Growth of the Modern Anarchist Movement in Great Britain

THE EDITORS: The author of the article published below – especially translated from the English original – died in London on 30 September 1949. George Cores had distinguished himself as an active militant of the anarchist movement over a period of 65 years. He was one of the few surviving links to the 19th century anarchist groups. Whether as a public speaker or in its few publications, Cores displayed a consistency and enthusiasm for the common cause. He was jailed for having, at public meetings, championed freedom of speech at a time when the threat of a political system that would deny those rights was looming over London. For many a year he was active in London and in the provinces alongside William Morris, P. Kropotkin, Louise Michel, Malatesta, Nettlau, Grave, Rocker and lots of other leading militants.

From 1930 to 1936 he was joint publisher of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, contributing various articles using the nom de plume ‘Proletarian’. He was as active in championing the Spanish Revolution as he had been in championing the 1917 Russian Revolution back in the day. A week before he died at the age of 82 he had attended a meeting of the British Anarchist Federation.

He left behind two unpublished works, one of them a pamphlet (his reply to Orwell’s 1984) – which we will ensure is brought to CENIT readers – and the document – it could scarcely be described as anything else – that we are now publishing.

[KSL intro:] The Spanish translator of this and the other article is identified simply as J. Ruiz, I have looked through Iniguez’s Enciclopedia … and it looks like this was Juan Ruiz Martín: The entry for him reads: 
“Marbella (Malaga) - d. London (Great Britain) 22.8.1983 (other sources date his death on the 2nd), aged 71. Rebellious and given to study (he trained to become a teacher but never completed the course due his serving time in prison), he was a self-taught member of the Libertarian Youth and, come the outbreak of the civil war was secretary of the Marbella CNT and served on the earliest Antifascist Committees, on the liaison committee that September and on the Popular Front committee and on the supplies committee up until the fall of the city in January 1937 and many regarded him, together with socialist Esteban Gil, as the most influential figure during that time. In the months thereafter he served as an artillery officer on the Ebro front and was wounded. Leaving for exile at the end of the war e suffered the Le Vernet concentration camp and served in a labour company, from which he escaped, only to fall into the hands of the police who shipped him off to the concentration camps in North Africa (by 1941 he was an aide in the infirmary in Djelfa and a member of the camp committee). Having enlisted in the British army, when the war ended he stayed behind in England with Roa, Vargas and others and worked in a hotel kitchen. In England he looked after the funnelling of aid to the comrades from Spain. An expert in child education, he gave a number of talks at British universities. He was a contributor to Cenit (the review), España fuera de España (1966), Faro (Malaga) and the Paris-based Nervio (1959-1960). [End of KSL intro]

A proper understanding of the movement in which we are active in this country calls for an understanding also of the circumstances wherein it came into the world and gained in strength and shape. By the end of the 1870s, the “age of apathy” (as it was described) came to an end and, aside from expectations of better times ahead through political reforms, the Cooperative Movement’s modest but unfailing growth and that of the “craft” unions (trade unions) that were out to defend “skilled” workers, there was a long interval of despair for those who had inherited the hopes of Owenite socialists and communists and were keen to tamper with society’s economic foundations and help make labour an entitlement to enjoyment of the wealth that work, skills and expertise make available to civilized man. 

As a general rule, the masses of the workers, in dire poverty and despite their being left to their own devices on countless occasions, believed in the false teachings of their teachers, churchmen and politicians to the effect that things had always been the way they were and that it was pointless trying to effect the radical change that revolutionary thinkers and agitators were peddling. The Church had a hymn, one verse of which proclaimed:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And orders their estate.

There is no question but that the urge to resurrect that sort of fatalism in the minds of the “lower orders” has been wrapped up in the big clerical campaign that has now been many a year in the mounting through the wireless and through the press. Not even suspecting that historical and critical and scientific knowledge and deeds have utterly demolished theology’s traditional dogma.

Historically, the working people had known nothing but the system that had been devised to keep them poor and crushed them, driving them to despair and impotence and they were in thrall to the overall notion that “we need capital” (meaning capitalists) and landlords who, picking out the best locations for their own residences, forced the poorer classes to huddle in ghastly slums with very low levels – if not an utter absence – of light, housing and hygiene. The “poor Law” system back then would have made any civilized person quake. The non-able bodied poor were looked upon and treated as if they were criminals. Emigration to Canada, the United States and New Zealand, was one escape route for large numbers of these poor, and, in the case of many of them, a disaster too.

There was some sign of hope back then in the shape of the workers’ clubs and institutes where many thousands acquired a political education and general knowledge. There was also the great Freethought Movement which, after Richard Carlyle, Hetherington and Holyoake, was so righteously led by men as worthy as Charles Bradlaugh. This movement enjoyed strong and widespread influence. Unfortunately, it was dominated in large part by the “Malthusian” fallacy. A clergyman by the name of Malthus had penned a treatise informing the long-suffering working class that all social and economic troubles were attributable to “over-population” and hammering it into them that they had no right to have children, being too poor to support them. Luckily, birth controllers these days make little reference to Malthus’s false arguments. The working class was used to saying: “We have too many” rather than saying “There are too many exploiters, rich, idlers and landowners burdening us” and the latter even yearned for a major war as a relief from their economic troubles.

But the Freethought Movement was, in spite of that, a huge liberating influence, demolishing as it did the childish notion that some all-powerful deity had settled social and human questions once and for all.

During the 1870s and 1880s, the country had a republican current: Sir Charles Dilke and Joseph Chamberlain from Birmingham, very prominent figures, were sympathetic to such thinking. The Freethought Movement was almost wholly republican. That was due largely to the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the great poet. Up until 1880 Shelley’s poetry and prose were read by lots of progressive-minded folk. The battle against the property-owners that the people of Ireland waged had strong support in England and Scotland and the Irish National League was strong. Michael Davitt, who had been sentenced to penal servitude for his fight for freedom and justice in Ireland, was a very popular figure.

But there was very little allusion of any sort to socialism or communism (which of course did not mean the Moscow monstrosity) and then only feebly. The newspapers had associated all such thinking with senseless violence, murder and mad, bloody revolutions. The contention was that “Communards” were pursuing unattainable goals as “once they had divided everything up equally among themselves, it will not be long before things revert to their previous condition, if not to worse.”

But hope had not perished. Nor had the striving for a rational organization of society in which justice for the workers might prevail and happiness become general. One fraud that had to be guarded against was that some genius might set about penning some “scientific” or philosophical text and, as if by magic, pull some tumultuous, worldwide, popular rebellion out of his mental bag of tricks. Untrue. That is not the way that actual events come to pass.

It is an absolute fact that men and women of great skill and genius enrich the minds of their contemporaries by bringing them enlightenment regarding important matters. They are entitled to all of the respect and fondness we feel towards them, but their teachings get nowhere unless they reach out to the minds of the masses and become the natural expression of the people’s feelings and desires. The same cannot be said of any inert object or economic condition. This is what was going on in England in 1870. There was no inspired person to “start the ball rolling” and ring the bells. That was the doing of a few obscure workers.

A number of men had come down to London, people such as Joseph Lane from Berkshire, Frank Kitz, a Londoner; as well as Jack Williams, Samuel Mainwaring [Cenit has this as Mainosring] a Welsh engineer, and Ambrose G Barker, a young schoolteacher from Northamptonshire (Ambrose Barker is still alive today at the age of 91 and still displays huge interest in anarchist activities). These men influenced others of like mind. Some of those names can be found in the earliest propaganda newspapers. 

One of the earliest meeting places was a Soho public house where an international group, a so-called “Club” used to gather. The English section there included the likes of the Murray brothers who were able to convey the message dating back to the days of the Chartists. More concerned and younger minds craved to mingle with the people in the parks, markets and streetcorners, where meetings were held to excite the minds of the working class and urge it to fight on its own behalf in order to secure social conditions wherein people might be able to live as they should have been living and as the workers, as the producers of wealth, deserved to enjoy. Out of that came the formation of the Labour Emancipation League. 

They held rallies on Barking’s Mile End Road, at the entrance to the ports, in Victoria Park and countless other locations. They acquired a little hand-operated press and ran off leaflets and manifestoes of their own devising for general distribution. They were forever out on the streets, in all sorts of weather, all the year round, defying all criticism and pressing on with their efforts. This was all voluntary effort, entailing lots of sacrifices, loss of wages and jobs, “all for the sake of the Cause”. Sometimes one chuckles as one listens to some would-be candidate eager to be elected parliamentary or municipal office talking about them as if they were martyrs in the service of the public.

But those pioneers of ours did make genuine sacrifices, time after time which was standard fare, and they were unsparing, scorning anything that looked like begrudgery.

Open air meetings were genuine refrigerators for brains and minds. Ingenious, informative and stimulating talks were given night after night and often into the mornings and all day long on Sundays, by men such as Kitz, Lane, Williams, Harry Graham, Charles Mowbray – a tailor and actually, on form, a really superb public speaker – and W B Parker, a type-setter and lots of other real kindly men.

Nobody was out to impose sanctimonious or dogmatic beliefs and have them accepted. Those were the days of ideological effort. The narrow-minded dogmatists who unfailingly want to be in the right because they have read a book or two, had not yet become a commonplace in the socialist movement. Back then, the overriding need was, as has often been the case, was for “utopian” propaganda. 

The persecution of Johann Most (former Reichstag representative) following an article of his in his paper Freiheit applauding a Russian regicide proved a great fillip. That was in 1881. He was given a 16-month prison sentence. The group of comrades mentioned earlier published seven or eight issues of an English Freiheit, complete with a reprint of the indicted article.

And then along came the formation of the Democratic Confederation by H M Hyndman and a few friends. Initially it was, for the most part, an association of radical workers’ clubs. Later, at an annual conference, it changed to the Social Democratic Federation, at the suggestion of a delegate from the Labour Emancipation League. A year or two before, Mr Hyndman had actually been a conservative in his politics, but, following a few meetings with Joe Lane and Frank Kitz, he had had a change of mind.

Hyndman, a well-educated man able to read French and German, staked his claim at about that time to the mantle of Karl Marx, which caused the latter a few upsets at the time. Other middle-class persons joined the Social Democratic Federation, including William Morris, and his financial backing led to the publication of a weekly mouthpiece, Justice. In the public eye, these overshadowed the modest endeavours of the revolutionary workers from the Labour Emancipation League. But the latter carried on with its vigorous efforts in the East End, exposing the restrictions on Emigration that was then under way. In addition, there was agitation surrounding sugar subsidies, funded by the Tory Party, which ascribed the workers’ lot, not to “over-population” but to the importation of subsidized foreign sugar-beet. At the same time too, the Salvation Army and religious competitors were very active, inducing the poor to believe that they would enter the kingdom of glory “up above” after death. Our comrades proved very active in countering all such nonsense.

After a year or two, there was a split within the SDF and William Morris and some others, including the Labour Emancipation League, broke away to set up the Socialist League as an extra-parliamentary faction working towards socialism or communism alone. With the help of William Morris, they published The Commonweal on a monthly basis. Lane, Kitz, Mainwaring, Barker, Mowbray, David Nicoll, Tom Barclay, Tochatti and provincial comrades such as Alf Barton and Bert Stockton from Manchester worked relentlessly and the teaching of social-revolutionary thinking spread throughout the land.

At which point two more well-defined schools of thought emerged. The Social Democrats, led by Hyndman, and the middle class marshalled within the Fabian Society which stepped on to the stage, lobbied in favour of “taking Power” whereas the bulk of the Socialist League yearned to see the back of the State and the establishment of a free community wherein everyone would share in the work and the wealth. 

But the real effort behind propaganda in the ranks of the people was being mounted day and night by comrades whose namely rarely made it into print.

Peter Kropotkin visited England in 1882 and addressed a rally in Stratford, London chaired by comrade Ambrose G Barker.  He was accompanied by Tchaikovsky on that occasion. Kropotkin returned to England in 1885 and, after working in tandem with a group of individualist anarchists he launched the ‘Freedom’ Group and, with the help of Mrs Wilson and a number of others, he launched the newspaper of the same name, as the mouthpiece of communist anarchism.

John Turner and a few other comrades from the Socialist League, plus several SDF members, threw in their lot with them and from then on the Anti-State movement began to emerge in its finished form. Inside the Socialist League, the Staters and the Anti-Staters clashed. The former were out to turn the League into a second SDF, but Joseph Lane, who published his Anti-Statist Communist Manifesto, thwarted their efforts.

Meanwhile, some interesting events had occurred. There was a serious unemployment problem, with huge numbers of men sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square on the banks of the Thames and just about everywhere due to the shortage of lodgings. A huge demonstration in Trafalgar Square on February 8 1886, culminated in a march through Pall Mall and Piccadilly to Hyde Park, with thievery and looting all along the route. John Burns, Hyndman, H. H. Champion and Jack Williams stood trial at the Old Bailey as alleged ring-leaders in the scandal and, by the way, were acquitted. But unemployed meetings were still being held on the streets. Young public speakers displayed wondrous oratorical powers. Among them were Jim and Jack Allman from the Socialist League. One of the speakers on ‘Mob Monday’ was the well-known worker Andrew Hall, a sort of a histrionic speaker who used to cast aside his cap, jacket and muffler before launching into his address. He joined the workers from the Socialist League. 

Under the command of General Sir Charles Warren, who had seen action in the war against the natives of South Africa, the police force was reorganized along quasi-military lines. In the end, the unemployed were denied the use of the Square which was made out of bounds to any public demonstrations. That action by the Tory Home Office minister, triggered what has come to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ in November 1887. A combined demonstration approaching from every part of London came under attack at strategic locations from an organized force. Truncheons were deployed against the people everywhere and the hospitals reported that they had attended to upwards of four hundred casualties. One man by the name of Alfred Linnell was seriously injured by the mounted police and died a few days later. On that occasion, John Turner from the SDF (he was not yet an MP) broke through the police cordon only to be arrested and sentenced to six weeks in prison.

At the same time, during those years, the police strove in London and in the provinces to smash the relentless propaganda mounted through street corner meetings. Among the Londoners, Jimmy Allman “did” the usual month behind bars rather than pay for damages and costs, and Bert Stockman too faced the same penalty in Manchester. Ironically, his own father was a prison warder in Strangeways prison there. In Great Yarmouth, where several of our people were arrested, the prosecuting counsel was made to look like a laughing-stock when thirty comrades showed up in court from Norwich, charged with “obstruction”, when in actual fact there had been nothing of the sort.

But the “freedom of speech” campaign, won thanks to direct action, could fill a hefty tome. Jack Williams went to jail for six months for holding a meeting in Dod Street, Burdett Road in Limehouse, E. That was a huge victory for the people, in which everybody had had a hand. William Morris appeared before the local police court in connection with it.

It is really flying in the face of all logic for there to be a party in existence claiming to speak on behalf of the working class which did all this and then, once in power, for it to senselessly and heartlessly dismantle all of the freedoms for which the workers have battled and suffered for upwards of a century. 

The propaganda effort continued. It is worthwhile reminding younger readers that back in those days there was no Labour Party, let alone an ILP. But the workers, seeking social change, through their concerted actions, set up or joined what were described as ‘Labourers’” or unskilled workers’ unions.

The Gas workers were the first to do so and, resorting to direct action, they secured the eight-hour day at a time when ten, twelve and up to thirteen hours of work for poorer labourers were unremarkable. The lawful entitlement to an eight-hour day lagged several years behind.

Back then, there was no “Left” nor “Right”. No one entertained any thoughts of establishing a state, criminal or despotic police force in the name of Socialism or Communism. There were, though, social democrats, anti-parliamentary communists, anarchist-communists and, in France, a tiny band of marxist “Impossibilists” led by one of Karl Marx’s sons-in-law. But freedom of thought and of speech, of assembly, freedom of the press and Anti-State freedom of association were the very soul of the entire movement of opposition to the organization of society along capitalist lines. Imprisonment, exile, penal servitude and death as the price of expression of considered opinions were not just alien to the entire workers’ movement but were held in utterly contempt. 

No matter what one might have thought about how broad freedom should be, there was at least an acknowledgment that freedom was essential to the life and growth of human society. 

There was a huge event back then that justified the dogged and persistent effort that had been carried out over the period of some twenty years.  That was the great Docks strike of 1889. It began with a downing of tools on the Hay Wharf on the banks of the Thames. It then spread like wildfire: the dockworkers spontaneously joined in in their thousands. They had been treated shamefully. They had had to hang around at all sorts of hours of the night to find out if they were in luck and might have some work and be able to earn a few shillings with which to cover the needs of their wives and children. They would brawl with one another like convicts, squabbling over four or more hours of work for a few pence per hour. Out of ready acknowledgment of them, the stevedores’ gangs joined the strike and threw their support behind the so-called unskilled workers. Ben Tillett had launched a Dockworkers’ Union, but it had made little headway.

The wide recourse to direct action enthused everybody and spread across London and the provinces. In their factories and workshops, workers also went in strike in their thousands and not just “in sympathy” with the dockworkers, but against the miserable wages they were receiving for their labours and in order to better their dire and intolerable working conditions. John Burns and Tom Mann, as well as Ben Tillett, built up huge public reputations in connection with the strike. The moral of this is that what might appear as fruitless efforts on the part of a few anonymous types, whilst it may be monotonous and undramatic, is precisely what can prompt huge and surprising developments through the years.

None of this was delivered by “great leaders” nor by prophets. The main credit must go to the obscure “utopians” and anarchists who never let up on their efforts, in bad times or in good.

Of course, all anarchist workers played their part loyally in the struggle or supported their comrades through that great industrial upheaval. In all likelihood, it was the greatest and most significant social upheaval Great Britain has known in modern times. 

Even more important, perhaps, than the 1926 General Strike. 

The dockworkers won their demands for sixpence an hour, more regular employment and they formed the Union now known as the Transport and General Workers’ Union.

George CORES

(translation by J. RUIZ)
CENIT

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.