A Few Notes On Propaganda [1900]
It is a long time since I sat down to tell you about the movement up North and, now that I have mustered up enough energy, I have to confess that there is not much to write about. With the exception of Liverpool and Leeds nobody appears to be doing much.
Well, the Liverpool boys do play blazes! In all ways. At the picnic we caught one of them – an Irishman too – trying to sing (?) a song in Yiddish. He ought to have known better. But every one of them, lads and lassies, works hard; meeting after meeting, paper selling and distributing; they have raised the town, so much so, that a local paper (just to hand, and rejoicing in the name of The Porcupine) calls them: the Liverpool Redcaps. They have now formed two groups, the object being to work different parts of the town. This is not a bad idea if they are strong enough to do it; but I trust they are not weakening too much the original group.
In Leeds the propaganda has gone well; unfortunately, the outdoor meetings have had to be given up owing to the lack of speakers, and this has had rather a bad effect upon the finances of the group. Otherwise everything is healthy. The group had Emma Goldman down[1] and held a number of good meetings, both in and out of Leeds, which had a good propagandist result although they resulted in the inevitable financial loss. They started a fund for the Paris Congress, but this has not reached expectations owing to the facts mentioned above and also to the state of trade with some of the comrades.
The great effort of the year has been centred upon the anti-war agitation; a number of very large and successful meetings being arranged for the local branch of the South African Conciliation Committee. Barton, Stockton, Turner, Pete Curran[2] and the local comrades have been the principal speakers. To wind up these meetings we had a monster demonstration which, unfortunately for the health of some of the comrades, turned out to be a Jingo demonstration. It was a day! All the scum of the pubs in Leeds were turned out being called up by means of placards inviting them to give us a ‘Scarborough welcome.’ And they did.
In Sheffield, Alf Barton and Stockton are doing all they can; very little is to be done there on account of the apathy of the erstwhile comrades, some of whom had been infatuated, unthinkingly, by the wordy logic of a certain Individualist. That time is, however, now passing, and I believe that from all accounts some good work will be done there yet.
I was in Manchester the other day, and although I could not hear of any direct Anarchist work going on, I heard that a great deal of most excellent work has been done by our comrades Kelly, Warwick and Stockton in connection with the Peace movement. It seems a pity that the comrades in Manchester and Salford do not wake up and re-form the group; for I am sure there are plenty of comrades only waiting for the initiative to be taken.
I cannot help but feel that we are very largely to blame for the slump in the movement here. Of course, we cannot expect wonders while there is such a terrible reaction as at present, but we certainly ought to have been able to have kept together better than we have done. As a matter of fact, the Anarchist movement in England is by no means an insignificant thing. With a little cohesion it is capable of taking its place as an influential factor toward change. But we have got careless, and the perfectly correct suspicion of officialism and centralisation resulting from artificial organisation has led many of us to rely upon fighting ‘on our own’ – a good thing in its place, but which is as absurd as centralisation when used everywhere and as a remedy for everything. It is to be hoped that the loose organisation resulting from the newly-formed Federation of Anarchists will be able to make up for what has been lately a most lamentable deficiency. Another thing that we should look to is the fact that ‘all work and no play, make life a dull day,’ our groups have for the most part looked only after the outside agitation, with the result that they have only attracted those whose abilities happened that way. If, on the other hand, some attention was given to the social side of life and a comrade newly joining looked to the movement for his enjoyment, his latest literary or artistic or scientific ideas, it seems as though the result might be different to the present. We have have ample testimony of this truth in the French and the Bohemian movement, But of this more another time.
The Anarchist Newsletter, the organ of the recently formed Federation, is now ready. It needs to be in every comrade’s hands. So far as we have addresses of groups and individuals connected with our movement we will send them out; but there are many whom we do not know, so will they kindly send in their names and addresses inclosing a stamp (if they can afford it) and we will send it to them. All news and correspondence is to go to the Secretary: A. Barton, 12 Olive Terrace, Owlerton, Sheffield; and orders to W. MacQueen, 79 Markham Avenue, Leeds.
MAC.
Notes
1, Goldman went to Leeds on 10 December 1899
2, Alf Barton and Herbert Stockton are both mentioned in https://radicalmanchester.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/alfred-barton-19th-century-anarchism-and-the-early-20th-century-labour-party/; John Turner was a London anarchist and trade unionist; Pete Curran was a socialist and ILP member.