Working Class Movement Library Talks

Easter Rising talk

On  Wednesday 13 April at 2pm Robin Stocks visits the Library to talk about his book on Manchester and Salford volunteers in the Easter Rising.

We mark the centenary of the Rising with an account of how, in the middle of WW1, members of the Irish community in Manchester and other British cities resolved to travel to Dublin to prepare for a rebellion to achieve independence for Ireland.  Admission free; light refreshments after.


Last chance to see our WW1 exhibition - and news of our next one!Our exhibition To End All Wars, marking the centenary of the introduction of conscription in early 1916, ends on Thursday 14 April at 5pm.  It is open during our drop-in times of Wednesday to Friday 1-5pm.

Our next exhibition To Make That Future Now! - 150 years of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council opens on Friday 29 April and runs until 26 August. It's open Wednesdays to Fridays 1-5pm and the first Saturday in May, June and July 10am-4pm.  More information here.


Poetry, fiction and painting at the LibraryOn Wednesday 27 April at 2pm artist Richard Milward presents Luddites’ Nightmares.

Taking inspiration from the machine-breaking Luddites of the early 19^th century, Richard is producing a series of paintings which, in his words, ‘expose, exaggerate and ridicule the ways in which modern technology encroaches on – and distorts – everyday life’.  A loan to WCML of one of these paintings is marked by this event, when we are delighted to welcome three authors to read from their own work on themes surrounding our relationship with technology.

Joe Stretch, novelist from Stockport who recently won the W Somerset Maugham Award for his book The Adult, will be reading, alongside London poet Salena Godden and Richard Milward himself.

Admission free, light refreshments after.

Richard's painting ‘TV Interference’ can be viewed at the Library between 20 and 27 April, Tuesdays-Fridays 10am-5pm.  The painting is based around the idea that today ‘technology is in the saddle and rides humankind’ (Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against The Future), as well as the potentially disruptive influence of mass media on the general public.

The Luddites' Nightmares paintings are being exhibited individually at a series of events this Spring/Summer (with readings from other contemporary authors on the technology theme) in what was the ‘Luddite Triangle’ where the original revolts took place 200 years ago: Lancashire/Cheshire to Yorkshire to Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire.


'TV Interference' (finished version)


Frow Lecture A reminder that Richard Cleminson will give the Library's 7^th annual Frow Lecture in the Old Fire Station, University of Salford on Saturday 7 May at 2pm. His topic is “A new world in our hearts”: anarchism and the Spanish Civil War. Admission free; light refreshments after.  All welcome.
Salford's Sarsaparilla SoundsThree institutions, Salford Museum & Art Gallery, Islington Mill and ourselves, join forces to fly the flag for Salford on the evening of Thursday 12 May as part of Manchester After Hours 2016. Using WCML and Salford Museum as locations, Islington Mill will curate a live programme of music and spoken word that’s in tune with these unusual locations.

The night starts from 5pm onwards at WCML with the focus on spoken word performance. We will hear from:
Louise Woodcock / Sue Fox / Bob Clowrey / Lauren Bolger / Alex Cook / Rachel Margettes / Rebecca Hurst - and more TBA.

In keeping with the ethics of the library founders there will be no alcohol served for the spoken word performances -  instead Steep Soda will be running a temperance bar, serving delicious and unusual soft drinks.

After 7pm the audience will be led across the road to Salford Museum & Art Gallery where they will spend the rest of the evening. Islington Mill will produce a live music programme, and there will be a bar serving alcohol and other refreshments.

More information here.

For more information about events across the cities on Thursday 12 May visit manchesterafterhours.com.

Benny Rothman book launchOn Friday 8 April at 1.30pm the Library hosts the launch of a new book about activist Benny Rothman.  Unite the union's biography Benny Rothman: a fighter for the right to roam, workers' rights and socialism, written by Mark Metcalf, covers not only the part played by Benny in the Kinder Scout mass trespass but also his battles against Mosley's fascist Blackshirts and his wide-ranging campaigns as a trade unionist and environmentalist.

Benny's son Harry will be in attendance at the event, and everyone who comes along will get a free copy of the 64-page book.   All welcome.


A poem, a cup of tea and a biscuit... The first of a series of events devised by University of Salford Chancellor Jackie Kay takes place on Thursday 21 April at 4pm at the Clifford Whitworth Library at the University.  Flight, Feathers and Quilt is an opportunity to view the Curated by Jackie Kay exhibition and to hear Jackie talk about her selection from the University Art Collection. Poet Patience Agbabi will read from Refugee Tales and Anna Pincus from the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group will also speak - the exhibition includes a unique quilt made by refugees from the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group..

All are welcome to this free event. Booking is essential.  Please reserve a ticket here.
 
Manchester May Day Festival 2016A series of events including talks, plays and music takes place on Saturday 30 April to mark May Day in Manchester.  Full details here. The Library is compiling exhibition boards at the Manchester Mechanics Institute about our collections, and specifically about the 150th anniversary of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council which falls this year. (Our exhibition about the Trades Council opens shortly - see above).

In the evening (8.30pm) Banner Theatre presents Chicago: the great teachers’ strike. Chicago tells the story of the 2012 teachers' union strike and explores the successful organising agenda that empowered the union members and mobilised parents, students and the wider community.  Tickets price £10 available here.

Marie Stopes symposiumThroughout her life Marie Stopes courted controversy and it is sometimes difficult to disentangle fact from the fiction that she created about herself. An international symposium on 23 June at the University of Manchester draws together leading experts from a variety of different disciplines to investigate 'the real Marie Stopes'.
The Symposium is open to both academics and members of the general public. It is free but must be booked in advance as places are limited. To book a place please email: info@symposiummanchester.com
More information at www.symposiummanchester.com.

Message from Salford Community Theatre

Salford Community Theatre are now recruiting for a team of volunteers to help with the running of their play
Love On The Dole which will be performed from 5–10 July, with two performances on the 10th.
They say: 'You don’t have to be available for all of these dates, if there is an aspect of theatre production, be that in costume and props or front of house and marketing, that you would like to try your hand at we will come up with a schedule to match your availability.
If any of this is sparking your appetite for community and theatre, or even just your curiosity we have a couple of events coming up where the production team and the cast will be more than happy to tell you more.
You can register your interest with an email to Rose.Fowler@salfordcommunitytheatre.org or give us a call on 07519344668'.

'English Working Class': Made Up North!

The 4th Northern Radical History Network Conference in Bradford

LAST Saturday Dave Goodway, the social and cultural historian who worked in Continuing Education at the University of Leeds from 1969 to 2005, gave an illuminating rendering of the intellectual influences upon E.P. Thompson through William Morris and, perhaps more importantly, the necessary territorial environment in which Thompson found himself when he researched his significant book 'The Making of the Working Class' in 1963, in what is now West Yorkshire. This last point became clear when Mr. Goodway came to answer the question from Adam Gutteridge from Sheffield:
'How did the book come to be produced out of a specific geographical location?'

Mr.Goodway responded thus:
'He didn't teach local history, his background was in English literature, but E.P. Thompson's “The Making of the Working Class” is a national history with in-depth local research in the West Riding of Yorkshire that goes beyond the London-centric history, and he made an active choice to live in an industrial area.'
or as E.P. Thompson has it in his Preface dated Halifax August 1963:
'This book was written in Yorkshire, and is coloured at times by West Riding sources.' 

Thompson had gone to Cambridge in 1941 to study English literature and social history in Elizabethan England, going to Leeds University as a staff teacher still in English literature in 1948, and had in the 1950s still regarded himself as a poet and had been elected to the District Committee of the Communist Party around this time. He later came to write a 908-page book on William Morris 'Prophet of a New Order', and claimed 'Morris came to seize me by the throat', and Goodway said this book led him to 'reclaim Morris for a socialism that is revolutionary'. It was Thompson's work on this book that was, according to Mr. Goodway, crucial in beginning a transformation in Thompson's thinking that was accelerated in 1956 when he left the Communist Party, during what became 'the most important year for Thompson': following the Hungarian Revolution E.P. Thompson had written about the folly of 'leaving error unrefuted'. 

Goodway pointed to the distinction that Thompson found in his study of William Morris between 'Desire and necessity' or between morality, human will and conscience on the one hand, and Marxist determinism on the other. Derek Pattison told me that the historian Eric Hobsbawn regarded E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' as too 'romantic'; Hobsbawn stayed in the Communist Party up to his death, long after Thompson left in 1956, and Hobsbawm deftly continued to juggle his grand historical ideas about society and with a straight poker-face, and an apparently clear conscience as the mountains of corpses piled up across the planet.

E.P. Thompson is not, like Hobsbawm seems to be, studying a topic to pour scorn on some social element like 'Primitive Rebels' or 'Bandits' in order to show that they are immature or backwards stages in a linear progression to the present. Thompson writes in his Preface:
'I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.'

One senses a smug, supercilious condescending attitude in Hobsbawm, that is lacking in the Englishman, E.P. Thompson. George Orwell's portrayal of 'Catastrophic Gradualism' would not trouble the hardened Marxist Professor Hobsbawm, as I suspect it would E.P. Thompson. The publishers Gollanz asked the historian John Saville for a text book on the English working-class and he referred them to Thompson, then what started as a social and political history of the West Riding ended up by being what Dave Goodway describes as 'the most important history book in England'. For Goodway the word 'Making' in the title of 'The Making of the Working Class' is vital because it emphasises that 'man must and does create the conditions under which he lives'. 'Making' in this sense means 'agency and engagement' in people creating for themselves their own destiny. Goodway said that the key organising theme of this work was visible in Thompson as early as 1955 during his work on Morris, and the facilities for the study of the subject were present in the fact that Thompson was involved in giving adult education classes in the West Riding of Yorkshire; several of his students helping in the project from classes scattered across West Yorkshire from Todmorden to Northallerton.

Fiona Cosson from Littleborough in Lancashire, asked if Thompson was a 'public intellectual' and if this is something of a legacy that has now been abandoned by the Left? It was thought that historians today had bought into the 'consensus' and moved from the study of 'class' to research into consumption with research grants now awarded for contemporary concerns like consumption habits and perhaps issues of identity politics. Goodway said that there are pressures on academics to produce their results before they are really ready, and that he felt that there is little chance now that researchers and academics can create works like 'The Makings of the the Working Class' or 'William Morris'.

There was some discussion as to if Thompson was right in his central thesis that the working-class became a reality at the time of the Reform Act Bill in the 1832 the focus of his Chapter 16 on 'Class Consciousness', or as Hobsbawn has claimed, later in the 19th Century with the emergence of the popular press and cheap railway travel.  Hobsbawm had taught Goodway, and he said that Hobsbawn didn't address the issue that this late 19th Century rendering of the formation of the English working-class was an altogether more passive animal.  Something that was not tackled last Saturday was Thompson's stress in his Chapter 2 of the book on the London bias of many theorists of the English working-class.  At the end of that chapter, after giving a quote from Dr. Hobsbawm, he writes:
'Nearly all the theorists of the working-class movement are in that London tradition - or else, like Bray the Leeds printer they are analogues of the skilled London working men.'
He then argues:
'But the list itself reveals a dimension that is missing - the moral force of the Luddites, of Brandreth and young Bamford, of the Ten Hour men, of Northern Chartists and I.L.P. (and) South and North, intellect and enthusiasm, the arguments of secularism and rhetoric of love - the tension is perpetuated in the nineteenth century...  And each tradition seems enfeebled without the complement of the other.'
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The next issueof the printed issue of NORTHERN VOICES No.14, will soon be available for sale with a with a review of one of Dave Goodway's books 'The Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow:  from William Morris to Colin Ward', Northern Voices can be obtained as follows:
Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included). Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' sent to c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com

Political Prisoners & Luddites in York

ALMOST 100 turned up last Saturday at the York Guildhall to a commemorate the 200-year anniversary, in January 1813, of the execution of several men accused of being Luddites. In York, at that time, before a densely packed Court room all the men were found guilty of crimes like criminal riot, unlawful oaths, robberies etc. They were men of the West Riding of Yorkshire: of the Calder Valley, of the Spen Valley and the Colne Valley. A contemporary writer wrote:

'As the day broke slanting rain faded away to reveal flakes of snow' as the men were taken shackled to York Castle to be punished, the streets were heavily policed because of the 'fear that people will try to rescue the people before they were executed'.

 Dr Katrina Navickas at the University of Hertfordshire, spoke eloquently and pointed out that to the men from the West Riding in those days the city of York was 'a foreign land'. It was, she said, a case of 'execution for political of social crimes'. It was the time of the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, and Ms. Navickas told us that in the West Riding there were 'communities of silence' with a fear of spies, but Joseph Woods from Halifax visited the parents of one executed man Tom Smith to uncover some of the facts. She claimed the Luddites were not 'a faceless mob' but were confronted, as we are today, by a free market economics in which the invisible hand of capital would 'increase profits' and 'cheapen labour'. Government had already 'banned' trade unions in the early 1800s.

In their letters the Luddites had shown themselves to be knowledgeable looking to protection from the Elizabethan laws. They knew that the new technologies of their time would threaten to reduce their skills as workers. In a book by George Walker 'The Costumes of Yorkshire' there is an illustration of a Luddite as a man in a woman's dress; rather like the one in the painting by Ford Madox Brown entitled 'Work' (this picture is at present in storage at the Manchester Art Gallery).

Professor Malcolm Chase addressed the issue of York as a historic place for political prisoners because it was the epicentre of Yorkshire. From the imprisonment of Welshmen in 1295; through the jailing of Parisian nobles in the 15th Century; to the men of the West Riding being hung, drawn and quartered in 1664; and on to the Jacobite executions 'York was a political place,' he said. Indeed, it seems that York was the major political prisoners after London. York was a centre of reform and Pro. Chase said 'Campaigns for centre for political reform often began in York'; these political vibrations continued right up to the First World War.

The last speaker, Alan Brooke, was indeed an anarchist from Huddersfield and he claimed that in 1912 George Greensmith, a local anarchist, claimed that 'the syndicalists were inspired by the Luddites'. He made many quotations with references to Gustav Landau's criticism of Marx, the Munich Soviet, Max Weber, Tomas Mann, Bellock, Chesterton, Louis Mumford, and Friz Lange's film 'Metropolis'. He said: 'The Luddites tried to engage the people for a law to stick to and uphold the Elizabethan Statutes'. But it was a time when the regime didn't want the market or the workplace to be constrained by statutes.

Curiously the problems of the weavers, colliers, and other workers of Nottinghamshire, Leicester, Yorkshire and south Lancashire over the introduction of new technology and their attempts to retain their skills and artisan crafts, has some similarities to the the late 19th century struggles of the Spanish rural workers of Andalucia to fight 'piecework' through violent action: in 1882, these workers who labelled themselves the 'Desheredados' or 'Disinherited', consisting of the vineyard labour of Jerez and Arcos de la Frontera, broke away from the Regional Workers' Federation after the Congress in Seville in that year. Gerald Brenan writes in 'The Spanish Labyrinth':

'The real struggle on the large estates was over destajo (piece-work)... The landlords could not pay decent wages so long as their labourers did so little work. The labourers would not work harder because by doing so they would increase the already cruel unemployment. The serfs, landlords got serf labour – that is, bad and unwilling labour – but the labourers did not get the one privilege of which is maintenance.'

The issue of piece-work was serious for the people of this South West corner of Spain in the late 19th Century, just as the issue of the introduction of new technology was for the people of the West Riding of Yorkshire in the early 19th Century.  In both cases they thought the practices were inhuman and degraded people.  Gerald Brenan explains:

'Feeling in the country districts at that time (1880s) was especially tense because the last two years had been years of severe drought and famine. The starving labourers had had to stand by and watch the crops on the large estates carried off to be sold at high prices in Seville or Cadiz. Ever since 1876 discontent had been acute and had shown itself in burnings of vineyards and in assassinations. Secret groups and societies pullulated. Then came a year of exceptional abundant rainfall. The harvest was excellent and a strike of reapers against piece-work led to a state of excitement and expectation in the whole district.'

In both cases the people responded in the best way they could and perhaps the only way they could; through riot and direct action.  In the absence of proper trade unions the Luddites were attacking machinery while trying to invoke the Elizabethan statutes to protect themselves, and the labourers of the Cadiz province of Southern Spain were seeking 'justicia' by sabotage and direct action.  There seems to be some similarity in these struggles.  As he faced the prospect of execution in York George Mellor spoke up:

'The human soul is worth more than work or gold'. 

One could image a Spanish anarchist in Andalucia in the 19th Century saying something similar.

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NORTHERN VOICES No.13: Out Now!!!

NORTHERN VOICES 13, - the printed / physical version of N.V. - deals with some of the issues that the others on the so-called British left won't touch. Starting with an interview with Sylvia Lancaster, mum of the murdered 'Goth Girl' / 'New Romantic' Sophie Lancaster, who was kicked to death up Bacup, in Lancashire, in August 2007. How do you feel about a new 'Hate Crime' on the statute book? Previously, Northern Voices has given you 'The Gangs of Manchester' dating back to an early 20th Century, but that was about lad's gangs: does the merciless killing of our sublime Sophie represent a step into a darker age? To be up-to-date and understand the way Northern Voices thinks and is different from other publications you should read the real and physical N.V..

Other stories include an apparent attack on the arts in Rochdale by the Link4Life organisation; 'The Strange Burnley story of Philip Morrell: the man who resisted Britain's participation in World War One' by Rev. Father Petty; an interview with a Libyan freedom fighter in Manchester by Barry Woodling; Tameside Eye & Salford Spy; Bribery & Corruption Column covering blacklisting; work-for-dole; allegations of bribery on Bury Council, 'environmental vandalism' at Chat Moss in Salford and  Les May on what he is now describing as 'Backdoor Privatisation' in Rochdale.

Do you think theatres and drama are Crap? Well, if you do or you don't, there's a review of Six O' the Best Northern Theatres by Chris Draper and with 'Miss Julie'* staring one of our northern actresses Maxine Peake, and starting at Manchester's Royal Exchange on the 12th, April, you can decide if it's worth a visit to Theatre -in-the-Round, based on what Chris has to say about the state of our local theatres up North. In our coloured centre-spread there is an image of an anarchist scarf that James Keogh, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39 and who last November was awarded a Blue Plaque by Tameside MBC, sent to his mum in Ashton-under-Lyne. Did James buy it on the Ramblas in Barcelona after he arrived in Spain in 1937? Then if you fancy a bit of culture you can have a look at our view of the Ford Madox Brown Exhibition, and the tricky business that led to his painting of the murals in Manchester Town Hall: our centre spread includes 'Bradshaw's Defence of Manchester A.D. 1642'.

Then there's history with 'Peterloo & the politics of Failure' by Dick Dutch and more of Chris Draper on the Sheffield outrages and sucking-up to the bosses by British trade union gaffers.

* 'MISS JULIE' by August Strindberg at the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester:
a new version by David Eldridge, from a literal translation by Charlotte Barslund
'I can't run away, I can't stay. I can't live, I can't die. Help me'
MAXINE PEAKE plays Miss Julie. Known for her television appearances in SILK, the BAFTA nominated HANCOCK & JOAN and SHAMELESS, she is reunited with director Sarah Frankcom, whose recent successes at the Exchange include the award-winning PUNK ROCK and A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE.
'Sweden, 1894. Midsummer night’s celebrations are in full swing but the Count’s daughter, the beautiful and imperious Miss Julie, feels trapped and alone. Downstairs in the servants’ kitchen, handsome and rebellious footman Jean is feeling restless. When they meet a passion is ignited that soon spirals out of control. Strindberg’s masterpiece caused a scandal when first produced – and has been hugely popular ever since – for its searingly honest portrait of the class system and human sexuality.'
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The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13, with all sorts of stuff others won't touch and may be obtained as follows:
Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included)
Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at
c/o 52, Todmorden Road,
Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com
_______________________________________________________

Catching on! The Musical!

HISTORICAL MEMORY & THE BOYS ON THE BLACKLIST
______________________________________________________

Here's an issue for discussion at the newly formed
Greater Manchester Radical History Group:

Meeting to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.
Entrance Free. Everyone welcome.
______________________________________________________
WHY was Steve Acheson from Denton in Tameside and a handful of Manchester contracting electricians left standing on lonely pickets around the city's building sites fighting the blacklist in the building trade and almost ignored by the British left and the trade unions for so long? Why do some things become documented and celebrated, and others disappear from the historical memory?

In 1899,a strike took place in New York that forced the press barons, Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst, into a compromise. This month, Dan Barry in his theatre column of the International Herald Tribune, wrote: 'There really was a newsboy's strike in 1899 that unsettled the empires of Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst' and 'there really were thousands of children using muscle and wit to thwart delivery of Pulitzer's Evening World and Hearst's Evening Journal...' The sheer embarrassment of these gaffers, Pulitzer and Hearst, being portrayed as heartless scoundrels by thousands of young ragamuffins demanding the right to 'sale or return' on the newspapers they sold on the streets of New York was remarkable, and perhaps more remarkable was that they had some success. Yet, afterwards the New York newsboy's strike, which spread to other cities, disappeared off the historical radar and almost a century would pass, writes Dan Barry, 'before the Newsboy's Strike of 1899 received its due...' It has now been remembered because the historian, David Nasaw, spotted a footnote and wrote 'Children of the City' about the 1899 Newsboy's Strike in a book in 1985, and this month Disney has put on a Broadway musical 'Newsies the Musical' which began previews on the 15th, March: the actor and playwright, Harvey Fierstein who wrote the play says 'facts are not what drama is'. Mr. Fierstein said he wanted to plumb the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these striving children come to a liberating realisation: 'That they matter.'

Why was the New York newsboy's strike forgotten about for almost a century? Why did it disappear from the historical memory for so long and now it is being remembered in a musical on Broadway by Disney? Surely not because of some conspiracy by an historical hierarchy? Some things like the consequencies and sufferings of the parties in the Spanish Civil War were clearly shelved and hidden in a great forgetfulness by 'el Pacto de Olvido':
'Pact of Forgetting (in Spanish: el pacto de olvido) is the Spanish political decision (by both the leftist and rightist parties) of avoiding having Spain deal with the legacy of Francoism after the 1975 death of Gen. Francisco Franco, who remained in power since the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939.'*

The Spanish case was a very special instance of taking an event off the political/ historical record, but it is unlikely that the New York newsboys fell into such a deliberate act of exclusion or that the Manchester electricians were deliberately overlooked by the media during the early years of their campaign against the blacklist; much more likely it was down to a failure of madia management on the part of the workers in the early days. But does this apply to Captain Swing and the Luddites in the 19th century as some radical historians are now suggesting? Was it bad media management or something else that has led to them being overlooked by many main stream and left-wing historians?

This coming Saturday this will be discussed at
Greater Manchester Radical History Group Meeting
to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.


*This pact underpinned the transition to democracy of the 1970s and meant that difficult questions about the recent past were suppressed for fear of endangering 'national reconciliation' and the restoration of liberal-democratic freedoms. Further, responsibility for the Spanish civil war, and for the repression that followed, was not to be placed upon any particular social or political group. 'In practice , this presupposed suppressing painful memories derived from the dictatorship's division of the population into "victors" and "vanquished".'
This pact has since been challenged with the arrival of a socialist government in 2004 under the prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose grandfather, himself a republican officer, was condemned to death and shot by Franco's Nationalist troops in the Spanish Civil War.

Greater Manchester Radical History Group

Meeting to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.

Aims:
1) To found a Northern Radical History Network.
2) To decide on the nature of our first research publication:
the Luddite anniversary.

11am to 12.30:
Chris Draper on the Practicalities & Purpose of Radical Publishing:
Production, Content, Style, Form, Accessibility & Distribution.
Examining some previously published examples for consideration:
'Chomsky & his Critics' issued in 2001 (first published by sociologists at the Manchester Universities and some northern anarchists); the Northern Voices' series of journals 2003-2012 ( published by Northern Voices' Editorial Panel); Spanish Civil War booklet (first published by Tameside Trade Union Council in 2006 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Greater Manchester County Association of TUCs' program for that year), 'The Workers' Next Step' (2009).

a) What kind of outcome do we want from our project & publication?

b) What kind of booklet do we want?

c) Where will it be distributed and to whom?

d) What should be the relationship of these publications to the Blog?

e) What kind of methodology ought we to be using?

Lunch Break: 12.30 to 1.30pm.

1.30pm to 2.30pm:

Richard Holland on the Luddites & Peterloo-
Why do some events get neglected and others get embraced by the popular culture and the establishment left?

2.30pm to 4pm:

Roger Ball on the History, Practical Experiences & Endeavours of the Bristol Radical History Group, giving everyday parochial examples from his knowledge of the South West of England, and showing how he views a similar venture might relate to the general public in our Northern towns and cities.
What is the knack of opening up the public conciousness to our own history and form of life, away from the stale ghettos of establishment thinking and politics?

NORTHERN ANARCHIST NETWORK: Colin Ward, Luddites, students & the new syndicalists

ABOUT 25 attended the NAN last December for a meeting at the Bolton Socialist Club which discussed the place of the anarchists in the current economic crisis. Richard Holland provided us with an outline of the 'hidden history' of the Luddite movement in the North.  It was argued that to the conventional left the Luddites presented a bit of a challenge as being something 'not quite Kosher' and not so acceptable as the Chartists, who could be safely categorised as a logical historical step towards 'respectable' historical institutions such as the Labour Party.  The NAN agreed to work for a celebration of Luddism in 2012.

In her contribution on the student struggles, Rachel Whittaker disputed that tuition fees were the most significant problem, claiming that the current ideology of the corporate emphasis on career, vocational studies and business management, is the real issue degrading education in modern times. The growth of private colleges run by companies may be an example of this.

Keir from Edinburgh described the situation of the labour movement since the Coalition government began its program of cuts in public services. Keir is one of the voices of the new syndicalists within the National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN), who are emerging as the realisation grows that British party politics is basically a bag of wind.  The 'syndicalists' are now perhaps the fastest growing section of the NSSN, which is itself now facing a power grab by the Socialist Party; certainly the syndicalists probably have the most members of the NSSN national steering committee after the Socialist Party.

Dave Goodway addressed another alternative to party politics by looking at the relevance of the ideas of Colin Ward, who died earlier in 2010. Colin Ward's ideas, he said, are rooted in a few books which he made the most of, and can perhaps be best summed up in a proposition expressed in 1910 by Gustav Landauer that stated: 'The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently'.  Given the banal political recipes put forward thus far by the conventional British left and others to deal with the economic crisis, it is surely vital that someone on the libertarian left comes up with a better agenda for social change.  By throwing together this eclectic mix of speakers, the NAN may have made a step towards developing a much needed alternative analysis.

'Can tha' keep a Secret?' - An old Yorkshire tale of class war, conspiracy, murder …and a nice day out! by Chris Draper

(Due to an editing error in the latest issue of Northern Voices, we've accidentally 'cropped' an article by valued contributor Chris Draper. We hope we can make up for this mistake - to both Chris and our readers - by reproducing the article in full on the blog. The introduction follows and the rest of the article can be read after the 'read more' link below)

In February 1812 at the Shears Inn, Hightown, West Yorkshire a secret meeting of working men took place in an upstairs room. The talk was of desperate measures, how could croppers defend themselves, their families and their community from the destitution wrought by the cloth masters? The men determined to stop the new shearing machines being imported into the Spen Valley. They planned an all out campaign of direct action. A campaign that would climax with an armed assault on Rawfolds Mill and a notorious attempt by the local vicar to force an injured Luddite to reveal the names of his fellow conspirators…