and undisciplined. To which Ranciere accused Marxists of being a bunch of little shits.

From a criticism of Althusser and orthodox Marxism, Ranciere’s message soon became ‘Philosophy – it’s a big bag of dicks.’ Writing Hatred of Democracy, Ranciere attacks the Platonic tradition and ties it to practically every Marxist philosopher. He argues that everyone in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marx, wants to become a philosopher king to shovel Truth into the mouths of the blind ignorant masses. Ranciere carries this line of thought to his other books such as “Disagreement” where he accuses every theorists of democracy of being a Platonic saboteur.

Hannah Arendt in an essay entitled ‘Communicative Power’ wrote: ‘We have recently witnessed how it did not take more than a the relatively harmless, essentially nonviolent French students’ rebellion to reveal the vulnerability of the whole political system, which rapidly disintegrated before the astonished eyes of the young rebels…. they intended only only to challenge the ossified university system of government power, together with that of the huge party bureaucracies - ‘une sorte de desintergration de toutes les hierarchies”. It was a text-book case of a revolutionary situation.’

Roger Ball of the Bristol Radical History Group seems to be always trying to turn history into agitprop, and capture the headlines. His latest offering is based on an old theme: Unseating the local influence of the Society of Merchant Venturers and pointing to their trade in slavery: ‘Kick over the statues: using history as a weapon’. More recently their efforts have led to a ‘Countering Colston campaign’ in Bristol, which in turn has inevitably resulted in a doctoral paper ‘IS IT WRONG TO TOPPLE STATUES & RENAME SCHOOLS?’ by - Dr. Joanna Burch-Brown* Perhaps radical history has now itself become an industry from which various academic hangers-on are now profiting: even my friend Roger Ball a pioneer of radical history has now been anointed Dr. Roger Ball, and is currently employed as a Research Fellow at Sussex University.

Kerrie McGiveron discussed the part played by the New Left and the rise of Big Flame in the early 1970s, with particular reference to the Kirby Rent Strike (1972-73). She gave an ethographic account of the Rent Strike with the help of a film documentary produced by Nicholas Broomfield. At one point in the film a woman interviewee between puffs on her cigarette in the setting of what appeared to be her front-room, said:

‘

You can take your film, but the position of the working class won’t change’

To which the interviewer responded: ‘Why do you think I’m making this?’

She then said: ‘Just for your personal satisfaction!’

Ms. McGiveron, when questioned about this exchange in which it was suggested that the woman was displaying ‘apathy’ and a claim to ‘privacy’, claimed to have background information in which it was suggested that the interviewee was a member of a far-left party and was in fact very active. Ms. McGiveron had already made clear she was conscious of the dangers of post-facto rationalisation in doing this research. So can we take this special claim to background knowledge seriously?

Terry Wragg of Leeds Animation Workshop showed an animated film which was designed to portrayed male sexism. What began with building site banter, randy pestering and innuendo, concluding with more full-on approaches of the #Me Too variety. What was important here about the animated film was that a picture of reality is much more powerful than saying something; that’s why a docu-drama film like ‘Three Girls’ about the grooming scandal in Rochdale was so effective. But while one can do a feminist-take on predatory men in a social context, it would be just as anthropologically appropriate to do an animated film on ‘Pancake Tuesday’ and the initiation ceremonies, the ritual ‘de-bagging's’ and ‘ball greasing’ of apprentices, that were indulged in widely in the factories and mills in the North of England by both working-men and women in the last two

centuries. But when we talk about radical history in this context we are really, I suspect, joining the bandwagon of the fashionable addicts and the politically correct crowd.

The case of Geoff Brown who took part in the Round-table discussion ‘Remembering 1968 & After’ is significant in this respect. Geoff claims he is ‘active as a historian of Manchester “from below” ’, a softly-spoken Southerner and someone who moved up North in 1972. The jury must still be out over his claim to be a historian ‘working from below’. His publication record as presented in the program for the Liverpool event is rather sparse, he has written something for International Socialism entitled ‘John Tocher and the limits of commitment’ for the North West History Journal (2017/2018); ‘Il Principe, a handbook for career-makers in further education’ and ‘Pakistan, failing state or neoliberalism in crisis’ in International Socialism.

What we are getting here in the sphere of the fad for radical history is something like what Proust showed us in Sodome et Gomorrhe, and what Wyndham Lewis described in ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ as ‘an analysis of the powerful instinctive freemasonery of the pederast’. Dr. Ball wants us to kick over the statues to cleanse the architecture of Bristol and beyond of former historical adventurers, Penguin Random House want to diversify to the nth degree to take care of talented minorities such as the trans community this year, and, who knows, perhaps the necrophiliacs next year.

* Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

Richard Blair on Legacy of George Orwell

In February 1937, an idealistic and ungainly Englishman in his thirties traveled to Spain to take his place in the trenches at the Aragón front to defend the Republic. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, remembered by history as George Orwell. This month, 80 years after the start of that adventure, Richard Blair, the writer’s only son, now a 72-year-old retired agricultural engineer, visited Huesca to take part in the opening of a major exhibition about his father.

TALKING to EL PAÍS during his brief stopover in Madrid on his way back to London, Richard Blair evoked the figure of Orwell and commented on the relevance of his legacy and the enormous interest in his final novel, 1984, which has become an international best-seller since Donald Trump became US president.
“It’s true that in recent weeks, with the references in the United States to ‘alternative facts’ [cited by Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisors], there has been increased interest in his book. But my father has never gone out of fashion.” The book was not so much a prophecy as a fable about Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism, says Blair, although as he points out, some details from the novel that once seemed like science fiction have been part of our everyday life for some time, such as security cameras that watch our movements, or what some companies know about us from our internet activity, or how we use our credit cards. “Society has evolved toward what he saw. The world is becoming Orwellian,” he says.
Blair is patron of the Orwell society, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to spreading knowledge about the life and work of the writer, as well as debate about ideas, and that remains scrupulously neutral about politics. Which might explain why he is so careful in choosing his words when talking about Trump.
“I think that there is a lot of tension and compression in the White House right now. It is true that Trump is attacking the press, but he is a complete enigma, they are all maneuvering and learning to live with each other,” he says.
Nevertheless, he says he cannot help but be happy at the hike in sales of his father’s books, particularly as he inherited the publishing rights (“which expire in 2020,” he points out). But he recognizes concerns that this has been due to the public finding parallels between the current situation and the dystopia Orwell described.
Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted Richard in 1944. Ten months later, Eileen died on the operating table. Some of the friends of the tuberculous-stricken writer suggested that he give up custody of the child but he ruled out the possibility. The relationship between Orwell and his adopted son became closer when the two of them moved to the Scottish island of Jura, chosen because it was a healthier location for Orwell to overcome his illness and where it was so cold that “if you move six feet away from the fireplace, you freeze.”
Blair’s memories from those days are of a loving father who made wooden toys, who had a strange sense of humor, and whose parenting style had none of the political correctness of modern upbringings. On one occasion he allowed the three-year-old Richard to smoke from a pipe filled with tobacco collected from his cigarette butts. The result, aside from a vomiting fit, was that the child saw himself temporarily vaccinated against the vice of smoking.
It was on Jura that Orwell finished 1984, writing in his room during the day and spending the evenings with the child. One of their favorite activities was fishing, especially for the lobsters that filled out a diet otherwise made frugal by post-war rationing. One weekend in August 1947, however, on a journey back from a weekend of relaxation on the west side of Jura, their boat sank and they almost drowned. Blair says Orwell’s health suffered as a result. David Astor, owner of The Observer newspaper, which published the writer’s work, asked to be allowed import the newly discovered antibiotic streptomycin from the United States, with which he was treated between December 1947 and July 1948 in a hospital near Glasgow. But his efforts were in vain: Orwell developed an allergy to the medication. “His nails fell out and blisters appeared on his lips,” Richard recalls. The writer died in January 1950 at age of 46, when his son was about to celebrate his sixth birthday.
What is the most important lesson that Orwell taught us? For journalists, says Blair, there are many. “To be honest. The most important things are facts which can be corroborated, not reality as you want it to be. Journalists today do not have time to check facts, and errors are perpetuated and multiplied on the internet until they become true.” The writer’s son also recalls Orwell’s six rules for clear writing from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print; Never use a long word where a short one will do; If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; Never use the passive where you can use the active; Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”
Blair finished up with his father’s definition of liberty: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Blair is particularly concerned about the lack of dialogue in contemporary society. “All people do is shout at one another, without actually listening.” And he is surprised to see young people who, instead of speaking face to face, spend all day staring into their smartphones. “Even couples in restaurants! Are they communicating with each other via text messages?!” he jokes. And what would Orwell make of the 21st century, the era of the internet, great scientific advances and post-truth?
“Ah, now that’s the million-dollar question. But it’s impossible to get into anyone’s head. Nor to come up with the answer by reading his books. If he were still alive he would be 113, and would have had a lot of new influences… There’s no point in speculating.” As such, we don’t know, and we can’t know. But he does go as far as to assume one thing: whatever his thoughts, they would be characterized by common sense.

Donald Rooum Quits Friends of Freedom Press

AT the last meeting of the Friends of Freedom Press on the 9th, Jan. 2016, the veteran anarchist and cartoonist, Donald Rooum*, aged 88-years, officially retired from the board of directors that is responsible for publishing one of the world's oldest newspapers, Freedom - the anarchist journal (founded by among others Peter Kropotkin in 1986).  The reason for Donald Rooum's departure was a bitter encounter later described as an 'anti-social-social', orchestrated by the so-called Freedom Collective led by Andy Meinke who runs the Freedom Bookshop.

A year ago  on the 6th, Jan. 2016, Northern Voices' reported that Mr. Rooum had resigned from his position on the so-called Freedom Collective owing to a 'conflict of interest'.  This was later denied by both parties, and perhaps because of this earlier confusion, this time Steve Sorba, the current Secretary of Friends of Freedom, had insisted that Mr Rooum must put in his resignation in person; which he duly did at the meeting on the 9th, January.

At this meeting Carolyn Wilson, who was appointed as a Director of Freedom Press at the last Annual General Meeting in June 2016, said that she would 'put out feelers' to get another director to replace Donald.  This Freedom Press AGM was quite memorable because of the rough reception given to someone merely presenting some alternative proposals to those approved by the so-called Freedom Collective:  the metropolitan police later were involve in an investigation as to what had transpired.

Problems still exist, we understand, with regard to the Freedom Collective's failure to provide clear and adequate accounts with regard to Mr Meinke's management of the Freedom Bookshop, and the rooms rented to various outside bodies using the rooms at the Freedom Press premises.
Donald Rooum's departure represents a final tragic 'ruptura' with the past and the great historic and intellectual tradition of Freedom, dating back to the post-war period of Vernon Richards and Colin Ward, and the influence of British anarchism as a real political force on the New Left and in the Peace Movement in the 1960s.  
The tragedy of Donald Rooum's retirement is that it comes at a time of serious dispute between elements on the 'Collective' with their narrow English political pedantry and 'sectarian chauvinism'; and those who seek a broader approach to anarchism rooted in everyday life.  Rooum represents the last of the old guard, none of the remaining Friends were part of the traditional intellectual tradition including Steve Sorba (the printer) and Jayne Clemenson (the layout artist), who were actually involved in the production of the Freedom newspaper, rather than the creation of the historic message and aims of Freedomite anarchism. **

*  Mr Donald Rooum's Company's House registeration on Friends of Freedom Press:    

Uk (British) • Retired • Born in March 1928 (88 years old) 17 Dec 2001 → 9 Jan 2017

**  Unfortunately, neither the Friends of Freedom Press or the so-called 'Freedom Collective' publish any serious minutes or reports; so the only place that people interested get to know what is going on is on this Northern Voices' Blog.

The Banks & other agents of Social Change

Toxic Meltdown Still Has Knock-on Effects on Banks

CRITICISM of the Obama administration still continues, owing to its failure to prosecute Wall Street executives over their responsibility for the bundling and structuring of dodgy mortgages on American homes into sold to investors around the world, which became a highly profitable business for the Wall Street banks as well as European banks before the catastrophic 2008 meltdown.  This represents the latest hangover of the sub-prime property market meltdown.

At the year end, some European banks did deals with prosecutors over historic claims that they pushed toxic mortgage securities in the years in run up to the financial crisis.  Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse will pay-out nearly $13 billion combined to settle with the United States Justice Department.

These banks have now settled and may, according to the New York Times, have benefited from paying billions less than was once anticipated.   The $7.2 billion settlement with Deutsche Bank produced relief among investors who had been upset when it became clear in September that prosecutors were after a penalty of something like $14 billion. 

Deutsche Bank shares, on the news of the settlement, rose by 5% in Frankfurt, before settling up 0.8%.

The UK bank, Barclays, was a smaller operator in the mortgage backed securities market, and it seems to be prepared to wait and take a chance on waiting to see how things work out once Donald Trump takes over as President.  Barclay's shares fell in London trading last week as investors assessed the risk of forthcoming legal action.   Barclay has said it will 'vigorously defend' itself against a complaint brought by the Justice Department after recent settlement talks collapsed.

Holding banks accountable for the sub-prime meltdown is still being debated in political discussions, books and films like 'The Big Short' which came out last year. 

The Banks, mostly American, have already paid out over $100 billion in settlements with the US government.  But though the banks have written cheques but the Obama administration has been criticised for not prosecuting Wall Street executives. 

Last May, a federal appeals court over-turned a $1.27 billion penalty against Bank of America over the sale of  bad mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  The appeals panel found that prosecutors 'didn't provide enough evidence that        either the bank's Countrywide unit or a former Countrywide executive had committed fraud in a loan program known as “the hustle”.'

The Deutsche Bank settlement lifts the shadow hanging over the bank.  Since taking over in mid-2015, John Cryan, Deutsche Bank's chief executive, has been trying to break with the bank's legacy of the legal woes. 

Banks, Values, & Corruption

In 1961, Philip Holgate wrote in Freedom, which was then the main British Anarchist journal, an essay entitled 'CAPITALISM – The Image of the Truth' in which he noted:  :

'In sentencing executives of two electrical engineering companies, and twenty-one companies themselves, to fines of nearly two million dollars, and terms of imprisonment, an American Federal judge accused them of having “mocked the image” of the nation's free enterprise system by their offences against the Anti-Trust Laws.'

James Pinkerton, a northern anarcho-syndicalist member of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation (SWF)* and its international secretary, used to say that by saying a society was 'corrupt' one hasn't even begun to describe a society, because all societies are corrupt in so far as their members in the nature of things would breach the salient values of that society.  Thus it ought not to surprise us that the bankers in the USA and Europe in 2008,.would shun banking ethics to stoop to either create dodgy sub-prime packages; manipulate benchmark interest rates; or launder Russian money, and that in the same way the electrical engineering companies in 1961 would 'mock' the values of free enterprise by price-fixing to place high tenders to diddle the government's Tennessee Valley Authority.

Mr. Holgate in his 1961 Freedom article, argues that the electrical engineers are simply perpetuating a capitalistic myth of free enterprise which they and other capitalists don't really believe in.  Mr. Pinkerton the anarcho-syndicalist, would I suspect suggest that despite their beliefs in the values of capitalism, the real life capitalists are only human and would breach their own values for practical advantages.

Big or small:  Social Change & the Economy

In an article entitled 'Unfree Enterprise' in Freedom in January 1962, the paper's then 'Italian' anarchist editor, Vernon Richards, wrote:

'We are always pointing out that the capitalist economy is monopolistic, and that all this talk about free enterprise, and the stimulus of competition is just a lot of talk with no basis in fact.'

Mr. Richards then ponders:

'.... from the point of view of those who seek to completely reverse the values of society so far as production and distribution are concerned – does the growth of monopoly make change more difficult or easier?   Are the chances of change greater in a nation of small shop-keepers, small farmers, small industrialists, small businessmen than in one of huge combines in which agriculture has been industrialised, industry virtually internationalised and distribution centralised?'

Vernon Richards' claims 'that the growth of huge impersonal corporations tends to unite the ordinary people in a way which “individualist capitalism” did not'. 

It's strange that Mr. Richards in another essay in the 1960s when comparing the Spanish workers with that of the American, should say that the average U.S. worker usually 'hasn't two radical ideas to rub together'.    Another Italian, Ignazio Silone wrote in his book 'School for Dictators' that perhaps the lack of dynamism of the industrial workers 'is a consequence of the of the growth of big industry.'  Developing this argument Silone argues persuasively:

'Moving from the artisan's shop and the small plant to the great factory, the worker in time undergoes a considerable transformation.  His [sic] mental horizon is broadened and his class consciousness increased, but at the same time he loses his taste for freedom and his readiness for individual action.  The worker in the great factory is apt to be bolder and stronger in mass actions, whether peaceful or violent, whereas he he is generally unable to act alone or in a small group.'

It's worth noting that in the May 1979 General election about a third of British trade unionists voted Conservative.  It was after this election that the communist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, wrote his critique of the traditional labour movement entitled 'The Forward March of Labour Halted', in which he argued that by itself trade union militancy could not automatically create class-consciousness or organise a radical socialist advance. 

Trade Union Bosses &amp the Decline of Industry

In September 1982, the sociologist Tony Lane in a controversial and important article in Marxism Today entitled 'The Unions:  caught on the Ebb Tide' wrote criticizing the 'sectional interests' of the trade unions and their 'a lack of will to fight' causing a 'crisis of legitimacy', further explaining that this had caused a schism between the trade union leaders (including shop stewards) and the rank-and-file members feeling that there was little democracy in the movement.  In his critique Tony Lane wrote censuring the trade union bureaucracy for failing to deal with the significant changes to the manufacturing industry in the UK and decline in large-scale urban factories where traditionally the organised trade union membership was based, and he predicted, almost two years before the Miner's strike, that unless there was clear leadership on how to tackle these problems with more interactive democracy at the workplace, the rank-and-file membership would face 'uncertainty as to whether the unions are worth fighting for'. 

For Tony Lane in his Ebb Tide essay, it was not so much the Thatcher's anti-trade union legislation or the 'resurgent laissez-faire Toryism', but the longer-term economic shifts that were having an impact in undermining the influence of the labour movement.  In the mid-1970s, Tony Lane, then at the University of Liverpool, had been invited by Derek Pattison, now the current President of Tameside TUC, to address a body of northern anarchists and in the North West Worker's Alliance (NWWA) and some members of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation (SWF)**, about the theme of his book  'The Union Makes Us Strong' at a pub on Union Street in Oldham, and Bob Holton had just written his book  'British Syndicalism 1900 to 1914:  Myths & Realities' in 1976.

But Tony Lane by 1982 had identified the dilemma in the British labour movement in so far as it lacked a strategy which proved fatal during the Miner's strike of 1984-85.  It lack a strategy because on the shopfloor the workers during the periodic boom years from the late 1960s until the early 1970s had been able to depend on day-to-day tactics in dealing with their managements: if the worker's loss a fight with their boss one day they could always look forward to fighting another day under more favourable circumstances.  This bumping along approach led to laziness with regard to a strategy for solidarity with other workers.  In the 1980s when the rainy days came and didn't go away they were ill-fitted to take the employers and the state as Tony lane had predicted. 

Curiously in the mid-1970s the northern anarchists in the North West Worker's Alliance around Manchester, were anxious to break with what some saw as the 'sectarian syndicalist' approach of the English anarchists who had failed to impact upon the British labour movement during the period of change from the Roberts Arundel dispute in Stockport in 1967 onwards, the anarchists who had been active on the ban the bomb demos failed to bring anything to the picket lines as was shown by their lack of involvement of either the anarchists or syndicalists in the Pilkington's glass-worker's strike of 1970.

In 1976, Bob Holton had written his book on 'British Syndicalism – 1900 to 1914: Myths & Realities' at a time when shop-floor syndicalism showed some promise .  But Tony Lane by 1982 had identified the real dilemma in the British labour movement in so far as it lacked a strategy which proved fatal during the Miner's strike of 1984-85.  It lack a strategy because on the shopfloor the workers during the periodic boom years from the late 1960s until the early 1970s had been able to depend tactics in dealing with their managements: if the workers loss a fight with their boss one day they could always look forward to fighting another day under more favourable circumstances.  This bumping along approach led to laziness with regard to a strategy for solidarity with other workers.  In the 1980s when the rainy days came and didn't go away they were ill-fitted to take the employers and the state as Tony lane had predicted.

Curiously in the mid-1970s the northern anarchists in the North West Worker's Alliance around Manchester, were anxious to break with what some saw as the 'sectarian' approach of the English anarchists who had failed to impact upon the British labour movement during the period of change.  Despite valiant attempts this group failed to mobilise the dormant core of anarchists in the Syndicalist Worker's Federation (SWF) in Manchester who failed to interact with the struggles of working people in the region.  As Tony Lane has shown in 1982, the British labour movement continues to lack a strategy but tiny groups like the SWF, the Solidarity Federation and the anarchists often show no signs of having any grasp of tactics either.

*    The Syndicalist Worker's Federation was founded in 1954, when it emerged as an anarcho-syndicalist organization from the then Anarchist Federation of Great Britain.  In 1994, it adopted its current name the Solidarity Federation, having previously been the Direct Action Movement since 1979.

**  The rather London-centric Albert Meltzer, in his autobiography 'I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels' wrote: 'The SWF, anarcho-syndicalist but choked by weeds of the neo-leftism surrounding it, disappeared as an organised body soon after Tom Brown's death (Brown was seen as the main London theorist of the SWF), apart from the  Manchester stalwarts.'

This shows Mr. Meltzer's parochial attitude in so far as the genuine anarcho-syndicalist activists in the North at the time were outside of Manchester in traditional industrial and mill towns like Oldham, Ashton-under-Lyne, Middleton, Rochdale, Bury, Burnley.and Bolton.   In 1971, there had been the Arrow Mill strike at Courtaulds in Castleton, Rochdale, involving mostly Asian workers.  During that dispute which included a sit-in strike, an anarcho-syndicalist 'work's counsellor' had been arrested.  After this dispute and the trial that followed, the local publication Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP) was founded, and textile trade unionists and syndicalists in the National Union of Textile & Allied Worker's Union (NUTAWU) in the towns to the north of Manchester began a campaign for shop-stewards in textiles.  This campaign was resisted by union bosses like Joe King at the NUTAWU headquarters in Accrington, and Albert Hilton, Arnold Belfield at the local office in Rochdalre and the local official in Oldham.

THE OTTER MEMOIR

by Séamas Cain
'I first met Laurens Otter outside a Labour Party Conference in Blackpool in 1959:  he was selling Peace News and I was with some Young Liberals from the North West demonstrating.  Later, in 1960, Laurens came to address the Rochdale Young Liberals on anarchism and worker's control.  He was involved in the peace movement and the Committee of 100, and for some of us he had a big influence on our development as anarchists in this country in the 1960s.  A member of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation, he had been a founding member of the National Rank & File Movement in London in 1959-60.'  (editor) 

LAURENS Otter was a prominent activist in the Ban-the-Bomb Movement in Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Indeed, he was a strategist and theoretician for The Committee of 100 and Polaris Action.  Mr. Otter has now published a Memoir of his life and activism.  I think it will prove to be of some historical interest.

Over the years Mr. Otter has been a prodigious small-press publisher.  He has published any number of collections of essays, as well as collections of poetry and plays by various authors.  His Memoir, however, provides a wealth of specific details and glimpses of movements that challenged established institutions throughout the world.

Laurens Otter has written:  “My parents knew Gandhi in India — mother had first contacted him when she was in South Africa, she used to fast whenever he did and my elder brother and I (in my case from the age of 4) used to fast for a day or two whenever Gandhi began to fast.”

Martin Bashforth, the editor of The Otter Memoir, has written that “Laurens belongs to a generation who, though they did not know it at the time, laid the foundations for the New Left in the 1960s and beyond.  Laurens was very much one of the activists from that generation — people who gave the movement its practical impetus.  They created organisations, movements, and publications to which those of us born after World War Two could turn as we worked out our response to the world around us.  In particular, during the late 1950s and early 1960s their use of non-violent civil disobedience was an inspiration, even for those of us too timid to adopt these tactics ... The Memoir as it stands admirably sums up the culture on the Left that had been created since 1945 and that deserves to be revisited by today's networked dissident generation.  They need to honour their forebears and learn from them.”

The Otter Memoir is available here as a free download ...

https://oldredfogey.wordpress.com/laurens-otter/

This Memoir contains descriptions of encounters, disagreements/agreements, and/or interactions between Laurens Otter and Richard Acland, Alex Alexander, Frank Allaun, Andy Anderson, Lady Clare Annesley, Pat Arrowsmith, Brian Bamford, John Banks, Donald Bannister, Robert Barltrop, Ernie Bates, Olwen Battersby, Brian Behan, Desmond O'Neill Belshawe, John Bishop, John Boland, Claude Bourdet, Maurice Brinton, Eileen Brock, Hugh Brock, Lily Brown, Peter Copper Brown, Tom Brown, Dr. Noel C. Browne, Oliver Browne, Forbes Burnham, Melita Burrell, Mike Callinan, Mary Canipa, April Carter, Ian Celnick, Ray Challinor, Terry Chandler, Terry Chivers, Stuart Christie, Bill & Joan Christopher, Chichester Clark, Howard Clark, George Clarke, Tony Cliff, Ken Coates, Kelso Cochrane, G.D.H. Cole, Canon John Collins, Phil Cooke, Mike Craft, Rikki Dalton, Lawrence Daly, Sir Tam Dalyell of the Binns, baronet, Dorothy Day, Francis Deutsch, Ian Dixon, Dr. Richard Doll, Kurt Dowson, Peggy Duff, Raya Dunayevskaya, Father Alan Edwardes, Freda Ehlers, Robert Ehlers, Stanley Evans, Marianne Faithful, Baron Brian Faulkner, Leah Feldmann, Michael Foot, George Foulser, Crystal Gates, Dorothy & Norman Glaister, Ygael Gluckstein, Victor Gollancz, David Goodway, David Grahame, Martin Grainger, Eddie Grant, Robert Green, Jo Grimond, Reg Groves, Stephen Gwynn, Denzil Harber, Margaret & Bryan Hart, Ernie Hartley, Ken Hawkes, Stephen Hawking, Eric Heffer, Ammon Hennacy, Wynford Hicks, Axel Hoff, Philip Holgate, Gerald Holtom, Bishop Trevor Huddlestone, Cheddi Jagan, C.L.R. James, Brenda Jordan, Pat Jordan, Francis Jude, Matt Kavanagh, Douglas Kepper, Jim Kilfedder, Father Gresham Kirkby, Charles Lahr, John Lall, Kitty Lamb, Bill Lean, Father Kenneth Leech, John Lloyd, Meng-Tse Lo, Keith Lye, Freddie Lyons, Seán MacStíofáin, Ollie Mahler, Father Donald Manners, Harry Marsh, André Marty, Madame Natalia Trotskaya, Tom Mboya, John McGuffin, Pronchais McGuinness, George McLeod, Harry McShane, Clifford Mélotte, Albert Meltzer, Hélène Michon, Renée & Lucien Michon, Yvonne Michon, Bernard Miles, Rita Milton, Harry Mister, Ron Moir, George Molnar, Sybil Morrison, Ken Morse, Peter Moule, Arthur Moyse, Hilda Murrell, Colin Myers, Mike Nolan, John Olday, Captain Terence O'Neill, Dr. Chris Pallis, Jeanne Pallis, Max Patrick, Geoffrey Payne, Inge & Donovan Pedelty, John Pilgrim, Carl Pinnel, George Plume, Eric Preston, J.B. Priestley, Stu Purkiss, Jim Radford, Mike Randle, Vero Recchioni, Vernon Richards, Archbishop Tom Roberts, S.J., Adrian Robertson, Mary & Jack Robinson, Jeff Robinson, Ernie Rodker, Roger Rolph, Donald Rooum, Father John Rowe, Bertrand Russell, Raphael Samuel, Philip Sansom, Simon Schama, Ralph Schoenman, Father Michael Scott, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, Mike Segal, Gene Sharp, Dr. Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, Sydney Silverman, Allen Skinner, Jim Slater, Colin Smart, Harry Smith, Joan Smith, Dr. Donald Soper, Harold Steele, Mary & Jack Stevenson, John Stockbridge, Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, George Stone, Douglas Stuckey, Buck Taylor, Carol Taylor, Joe Thomas, E.P. Thompson, Tommy Thompson, David Thornley, Charles Tillon, David Toogood, Peter Turner, Arthur Uloth, Fred Walker, Barbara Wall, Bernadine Wall, Digger Walsh, Nicolas Walter, Colin Ward, Tom Wardle, Will Warren, Kate & Bobby Waters, Kurt Weisskopf, Fran White, Roma White, John Whiteley, David Wicks, Kathy & Wilfred Wigham, Thomas Willis, Tom Wintringham, and Lillian Wolfe.

The Otter Memoir is available here as a free download ...

https://oldredfogey.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/the-accidental-making-of-an-anarchist.pdf

For Séamas Cain go to:

http://www.priosma.net

http://seamascain-writernetwork.org