Unite Sharon Graham's plan for a new workplace politics by Brian Bamford

THE UNITE ELECTION for GENERAL SECRETARY

Playing Politics or having control in the Workplace?

At the end of June the fringe website WORKERS' LIBERTY announced:

'Unite General Secretary candidate Sharon Graham’s proposals for “a Workers’ Politics” point in the wrong direction. In many respects they are a regression from Unite’s current political strategy.

'The wider output from Graham’s campaign says little about political struggles and largely disparages political trade unionism in favour of “returning to the workplace”. She has denounced rival left candidate Steve Turner and his new backer Howard Beckett as “the Westminster Brigade” (“the Westminster Brigade versus the Workplace”). In fact Graham lumps Turner and right-wing candidate Gerard Coyne together as the Westminster Brigade, as if Coyne rather than Turner winning would not matter!'

The website continues:

'Effective working-class politics does need to be rooted in strong workplace and community organisation and struggles, as opposed to just senior union officials hobnobbing with politicians or social media output; but Graham's stance is reactionary populist posturing.'

This small leftist body WORKERS' LIBERTY focuses here upon the spirit of syndicalism in Sharon Graham's strategy and calls it 'a regression from Unite’s current political strategy'.

They argue 'Graham’s campaign says little about political struggles and largely disparages political trade unionism in favour of “returning to the workplace” and that she 'has denounced rival left candidate Steve Turner and his new backer Howard Beckett as “the Westminster Brigade” (“the Westminster Brigade versus the Workplace”).'

In her own election address Sharon says: 'I am not supported by any clique of MP's. I don't have the machine of the current regime.'

THE HISTORICAL TRADITION of BRITISH SYNDICALISM

THE program set out clearly by Sharon Graham today has roots that go deep in the history of British, and indeed, European trade unionsm. It encompasses ideas that stretch back to the foundation of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union in the 19th century and was popular before the First World War in 1912 when 'The Miners' Next Step' was formulated and articulated as a project for workplace syndicalism and workers' control.

The Guild Socialist and historian G.D.H. Cole has described how British trade unionists tend to return to militant workplace activity in periods when parliamentary politics fails. If Sharon Graham's message today is anything to go by we may well be entering one of those phases. As I read through the addresses of the candidates for the Unite General Secretary today there seems to be an air of disillusionment with party politics and politicians.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that Sharon Graham is cynically drawing upon a 'reactionary popularist posturing' as the hole-in-the-corner Marxists of the 'WORKERS' ALLIANCE' seem to be suggesting in their critique above. Reading her address it seems to me that she is drawing upon her own insider knowledge and experience to articulate a narative of what could be called modern workplace syndicalism. It is not surprising that the politicians are in bad odour right now. They seem to lack common decency and that goes for the Labour Party as well.

Blacklisting & LABOUR'S Defence of the Boss's Right to Vet

IT not surprising that I note that the Manchester UNITE EPIU Contracting Branch North West/1400 have nominated Sharon Graham. This Manchester branch spearheaded the campaign that led to the exposure of the Consulting Association blacklist in the British building industry in 2009. The reason that the Manchester electricians would be sceptical about professional politicians can be found in a letter sent in 2008 to Graham Brady, then a Conservative MP representing one of the blacklisted Manchester electricians; in this letter dated 30th, April 2008, the then Labour Minister for Employment Relations & Postal Affairs, Pat McFadden wrote:

'Employers often vet the people they hire. It is not the policy of the Government to make it unlawful for employers to undertake such necessary vetting in a systematic way, conferring with previous employers as required. However... the Government is aware that irresponsible vetting can lead to abuse...' Then he reassures Mr. Brady MP and his blacklisted constituwent by sternly declaring: 'The Government remains vigilant in this matter and my Department monitors the evidence that information about trade unionists is being misused to discourage employers from hiring them.'

In truth we now know for sure that blacklisting in the Britsh building trade flourished under Labour Goverments because a year later in 2009, the Consulting Assocation and its blacklist files compiled bt Ian Kerr were sucessfuly confiscated by Dave Clancy, the Infomation Commisiioner. It is with our current knowledge of politicians of all governments have a habit of looking the other way and allowing lives to be ruined by blacklist files. With her knowlege of the BESNA in construction and the leverage campaigns she is able to state: 'We can't rely on politicians and I won't be signing any blank cheques for any party [and] I will stop us becoming a branch of the Labour Party, by moving beyond factions and focusing on policies.'

It is this refreshing down to earth approach to the everyday reality that makes Sharon Graham the ideal candidate for those of us who are sick of the fashionable addicion to virtue signaling and delight in someone who has the spirit of everyday reality about her. The alternative candidates Gerald Coyne and Steve Turner both seem to have a flavour of the political factionalism of current mediocre politics.

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Eric Preston former ILP activist has died

by Brian Bamford

ERIC PRESTON who lived in Leeds died last month.

Eric Preston who had been an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) since the 1950s has died. In 1959 when I first met him he was involved in founding the Rank & File Movement in London: the ILP together with the London Anarchists; the Syndicalist Workers Federation (SWF); the Solidarity Group (formerly 'Agitator'); the then Worker's Party which later merged with the SWF; and some subscibers to the paper Freedom set up the Rank & File movement to try to introduce an organised shopfloor form of libertarian campaigning element into the then active shop-stewards movement.

This Rank & File movement was mainly London based and according to Pete Turner later an editor of Freedom, this movement merged into the London Industrial Sub-Committee of the Committee of 100. Futher events like the Spies for Peace revelations emerged as a natural consequence of political evolution of these activists in the early 1960s. Eric Preston, who lived in Leeds, and his friends Bill and Joan Christopher at that time based in London, were central to these developments on the libertarian left.

Bob Galliers writes: Eric's funeral will be next Thursday but because of Covid restrictions etc we will not be going as numbers allowed to attend are few and standing outside is impractical and limited numbers too. The plan is that someone will film the ceremony so that those who cannot attend will be able to access it - not sure yet if this will just be recorded or live. There is a lot of research going on about Eric's early involvement in the ILP/ politics but sadly so many have passed on and those that are still alive have very vague memories. Seems that there are plans to have a good bash next year sometime to remember Eric. If there is a written obituary or I get any more information I will pass this on.

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Dave Douglass: Why I'm No Longer a 'Wobbly'! *

 Farewell British Isles Industrial Workers of the World
by Dave Douglass

Follonsby Miners Lodge Banner

FOR almost fifty years I have been a member of the IWW since it reformed in Britain in the late 70’s.  At that time it did what it said on the tin, it was a revolutionary union based on the principles on which it was founded in 1905 in Chicago, the principle of One Industry One Union, with all workers in one industry in the same union regardless of craft or skill or grade. United through their industries to One Big Union of all workers.  It sought not just a fair days wage but abolition of wage slavery, it fought for the next slice of bread and demanded the bakery.  Unions like the NUM and NUR at that time were based upon the principle after the early Industrial Unionists and Syndicalists in 1908/ 1909 and programmes like The Miners Next Step, and Industrial Union Britain had a profound influence on the trade union and labour movement.  We (The IWW through the 70’s 80’s and 90’s) continued to work within the mass unions as cells and duel members, we of course worked within communities on community issues too.  During the decades I was associated with the IWW I worked a lifetime in the mines and during that time South Yorkshire and North East IWW branches.  We organised large conferences and rallies within the heart of working-class communities and in mass mobilisations of the class and militant sections of it.  North Eastern IWW hosted a conference on Clean Coal technology and Climate change and commissioned a pamphlet in support of the coal communities and industry in defence of the miners union on the basis of clean coal technology.

The IWW internationally had had a significant impact on the pre-WW1 war and post WW1 war period, particularly within the Irish Socialist Republican Movement and coalfields Miners Federation of GB.

George Harvey first national organiser of the IWW in Britain, creator of the Follonsby (Red)Banner. Lodge Secretary Follonsby Wardley Lodge.

It is the inspiration of the miners ‘red banners’ and northern IWW members were influential in recreating the red miners Follonsby banner and forming the Follonsby Miners Lodge Association.  It carries the portrait of Harvey first British organiser of the IWW Connolly first national organiser of the IWW and founder member, Arthur Cook syndicalist president of the Miners Federation during the 26 lock out and General Strike, and V I Lenin whose slogan All Power to the Soviets sounded like the same aims of the IWW and the international Industrial Unions.

It has toured the country and been used as a central plank for lectures on our revolutionary history and culture, as well as publications on the banner and founder members of Industrial Unionism in Britain.  We had been regular guests at the James Connell commemoration in Kills County Meath, a Wobbly and author of The Red Flag, our banners and his influence inspired a radical red RMT union banner.  In major commemorations of 1912, 1926, and annually the Durham Miners Gala where we always had a marquee and bookstall and organised major rallies and discussions about revolutionary class politics.  From time to time we organised workers into the union and represented them at work and tribunals.  I had the honour last year of having the Follonsby Banner as the backdrop to a lecture on the struggles of the IWW and the Wobblies in Irish revolutionary history and the British mines, at the Socialist Republican commemoration of the Hunger Strikers.

To cut a decades long story short, over the last ten years and more I have been more and more distanced and disillusioned with the team calling itself the British IWW , to start with it has become hugely more centralised than it has ever been in its creation.  The decentralised democratic function of the branches is now controlled and centralised into a national leadership.  Sad to say the ‘union’ has become dominated by the south of England and within that a largely middle class London based membership who have carried their liberal left agenda’s straight from that milieu into the policy of the union.  You could be listening to the young liberal leftist Corbynista’s, Climate Extinction or now the IWW.  The social outlook of this milieu has grated for some time.  I was amazed for example as a person who fought for my class for ten years from 83 to 93 against pit closures and the slaughter of the coal industry and miners union and community, to hear anti coal anti mining agenda’s rolled out in the name of the union.  It was simply assumed this being the attitude among the southern middle class it was generally agreed, it wasn’t, not by any of us in the rust belts.  But the final straw for me is the wholesale adoption of Identity Politics, the sectarian politics of sex and gender with enforced PC positions again just assumed to be common sense and currency.  The agenda of class struggle and the sovereignty of the working class as a whole the bedrock upon which all other forms of oppression stem and around which we unite as a common class is the absolute bedrock of the IWW or has been up to now.

IWW picket line Gateshead 2014

Today I get sent this:-

Gemma (East Scotland area organiser) and Maddi (Clydeside Branch co-communications officer) are inviting you to the IWW's first online welcome session for women & non-binary members: Wednesday 15th July, at 7pm on Zoom (details below).

Please note: This message is being sent to all IWW members so that everyone can help spread the word. The welcome session on the 15th is specifically for women (trans-inclusive) and non-binary members. If you are a cis-gender man (you were assigned male at birth, and are still male now) then please stay tuned for news of future welcome sessions, or reply to this email if you'd like to speak to someone from your local branch or in your industry.

And today I resign, it’s a long way from Fellow Worker to cis-gender man and designating me not on my class and class orientation but whether I have a problem with the gender I was born with and actually assuming that that is some common feature of humanity.

The IWW for a long time, even when we were doing great things was always a very poor tribute band to the original, today it is no longer a class struggle organisation and is completely shot through with Middle class PC Identity liberal leftist politics.  A Sad and sorry end to a once great organisation, but they can't take away its fine past and heroic contribution. 

*  Origin of Wobbly Theory #1 - "Eye Wobble Wobble"

Also known as the "Chinese Restaurant Owner Theory", this is the most often cited and embellished theory.  There exists plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this theory as having a grain of truth to it.  Although it is equally likely to be little more than a cleverly crafted tall tale or yarn. We quote from Three Original Sources:
(1) The earliest known reference to the term:

In Vancouver, in 1911, we had a number of Chinese members, and one restaurant keeper would trust any member for means. He could not pronounce the letter "w" (due to the "l" sounds in the pronunciation of the letter), but called it "wobble" and would ask, "you Eye Wobble Wobble?" and when the [red] card was shown credit was unlimited. Thereafter the laughing term amongst us was "I Wobbly Wobbly".

--Mortimer Downing, IWW Member. Quoted in Jack Scott, "How the Wobblies Got their Name," in his Plunderbund and Proletariat (Vancouver, BC.: North Star Books, 1975), p. 153. Also quoted in Jerry Lembcke and William M. Tattam, One Union in Wood, A Political History of the International Woodworkers of America (New York, NY.: International Publishers and Madeira Park, BC.: Harbour Publishing, © 1984), pp. 188-89 n31.
(2) The following account is from the Official IWW History:

It was at this time (1912 during a "thousand mile picket line" railway strike in British Columbia) that the term "Wobbly" as nick-name for IWW came into use. Previously they had been called many things from International Wonder Workers to I Won't Works. The origin of the expression "Wobbly" is uncertain. Legend assigns it to the lingual difficulties of a Chinese restaurant keeper with whom arrangements had been made during this strike to feed members passing through his town. When he tried to ask "Are you I.W.W.?" it is said to have come out: "All loo eye wobble wobble?" The same situation, but in Vancouver is given as the 1911 origin of the term by Mortimer Downing in a letter quoted in Nation, Sept. 5, 1923..."

--From The IWW: Its First 100 Years by Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, 2006, IWW: Cincinnati, page 60..
3) This account is further elaborated in the following quote:

The word "Wobbly", a nickname for IWW members, humorously illustrates the union's efforts to combat racism. A Chinese restaurant keeper in Vancouver in 1911 supported the union and would extend credit to members. Unable to pronounce the letter "w", he would ask if a man was in the "I Wobble Wobble". Local members jokingly referred to themselves as part of the "I Wobbly Wobbly," and by the time of the Wheatland strike of 1913, "Wobbly" had become a permanent moniker for workers who carried the red card. Mortimer Downing, a Wobbly who first explained the etymology, noted that the nickname "hints of a fine, practical internationalism, a human brotherhood based on a community of interests and of understanding."

--Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows, The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (Vancouver, BC.: New Star Books, 1990), page 35.

Weighing the Evidence

Conceivably, Downing's account could be the honest truth. According to Dan Cornford (in Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire, ©1987, Temple University Press), The IWW was the first labor union in North America to refuse to discriminate against Chinese and Chinese Americans. (Many earlier left-wing organizations, including the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor discriminated vehemently against Chinese and Japanese Americans. Former members of these organizations (such as George Speed) later joined the IWW and jettisoned their racism). Such interracial solidarity most certainly did not go unnoticed in the Chinese American community, and they would likely have responded favorably to the IWW.
However, all the evidence of the "Chinese Restaurateur Theory" apparently stems from Downing's letter. There is no known independent source that verifies Downing's story. His account may just as easily be a romanticized embellishment of the truth, or it could be pure fiction, and there is no credible proof that it isn't. Downing's narrative also suggests deeply ingrained stereotypical views of Chinese and Chinese-American speech patterns, even by 1911 standards.
Quoting Mark Leier again:

In a letter to the author, dated 31 January 1989, Craig M. Carver, managing editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English states that the Chinese restaurateur version is not given "much credence ... because the story is simply unverifiable." Those with a scientific bent must conclude that the etymology is unknown; romantics may choose to stick with Downing.

--Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows, The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (Vancouver, BC.: New Star Books, 1990), p 35.

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Who Was Guy Bowman?

 by Christopher Draper

Fortunately for the rich, World War I transformed Britain’s raging class war into a murderous conflict between Nations.  Pre-war militancy was inspired by Syndicalism, a scheme for workers to organise into one big class-conscious union to run their own industries and revolutionise society and the prime movers were Tom Mann and Guy Bowman.  Curiously, whilst Mann’s story is well known the life of Guy Bowman remains a mystery.

Manchester’s Massed Militants

Britain’s first national syndicalist conference was convened by Bowman at Manchester Coal Exchange on 26th November 1910. Two hundred delegates representing sixty-thousand organised workers gathered with the speakers including Liverpool stonemason Fred Bowers, Huddersfield socialist Fred Shaw, Irish activist Jim Larkin and Spanish anarchist Lorenzo Portet. Tom Mann moved the founding motion; “That whereas the sectionalism that characterises the trade union movement of today is utterly incapable of fighting the capitalist class and securing the economic freedom of the workers, this conference declares that the time is now ripe for the industrial organisation of all workers on the basis of class – not trade or craft – and that we hereby agree to form a Syndicalist Education League to propagate the principles of Syndicalism throughout the British Isles with a view to merging all existing unions into one compact organisation for each industry…”

Don’t Shoot!

The authorities responded to strikes by sending in the army; shooting dead a miner at Tonypandy, killing 2 railwaymen at Llanelli and 2 dockers in Liverpool.  Unbowed, in 1912 Guy Bowman published in”The Syndicalist” a “DON’T SHOOT!” appeal to soldiers to refuse to fire on fellow workers and was sentenced to 9 months with hard labour as a consequence.

International Man of Mystery

Despite more than a decade of high profile activism Bowman revealed little of his personal life and what he did say is difficult to substantiate.  He claimed to have been born in St John’s Wood, London in 1871 to a French mother and Scottish father yet there’s no official record of his birth.  As an anarchist he might well have chosen to dodge officialdom yet at the height of his political activism he duly completed the 1911 census form, which bears his characteristic signature, yet he’s oddly absent from records covering both his pre and post-political years.

Guy Takes a Bow

Guy’s claimed birth year seems about right so he was already in his early thirties before he became known to English activists.  In 1906 he popped up in London as a journalist claiming specialist knowledge of European political movements.  Joining the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) he pursued a journalistic interest in the recent anarchist assassination attempt on the Spanish king. The founder of the International Modern School movement, Francisco Ferrer, had been arrested by Spanish police and charged with complicity in a move widely interpreted as a political frame up. In September 1906 Bowman published an article in the SDF’s newspaper “Justice” defending Ferrer and the following month he travelled to Spain to cover the continuing prosecution.

Expelled

On Tuesday 23rd October Guy Bowman was arrested in Madrid and interrogated by Spanish police for two days before being “conducted over the border” into France.  It was variously speculated that the police had been tipped off by either the Spanish Embassy in London or the British Government that Bowman was an undesirable alien intent on promoting anarchist insurrection.

Meeting of Minds

Thanks to the campaigning of Bowman and other activists around the world in June 1907 Francisco Ferrer was released after a year’s imprisonment. Immediately resuming his promotion of libertarian education Ferrer made an extended visit to England over the springand summer of 1909 (21 April to June 12). Bowman was then employed as General Manager of the SDF’s print & publications department, ”Twentieth Century Press” and was living at 4 Maude Terrace, Walthamstow (outer East London).

During his time in England Ferrer met the respected anarchist Peter Kropotkin and was reacquainted with his old Spanish comrade Lorenzo Portet. Ferrer entrusted Portet to continue his educational work (LP founded a “Modern School” in Liverpool) in the likely the event that the Spanish authorities would ultimately succeed in silencing him.  A few weeks later Ferrer was duly silenced.

On his return to Spain he was arrested, subjected to a show trial and shot dead by firing squad.

The French Connection

Bowman supported Ferrer’s educational ideas but was ultimately more interested in French Syndicalism. Guy was particularly impressed by the approach of the French Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) trade union. So much so that when leading labour activist Tom Mann landed at London’s Victoria Dock on May 16th 1910 (having returned from 8 years organising overseas) Guy persuaded Tom to accompany him to Paris, “to meet the men of direct action”. On their return to the UK the pair commenced publication of The Industrial Syndicalist (with Bowman as publisher, Mann as editor) and set about organising a national conference in Manchester.

Bowman’s French connection is intriguing. He spoke fluent French as well as English and German and it was frequently noted that Bowman didn’t look or sound English. Newspapers repeatedly questioned his claimed origins with the Globe typically asserting, “Bowman, of olive complexion and with pointed grey beard and hair brushed back has the appearance of a foreigner. In fact he speaks with a pronounced foreign accent, but is stated by his friends to be an Englishman.”  The Pall Mall Gazette observed,  “Guy Bowman is an Englishman who looks like a Frenchman”.

Bowman was certainly in Paris in 1905, where he attended the International Freethought Congress. After meeting Gustave Herve at the Congress he agreed to translate his “Leur Patrie” for an English edition published as, “My Country, Right or Wrong”, but was Bowman there as a French resident or merely a roving English reporter?  Everyone recognised that Bowman was a highly educated and fluent linguist so how did he acquire this learning?  Where was he educated and who were his parents?

Don’t Shoot!

When a DON’T SHOOT appeal to strike-breaking soldiers appeared in the January 1912 Syndicalist, Guy Bowman as the publisher was arrested.  Charged with, “Feloniously endeavouring by publication of a certain article…to seduce persons serving in His Majesty’s land forces from their duty and allegiance to His said Majesty and to incite them to commit divers mutinous acts and traitorous practices”, Bowman was sentenced to serve 9 months in prison with hard labour.

Tom Mann was subsequently prosecuted for reading out the DON’T SHOOT appeal at a demonstration.  Two printers of The Syndicalist were also prosecuted although Bowman received the severest sentence.  Fortunately public protests forced the authorities to relent and Bowman was out after two months.  Curiously Guy was back in court within weeks and fined £1 for two counts of travelling in a first class train carriage with a third class ticket.

Organiser or Disorganiser?

With 41 million strike days in 1912 industrial militancy eclipsed parliamentary politics as syndicalists prepared to organise internationally. Several continental groups offered to host an international conference but Bowman insisted it was held in England.  The FIRST INTERNATIONAL SYNDICALIST CONGRESS was duly held in London, in September 1913 but Bowman’s unreliable behaviour cast doubt on his integrity.  He was accused of dragging his feet in arranging the event and questions were raised about his inability to account for monies he’d been entrusted with. Regarded as divisive by both local and international comrades Bowman subsequently failed to furnish the Bureau set-up by the Congress with promised minutes, delegate addresses and other essential documents.

The International Bureau was left with little alternative but to appeal over Bowman’s head direct to English comrades , “to assist us to remind Guy Bowman of his duty of conforming to the decision of the Congress. By his conduct he renders the functioning of the Bureau particularly difficult.”

Class War or World War?

Meanwhile continental comrades confidently pronounced that if national governments declared war then organised workers would simply down tools and refuse to take up arms against fellow workers, regardless of nationality.  Throughout 1914 Bowman continued to tour Britain promoting syndicalism. In January he brought the gospel to the Pioneers Hall, Rochdale and over following weeks he spoke in Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and London.  On Sunday 8th February Guy publicly advised, “SABOTAGE” at the Co-operative Hall, Charing Cross whilst on Friday 13th March he informed an audience at Sheffield’s Temperance Hall that his advice wasn’t really DON’T SHOOT but DO SHOOT!  “When they (soldiers) were asked to shoot the working class they would turn and shoot those who gave the order...”

Bowman’s Misdirected Arrow

As World War approached, rifts developed between Bowman and Mann.  Both agreed organising industrially was the way to go but Mann was less willing to completely abandon parliamentary politicking.  Bowman was sympathetic to the idea of “dual unionism”, creating parallel anarchist style unions alongside existing organisations whereas Mann insisted on revolutionising established unions from within.  Just as ISEL began losing influence in March 1914 Bowman sued the National Labour Press over its publication of, “From Single Tax to Syndicalism” (Tom Mann wrote the text and Bowman supplied the introduction).  As publisher of the book, Bowman had the previous year contracted with the printers to produce 2,000 copies but then failed to pay the bill so to recoup their costs the printers published the book themselves and kept the proceeds.  Whilst accepting that the printers had technically violated Bowman’s copyright the court offered him no recompense and Guy was left having to pay his own costs and with his reputation in tatters.

Puff of Smoke

Once war was declared in August 1914, socialists everywhere abandoned their promises and rallied round their respective national flags whilst Guy Bowman was nowhere to be seen. In his introduction to a reprint collection of Syndicalist newspapers, Geoff Brown observed, “The last references I have found to him (GB) in the labour movement press are in the Labour Leader in January and March 1915…”   But that wasn’t quite Bowman’s last acknowledged outing.  Guy still occasionally visited Kropotkin who was by then similarly isolated from former comrades (because of his un-anarchist support for the war).  I’ve discovered that Bowman also spoke at Hounslow Adult School, Whitton Road on Wednesday 12th April 1916 on, “The Fraud Called Democracy”, under the auspices of the “Syndicalist Education League (SEL)”.

Partners in Crime?

So what did Bowman do next?  If he’d simply opted to dodge the draft that doesn’t explain why he never reappears in records after the war (or why he wasn’t recorded before his 1911 census declaration).  None of Bowman’s erstwhile associates seem any the wiser and there are further mysterious circumstances.  Bowman’s self-completed 1911 census return recorded that he was then living with two French nationals, “39-year-old Jeanne Bonnard and 10-year-old” Jack Bonnard. “Jeanne” was a “Widow” and Jacques presumably her son.  Like Guy, neither of this pair appear in subsequent records except on 17th April 1912 Jeanne, the widow, had another child, Guy L Bowman. So who was this equally mysterious partner of Guy senior?  My theory is that she was none other than the abandoned common law wife of the deceased Francisco Ferrer.  If I am correct her real name was not Jeanne but Leopoldine Bonnard who partnered Ferrer in Paris from 1898 until 1905 when they split acrimoniously.  I think the boy “Jack” was really Regio Bonnard, the son of Leopoldine and Ferrer, born in Paris in 1900.

Unlike his parents, Guy L Bowman does feature in subsequent official records and his middle name appears to substantiate my theory of his parentage for on 13th September 1949 the UK Air Ministry announced that, “The KING has granted unrestricted permission for the wearing of the undermentioned decorations conferred upon personnel indicated in recognition of valuable services rendered in connection with the war – Bronze Star Medal - Sergeant 1376906 Guy Leopold BOWMAN, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve”

So it seems the son of the man sent to jail for publishing “DON’T SHOOT” in WWI was decorated for his contribution to WWII! It is also recorded that in the years 1938-9 Guy Leopold Bowman served at a trio of London’s top hotels (Dorchester, Ritz, Langham respectively) as a “reception clerk”.

Syndicalist or Sinner?

Bowman’s disappearance from the political spotlight is not unusual, many labour activists retire into obscurity but few cover their tracks so effectively.  Research almost always uncovers backgrounds and life stories but I’m not the first to remark on Bowman’s elusive biography.  I might, though be first to suggest that Bowman’s “invisibility” appears artful.   I’m inclined to believe he concealed his curriculum vitae for good reason.  His unexplained high level education suggests his origins and possibly allegiance were not working class.  It is quite possible “Guy Bowman” was in fact raised abroad by a military family bearing an entirely different name and committed to an imperial mission anathema to socialism.  I can’t prove Guy and his family concealed the truth for cynical reasons but it would make sense of otherwise inexplicable evidence.  It is curious that after Bowman’s family disappeared during WWI the sole member to resurface was decorated by the RAF having previously served in the run up to war in a role notoriously employed by secret services to keep tabs on visiting foreign “diplomats”.

Tom Mann, like many fellow labour leaders, published a memoir so why not Guy Bowman?  His widely published expulsion from Spain and high profile imprisonment would surely have guaranteed good sales and his extensive knowledge of labour activism would have ensured historical value yet he kept it all to himself, an odd response for a professional journalist.

The Secret State

Recent events uncovered extensive State infiltration of every level of radical organisation (even NV is currently subject to legal threats from a secret policeman involved in blacklisting) so it’s time to re-examine the credentials of past “activists”.  Guy Bowman’s integrity is questionable.  Kropotkin’s confidante Varlaam Tcherkesov was certainly dubious; “Bowman, half-English, half-French, quite an esprit boulevardier, a despotic man, wanted the entire movement for himself and kept it in his hands. He quarrelled with young syndicalists, scorned them, and stood alone”.

In contrast to the subject of my next article in this series there’s no smoking gun. Bowman might yet be innocent but I submit he has a prima facie case to answer.  Perhaps modern day advocates might care to submit snippets of new evidence in Bowman’s defence.  Meanwhile, I invite readers to adjudicate for themselves.

Christopher Draper (May 2017)

Early Syndicalism discussed in Wakefield

YESTERDAY, the Wakefield Socialist History Group debated syndicalism at the start of the last century.   The speakers included Robin Stocks who has written 'The Hidden Heroes of Easter Week'; the Huddersfield historian Alan Brooks; and Robin Stocks who spoke about the South Wales' miner and syndicalist, Noah Ablett.
The title of the meeting at the Red Shed was 'SYNDICALISM & the GREAT UNREST'.
Alan Stewart, the convenor of the event, drew our attention to Bob Holton's book 'British Syndicalism' (1979), which described the developments before and after World War I asRobin Stocks,  a form of proto-syndicalism. 
In the introduction for the meeting  it was stated:
'The early years of British syndicalism saw, Holton (1976) suggests. a "slow and unspectacular advance."  He says there were three "currents of revolutionary  industrial feeling" at this stage.
The first, centred around the writings of Daniel de Leon, the American socialist.  Though sometimes marred by a certain "sectarian rigidity" his works -brought back to Britain by seamen and other workers- were lively and accessible (Challinor 1977).
'His ideas were welcomed in particular by dissidents in the Social Democratic Federation who felt the SDF had lost momentum and was neglecting industrial struggles.  In 1903 a GS Yates of Leith led a de Leonist breakaway.  The Socialist Labour Party was formed. It in turn spawned the British Advocates of Industrial Unionism (1906).
'Now de Leon had been involved in the establishment of the American IWW (Wobblies) in 1905.  Yet Holton (1976) notes that there were problems with applying the "dual unionism" strategy to British conditions.'
There did not appear to be much reference to or attempt to discuss the founding conference of the 'Leeds Soviet'  a hundred years ago this month, which was considered in detail by Chris Draper on this Blog in January this year:
'HISTORY's most remarkable social experiment began one hundred years ago. As the Russian war effort disintegrated, autocratic Czarism was abolished and a revolutionary SOVIET system substituted.  Soviets were collectives of workers and soldiers organised to end the war and radically democratise Russia.  In March 1917 (February in the old Russian calendar) the PETROGRAD SOVIET led the revolution and despatched a four-man delegation to England to encourage British workers to follow their lead.  On 3 June 1917, over a thousand workers’ representatives met at LEEDS COLISEUM, Cookridge Street to emulate their Russian comrades and organise a British network of ”extra-parliamentary Soviets with sovereign powers”. 
www.northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-leeds-soviet-1917.html 

British Syndicalism Talk in Wakefield

Comrades
British syndicalism emerged in the years after 1900 in response, Holton (1976) says, to "urgent economic and political problems facing the working class."
Firstly, British capitalism was still struggling -despite the end of the "Great Depression"- and real wages fell some 10% between 1900 and 1912.
Secondly, capitalist industry was increasingly concentrated.  Businesses were amalgamating.  Employers associations were being set up.  "Federated capital" was more visible (Holton 1976).
Thirdly, technological change was displacing/downgrading certain craft skills.
And finally labour leaders were increasingly being incorporated into state sponsored collective bargaining structures and into the bourgeois parliamentary system.  Trade union officials now seemed increasingly remote from the rank and file.  And Lloyd George would boast in 1912 that parliamentary socialists were the "best policemen" when it came to managing and diffusing industrial unrest.
Face with all this -falling wages, deskilling, larger units of capitalist production and conservatism on the part of traditional labour leaders- workers began to look beyond sectionalism and reformism to class unity, direct action and industrial unionism.
This syndicalist sentiment was influenced by what had been going on in Europe, the US and Australia.  But it also drew from domestic traditions of workplace militancy and what Holton (1976) describes as "anti-State socialism."
On Saturday 13 May at 1pm at the Red Shed, Vicarage Street, Wakefield WF1, the Wakefield Socialist History Group are holding an event, SYNDICALISM AND THE GREAT UNREST.  The speakers are Robin Stocks and Alan Brooke.  Other speakers tbc. The chair is Adrian Cruden.  Admission is free and all are welcome.  A free light buffet will be provided.

Fraternally

Alan Stewart

Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group

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.

U.S. Syndicalist Comment on Trump & Hillary

Dear friends,

If you would like to know some of our thoughts, for what they are worth ...

Don't mourn!  Do not attach yourself to the destiny of other people!

Hillary Clinton could have saved the country from impending disaster, simply by withdrawing from the campaign late last winter.  All of the normal indicators then demonstrated that Mr. Sanders had become a very viable candidate (the sheer amount of monies collected from ordinary people to support the Sanders' campaign; the incredible numbers and diversity of people attending his rallies; the simple fact that Bernie had no problems of character (unlike both Trump and Clinton).  For much of the campaign it was clear that Hillary's efforts were not focused on winning.  She was tired.  She was absent-minded.  Self-absorbed, she wanted to win but she did not want to struggle to win.  She refused absolutely to learn new ways of doing things.

Wikileaks and other sources revealed that the Democrat Party machine was not even fair with Mr. Sanders.  The DFL machine in Minnesota, especially, cannot learn anything new; they just keep repeating their limited rituals from out of the past.  Always, they are obsessed with nothing but 'control'.  They are the worst example of machine politics in the country today.  How do they stave off the inevitable collapse?  They can't, and they won't!

Mr. Sanders was the first person in national political life in the United States since the 1930s and 1940s to openly use words like 'socialist' and 'socialist democracy', and to do so in positive contexts.  Considerable numbers of people had no problems with his efforts, thus putting the big lie to all the secret 'socialists' and secret 'communists' of several generations.  What did Proudhon and Kropotkin say about acting in our own right, and in our own name, and for ourselves?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, two Center-Rightists portraying a ritualized dispute, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, after furious verbal battle set down their weapons and quietly agreed to “peaceful” and friendly transition of 'power'.  It doesn't matter to either of them; one thoughtless Center-Rightist is as good as another!

We are witnessing the malaise of late-stage capitalism.  It is nothing but a spectacle of dysfunction and chaos.  Trump, the first truly Imperial President, the new Caesar, the new Bonaparte, proposes to accomplish what Aaron Burr, in the long ago, could not.  Many people will suffer greatly as the extreme Center-Right experiments with their 'new' vision of a “new” Utopia, a plebeian and élitist if not fascist Utopia.

However, even in the time of Hitler or Stalin, people could still think and act creatively and positively in the world.  Do not allow yourselves to become demoralized or depressed!  (That is the real devil; not Trump!)  Act and think for yourselves!  In the collective context of social responsibility, act and think now for a better future!

I'm sure you will find many opportunities in the near future for constructive direct action.

In solidarity,

The activists of SAN (Syndicalist Action Network),

in the U.S.A.

Toxteth Teacher Exposed as Anarchist!

Nellie and Jim

by Christopher Draper

(Lives of Northern Anarchists - part 9)

THERE are two versions of education.  One encourages kids to explore the world so that they may in time confidently create their own future.  The other moulds youngsters into adults able to perform predetermined roles in pre-existing society.  The latter authoritarian tradition controls State schools but, as seeds beneath the snow, there have always been individuals fighting for the liberation of learning and practising alternatives.  Jimmy Hugh Dick opened an anarchist school in Liverpool in 1908 and for almost half a century continued to preach, practice and promote “free-education”. 

Early Influences
Born on 15 November 1882 to James, a Scottish policeman, and Barbara, a Cumbrian housewife, James Hugh Dick grew up in Toxteth surrounded by a large bunch of brothers and sisters.  Although Liverpool was a political city, as a youth Jimmy wasn’t interested in politics.  Initially, perhaps influenced by his mother’s Quakerism, he was a mild, teetotal secularist employed as a grocer’s assistant.  With an undemanding job and a yearning for 'self-improvement', in his early twenties Jimmy enrolled at a local Commercial College where he befriended Lorenzo Portet, a young Spanish anarchist employed as a language teacher.

Jimmy was soon won over to Portet’s syndicalist politics and as a friend of Francisco Ferrer, and a teacher himself, Portet was keenly interested in education.  When Ferrer visited Portet in Liverpool in 1907 Jimmy was inspired to drop the groceries and take up teaching.

Anarchy in Action
Supported by enlightened parents of the Liverpool labour movement, in 1908 Jimmy started an Anarchist-Communist Sunday School in the old Toxteth Co-op hall in Smithdown Street.  As the hall was about to be rebuilt, in 1909 James and his 38 students transferred to the ILP (Independent Labour Party) rooms in Tagus Street.  

Jimmy supported Ferrer’s international approach to education and was keen for the school:  
'To break down national prejudices and that patriotic piffle which is inculcated into the children of our present-day schools.'   He believed the kids should exercise initiative in learning but he also laid on overtly political lectures.  The school’s 1909 season included, 'The Paris Commune' by Matt Kavanagh, 'Whiteway Colony' by Chas Keane and, intriguingly, 'Faeries' from local syndicalist stonemason, Fred Bower.

The school developed within a flourishing syndicalist mileu.  Industrial syndicalism appeared increasingly attractive to the labour movement as, according to one observer:
'To many it appeared that the incorporation of union officials within bargaining institutions had succeeded in defusing their earlier radicalism.'
It was time to take up direct action and Jimmy’s 1908 reports for the anarchist newspaper FREEDOM, emphasised the, 'class-conscious and anti-parliamentary viewpoint' of not just fellow syndicalists but also, increasingly, of Liverpool ILP and the SDF comrades.

Liverpool International Club
Jimmy saw learning as liberation, not just something we do to kids but a definitively political process that we’re all involved in, and inherently anarchist.  Besides the school and his labour activism he was a key member of Liverpool’s International Club in Canning Place.  Fellow club members included Fred Bower, Lorenzo Portet and the radical painter Albert Lipczinski.  Through such club contacts Lipczinski came to paint both Tom Mann and Jim Larkin and according to David Bingham the latter portrait came to a dramatic end after it was, 'held as a banner by the Irish strikers in Dublin prior to the Easter Uprising and while being held aloft in this way, it was targeted by the infamous Black and Tans with their weapons and destroyed with gunfire.'

Talkin’ About a Revolution

Jimmy attended the huge, First Conference on Industrial Syndicalism held at the Coal Exchange, Manchester, in November 1910 as one of Liverpool’s two Revolutionary Industrialist delegates, the other was Peter Larkin. Lorenzo Portet attended as a delegate of the International Club whilst Fred Bower represented the Liverpool stonemasons. Although the gathering marked a real syndicalist advance it wasn’t sufficient to satisfy Jim’s revolutionary ardour.  He detected a residual belief in Parliamentary methods amongst delegates and informed FREEDOM that while, “it was obvious that the general feeling of the meeting was to shake off the political element” he still felt most, “were like the slaves of all superstitions, who hate the chains yet cling to them madly.” This insight informed and drove both my own and Jim’s lifelong commitment to liberated learning.

Humans aren’t entirely rational beings driven to act solely by the logic of reasoned argument otherwise we’d long ago have overturned a system that provides Philip Green with a yacht and his workers with the sack.  Our underlying psychology and feelings of empathy and solidarity develop in infancy, or not, and if we’re shaped by authoritarian social structures we grow to crave authority and leadership instead of independence, autonomy and freedom.  Anarchists from Eric Fromm to Colin Ward have since sketched in the details but Jimmy Dick pioneered the liberation of learning in Liverpool in 1908.

Marching Orders

At the end of 1909 the school moved again to another ILP building at 1 Clarendon Terrace, Beaumont Street, though Jim was openly critical of the didactic moralising of the ILP’s own approach to education.  He complained to FREEDOM:
'One thing that seems to mar the socialist Sunday Schools is the repetition of the silly platitudes and a declaration known as the Socialist Ten Commandments. Who had the audacity to draw up such a series of impositions and dare to cram them down the child’s throat, I do not know…Let us have done with this ceremonial business. Stereotyped characters are not for the new era. We want to make men and women not virtuous automatons.'

Jimmy was happy to observe that even national newspapers began to appreciate the unique character of his libertarian venture, “We have it on the authority of the Fortnightly Review that our school is the pioneer school.” Unfortunately, a reactionary storm was unleashed by sensationalist reporting of the “Houndsditch Affair”, when newspaper inaccurately identified murderous robbers as anarchists. Utterly wedded to electoral politics the ILP got cold feet and pulled the plug on Jimmy’s enterprise. There were no votes in accommodating anarchists so in January 1911 Liverpool’s “Independent Labour Party” kicked them out. The school was homeless.

In February 1911 Jimmy finally managed to re-locate the school to Alexander Hall, Islington Square, Liverpool but it was a long way for the kids to travel and attendance began to decline. In May Jimmy reluctantly decided it would have to close and his thoughts began to focus on his own political educational. 

Meeting of Minds

In the autumn of 1911 Jimmy Dick moved down to London and enrolled at the Central Labour College, a syndicalist-inspired breakaway from Oxford’s Ruskin College which had proved useless to militant working class students itching to advance the class-struggle.

Back in Liverpool Jimmy had written a children’s column for The Voice of Labour and one of his devoted readers, Naomi Ploschansky, following Jimmy’s example had in 1912 started her own anarchist school in London’s East End. On May Day 1913 “Nellie” (as Naomi was familiarly known) took her school students along to join the celebrations in Hyde Park (“we carried a banner, Anarchist-Socialist School”) where she spotted the Central Labour College banner. “So I went up to ask for “Uncle Jim”. I saw a young man with grey hair who looked gentler than the rest and I asked him if James Dick was there. He bowed: “I’m James Dick” he said.” It was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship.

Nellie and Jim

Nellie had arrived in London from Kiev as a baby in 1894 with her impoverished Russian family. Both her dad, Solomon and mum, Hanna, had since abandoned the synagogue and embraced anarchism. Attending the Jubilee Street anarchist club with her parents provided Nellie with the contacts to start her own Ferrer School, although she was only a teenager herself.

As Jim and Nellie’s friendship developed he agreed to assist her as co-director of her anarchist school and in 1914 they moved in together. As at Jim’s Liverpool school, the London students controlled their own learning but were encouraged to engage with wider political activities and demonstrations. Rudolf Rocker and his older son assisted at their London school and Rudolf jnr subsequently opened his own libertarian school in Canada.

When war was declared, Rocker was imprisoned and as the kids handed out anti-war leaflets the police were encouraged to raid the premises. After conscription was introduced Jim and Nellie, in 1916, got legally married to avoid the draft but soon that exemption was denied and the couple decided they should emigrate to assist the Free-Schooling movement in America.

Anarchist Education in America

Nellie, 22 and Jim, 34 sailed from Liverpool to New York aboard the St Paul on 30 December 1916. They were welcomed to America by anarchist comrades but Nellie was shocked and disappointed on visiting Emma Goldman to discover that she employed her own personal black maid!

Almost immediately the pair settled into an anarchist community at Stelton where they ran the school on the same libertarian lines they’d developed earlier in England. For the next forty years, including a period running a similar venture at Mohegan, Jim and Nellie pioneered anarchist education along with encouraging, visiting and corresponding with comrades around the world similarly committed to the liberation of learning. 

Eventful Visits

After the 1917 revolution, Nellie’s parents both returned to Russia whilst her sister Dora trained first as a nurse and then as a teacher in America. Nellie and Dick visited Britain together in 1919 and their only son, Jim jnr, was born here on that visit but at the same time Nellie’s brother, Samuel, was caught shop breaking by PC Clarke. He was convicted, sent to prison for a year and then deported back to Russia. 

In 1931 Jimmy came to England to attend a conference on progressive education and visited Summerhill, Britain’s flagship free school, at the invitation of A S Neill. Jimmy also took the opportunity to meet up with old comrades like Will Lawther and Tom Keell.

Having been welcomed to America by exiled Russian anarchist Bill Shatoff in 1917, when Jim, Nellie and Jim visited Russia in 1933 they were keen to meet up with him again. Shatoff had since returned to his homeland to help the Bolshevik revolution without ever abandoning his own anarchist principles. He never turned up at his apartment and was subsequently reported to have been arrested and “liquidated” by Stalin.

Legacy?

Jimmy continued to teach into his seventies before ill health forced retirement.  Despite their age, when the Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 it was Nellie and Jim who stepped in to look after their kids.  Their final anarchist educational venture, Lakewood Modern School which they had founded 25 years earlier, closed its doors in 1958 and Jimmy died seven years later, in 1965 aged 82.  During my own half century in education I met very few teachers in England who’d heard of Jimmy and a tragically diminishing number who practise his approach to schooling.  Hidden away in a few schools there are still anarchist “seeds beneath the snow” but there’s been a very heavy snowfall over the last couple of decades.

Jim Petty: Radical Working-man Dies

Born Burnley 6^th, March 1933, died in Blackburn Hospital 10^th, July 2015:

Married to Mary (died 1989), one son Iain survives him.

WHEN we call Jim Petty a radical northern anarchist we haven't even begun to describe his nature as a man and human being.  Radical anarchism and decency grew in his soul as  remarkable human being.  His early interest in politics was in the Labour Party but he never voted Labour after the 1970s.  Later he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and was active as a shop steward in both textiles, where he worked as a stripper and grinder, and later at Lucas in engineering.  Jim Petty was on the industrial committee of Committee of 100 from 1960 to 1961, where he came in contact with the anarcho-syndicalists of the Syndicalist Workers Federation (SWF) - at the time the journalist Ken Hawkes was its national secretary.   

In the 1960s, Sydney Silverman was the radical socialist MP for the nearby Nelson and Colne constituency.  Silverman was instrumental in pushing a law through parliament to abolish capital punishment later in that decade.  Consequently the local ILP in Burnley, Nelson and Colne was perhaps closer to the Labour Party at that time than other branches elsewhere in the country. 

The early 1960s was also a time when the ILP nationally; Brian Behan's Workers Party; Solidarity; some of the Freedom anarchists like Peter Turner, Jack and Mary Stevenson; Commonwealth and the Syndicalist Workers' Federation  formed the National Rank & File Workers' Movement.  The Rank & File Workers' Movement existed for little more than two years and attracted the attention of the Sunday Telegraph columnist Perigrine Worsthorne, but the success of the direct action peace movement protests around the Committee of 100 distracted most activists away from industrial Rank & File activism.  At the time of the Spies for Peace campaign exposing the Regional Seats of Government in 1963, the Burnley activists around Jim helped to reproduce the state secrets that the spies had made available on that year's CND March, and the Times of London ran a headline:  'Anarchists Take Over'.

Jim Petty, although he was involved in the campaigns of the peace movement, was very much a working-class anarchist all his life.  While he was in textiles he clashed with the then regional officer of the National Union of Textile & Allied Worker's Union (NUTAWU), Joe King, based in Accrington.  Sections of the NUTAWU, which was the spinner's and the strippers and grinder's trade union, had no proper shop stewards to represent them and the officials tended to be close to the bosses.  Later, when he working in engineering at Lucas Aerospace in Burnley, Jim was a member of the Transport & General Worker's Union, and about that time he was secretary of  Burnley Trade Union Council. 

He married Mary, a secondary school teacher in the Burnley area, she supported the Labour Party.  When Mary died he had friendships with Susan & Jenny, both who were at one time involved with Burnley anarchists. 

By the early 1980s, Jim had become a member of the Syndicalist Workers Federation (SWF), and later went on to become the first national secretary of the Direct Action Movement (DAM), after  Dave Thompson the SWF  national secretary stepped down.  This was a time when the anarcho-syndicalists were on a roll, and membership of the DAM began to rise in the run up to the miner's strike.  Jim Petty led the British contingent of the International Congress of the International Workers Association (IWA / AIT), when it convened in Madrid in the Spring of 1984.   It was essentially under Jim Petty's influence as its national secretary, that the British DAM gained some serious status in the international movement and built up a grass-roots membership across the country.  The DAM during the 1980s,  was at its most effective as a protest group and political force.  During the Miner's Strike in 1984-85 at the Congress for Industrial Action in Burnley, the then deputy leader of the NUM, Peter Heathfield, and Dave Douglass spoke about the strike on the same platform.  So successful were the Burnley anarchists that there was constant rivalry with out other left groups so much so that the Communist Party sabotaged an attempt to support the Shrewsbury pickets, and Jim's T&G Branch came to have the greatest number of party political levy 'opt outs' to the Labour Party. 

When Jim left office as national secretary the DAM changed it name to the 'Solidarity Federation' (Sol. Fed.) in 1994;  it then tried to represented itself as an imitation trade union body emphasising 'syndicalism' and playing down the anarchist vision.  Jim Petty and other members of the Burnley section took a dim view of these changes, which they regarded as wrong-headed and foolish. Jim though he was a trade unionist for most of his life was cynical about the British trade union set-up generally which he regarded as irredeemably reformist, and even reactionary in the sense that rather than create a vision and set an agenda of its own, the British trade unions merely responded to the agenda set by the bosses and the state. 

Jim Petty not only had experience in the trade union movement and radical politics, but he was involved in the Church of England as a member in the Anglo-Catholic Church, he was a lay reader and was later was ordained as a Father in the faith.  His own father had been also a member of the Church of England.  This extra dimension helped Jim to swim in social circles outside the narrow political ghetto, and the Burnley anarchists were able to build up connections and become an influence within ethnic communities in Burnley in the 1970s and 80s. 

Jim Petty remained a disgruntled member of the Solidarity Federation until 2005, when he was expelled by e-mail after his branch in Preston hounded him out of the Sol. Fed.  The formal reasons given for  his expulsion were mixed up with complaints relating his links to his Church and its distaste for abortion; Jim himself disagreed with his Church policy over this matter.  After his expulsion from the Sol. Fed. a derogatory photo was published of Jim in a dog-collar on libcom providing Holy Communion to his parishioners.  Following this a leading member of the Sol Fed. in Manchester, Ron Marsden, boasted to others that he had written to the Church hierarchy at which Jim was a Minister to acquaint them with his association with the anarchist movement, presumably with the intention of getting Jim defrocked.    

Jim told me years later that he had had an interview with the Dean who showed him the letter of denunciation, and asked Jim:

'Are these friends of yours?'.    

To which Jim replied ruefully 'Yes!'.

Jim always told me that he always believed that the real grounds for his dismissal from Sol. Fed. were to do with him addressing a conference of the Northern Anarchist Network (NAN) in Hebden Bridge in 2004 on racial problems in Burnley.  By that time Jim had also participated on the editorial panel of Northern Voices, and had written a remarkable eye witness report on the 'race' riots in Burnley for NV.   He helped to organise several NAN conferences in Burnley including the one in December 2012 at which Barry Woodling and others moved the Burnley Declaration which gained 150 signatures berating the conduct of the organisers of the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair in operating a blacklist against some supporters of the Northern Anarchist Network.  

As I write this, I have just returned from Tolpuddle, where I learned from a member of the IWW that the Solidarity Federation which once expelled James Petty 'imploded' two years ago.  Is it not ironic that the organisation that once excluded Jim is itself now politically virtually in ruins, and Jim's enemy Ron Marsden is helping claimants at Salford Unemployed Centre.