These could take differ- ent forms but Morris believed that each historical type reflected the attempt of a minority to escape the force of nature and the dictates of labour, and he argued that the differences between them were irrelevant to their classifica- tion. Bond-slavery, feudalism and wage-labour were not moral equivalents but they all enabled the elite to live from the labour of others and stripped those charged with the burden of labour of effective choice in production.
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This group were thus doubly enslaved. Morris applied the same reasoning to women, yet he argued that there was a difference between labour and the way that slavery operated in this context. Women were dependent on men as well as slaves to capitalism, and they were therefore triply enslaved.
Tyrannical societies that is, those based on slavery operated through mastership. John Ball tells his listeners: As one of the fictional char- acters of his prose romances says: Structurally, this demanded economic equality which Morris defined as a principle of dis- tribution according to need , an end to both the artificial hierarchies that facilitated slavery and the compulsion that forced labour. Yet none of these conditions released individuals from the duties and obligations that unjust, tyrannical societies perverted. In just social conditions, these obligations and duties would persist.
In a future communist society, Morris anticipated duty and obligation transformed. As masters, individuals exercised their own will but they did so co-operatively or, as Morris put it, in fellowship. Although he did not pinpoint precisely what he meant by this concept, he captured the essence of the social relations he desired in his discussions of art. His principle assumption was that the democratisation of art in communism would free individuals by transforming work. Working voluntarily, they would no longer perceive labour as compulsion but instead as pleasure.
How- ever, the freedom they experienced as artists would meet a communal as well as an individual need. They would have full scope for creative expression — mastership — but would find meaning for their art in fellowship. In the true sense, Morris argued, art was impossible, except by means of the co-operation of labour that produces the ordinary wares of life; and that co-operation again they cannot have as long as the workmen are dependent on the will of a master. They must co-operate consciously and willingly for the expression of individual character and gifts which we call art.
His charge was that because anarchists failed to understand that individuality must issue from, or in tandem with co-operation, their individualism played itself out in violence. Evidence to support the charge was readily available. In the early s a series of trials provided a platform for anarchists accused of committing a range of high-profile assassinations and bombings to justify the use of violence as a revolutionary tactic. In his October 6, His complaint against them was two-fold: Quite a lot of anarchists — including Kropotkin — agreed. His view was mediated by a longer reflection about the prospects for rev- olution.
No longer sanguine about the willingness or capability of the workers to immediately confront or resist it, Morris became convinced that his efforts to make social- ists through anti-parliamentary activity were hopeless and that the strategy would likely end in disaster. By the early s his criticisms of anarchism became more strident as he reluctantly reconciled himself to the idea that parliament offered the only available route to change.
At precisely the point that Morris accepted parliamentarism as the only available route to socialist change, some League anarchists found their inspiration in assassination and random killing and adopted a rhetoric of revolutionary violence that filled him with frustration and despair. Although he continued to offer financial support to former comrades who fell foul of the incitement laws and agent provocateurs, the co-operation he had once enjoyed with anarchists both in an out of the League as an anti- parliamentarian gave way to a deep hostility.
One anonymous anarchist correspondent to Lib- erty wrote that Morris now counter-posed violence to political action as if October 6, Even if the former was likely to lead to a type of socialism that he did not like, the refusal of all anarchists to accept it and the will- ingness of some to choose terror indicated the extent of their individualism.
Only those who prioritised this concept above all others would fail to see the necessity of supporting the collective struggle or perform blatantly immoral acts that ran counter to ordinary political calculations. As individualists, Morris concluded, anarchists were not prone to vio- lence as such, but to assertive and transgressive behaviours which might be expressed violently and which were at root, anti-social. Taking August Vaillant the anarchist executed in for throwing a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies as his model, Morris linked individualism to vain-gloriousness. Prepared to sacrifice his life in order to gratify his vanity; he is a type of men [sic] you meet in all grades all professions.
You and I have met some of them; even among artists and poets they are not unknown; men who would do, in their art, what they knew to be quite wrong and outrageous in order to gain notoriety rather than work honesty and well and remain in obscurity. Failing to understand their social obligations and duties, they denied fel- lowship and so wrongly interpreted mastership as a principle of individual domination.
Morris found another model of this brand of individualism in capitalism and in the experimentation of elite art where, what passed as cre- ativity was increasingly driven by the desire to secure a niche in the market through notoriety: Violence was symptomatic of this division, but it was rooted in an understanding of individual—community relations that Morris derived from his concepts of fellowship, mastership and tyranny: The sweep of his late designation of anarchist thought was muddied by the complexity of political debate and the contes- tation of both of his central terms: As will be seen below, these terms were used to describe free market anti-statism at one end of the spectrum and the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarianism of Bakunin and Kropotkin at the other.
Morris directed his critique at both, but his blanket rejection of anarchism assumed a questionable conflation that was belied by divisions within Victorian individualism and the anarchist movement itself. From politics to ideology Individualism was a central term in late Victorian political debate and disagreements about the role of the state, in particular, were conceptu- alised in terms of its opposition to collectivism. These interests affected the ways in which key terms of debate were couched.
The goal of revolution was usually described in other ways: The pre-eminent position that Herbert Spencer occupied in the individualist camp meant that individualism was habitually associated with anti-statism, opening the way for anarchism to be linked to the defence of the free mar- ket, the economic doctrine that socialists typically mapped to individualist October 6, Levy — did not and in embracing it further blurred the boundaries between different anarchisms.
At first resisting the label, he later identified himself as an anar- chist because he believed that anti-statists were more interested in defending privilege by entrenching market advantage in monopoly than in genuinely expanding the sphere of liberty. As a rule of thumb, anarchists who put themselves in one of the first two groups tended to be more receptive to anti-collectivist October 6, Yet, as discussions within and between these groups show, anarchist conceptions of individualism were far more complex and messy.
For example, notwithstanding the common ground that anarchist individualists sometimes found with anti-collectivists, anarcho-communists did not reject individualism out of hand. In this he had followed the tradi- tion established by Proudhon. Anarchists, Kropotkin argued, endorsed both his analytical approach and his anti-statism. Anarchist communists were intolerant of anti-collectivist economics, how- ever, and parted company equally with anti-collectivists and anarchist individualists on questions of property and exchange.
Communist anarchists claim as the basis of the new social order common property, whereas Individualists defend private property as the necessary foundation of society. Nor is that the only difference between Commu- nist and Individualist Anarchists. Communist Anarchists maintain that October 6, Mutualism, they argued, was not a mere economic system, even if liberty of production, or the right of producers to determine how goods were to be dis- tributed and disposed of, was central to it.
As a correspondent to Freedom noted, plain individualism was Lockean: Kropotkin made a similar point in a discussion of Proudhon and Stirner, but introduced a modification to the terms of debate. Proudhon, Kropotkin argued, understood correctly that moral conscience, by which he meant a conception of justice and equal- ity, had a basis in social life.
Stirner argued that morality existed only by convention and wrongly concluded that it was necessarily rooted in author- ity. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, outside observers sometimes simply passed over the complexity of anarchist politics and failed to acknowledge the different ways in which the relationship between anarchism and individualism was understood. For example, in a sweeping critique of a priori political philosophy, T. Huxley identified two impor- tant trends in the history of European thought: In the modern period Hobbes stood at its head.
On this system of classification Auberon Herbert — who rejected the label — was as much an anarchist as Levy who was willing to accept it or, as Huxley in fact suggested, as Stirner and Bakunin. On account of the influence that Stirner had exercised on the anti-socialist Eugene Richter whose satire Pictures of a Socialistic Future mocked German social democracy as a hopelessly inefficient and frighteningly utopian tyranny , Liebkecht traced the origins of anarchism to Stirner and thus denounced it as an individualist doctrine.
There is, in fact, nothing in common between Anarchism and Socialism. Yet it was unusual because it was also based on both a familiarity with the anarchist movement that Huxley lacked and October 6, The second were the anar- chists of the Autonomy group and the third the Freedom group organised around Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson. Nevertheless, in his late critique of anarchism he subordinated these differences to cap- ture both groups under the common principle of anti-authoritarianism. He attempted to show that anarchist moral individualism rendered agreement in socialism impossi- ble.
His discussion drew back to the concepts he had elaborated in the s: The difficulty of the charge was that it ran counter to a process of decision-making that Morris also supported, suggesting that the ideological reduction that he had distilled from his engagement with anarchist politics was perhaps faulty.
For Morris, this argument was self-defeating. To illustrate why, he imagined a dispute about the build- ing of a bridge. Should opinion be divided, he asked: Yet as the debates about individualism make clear, this argument was difficult to sustain. Admittedly, the clearest statements of anarchist-communist ethics appeared only after Morris had died.
However it was clear from discussions in Freedom that anarcho-communists were extremely wary of non-communist anarchist doctrines and their impact on individual—community relations. Two partic- ular examples were that mutualism failed to provide adequate safeguards to protect the egalitarian relations it espoused and that egoism gave free reign to individual competition. Indeed, he located the problem of individualism in the tension between anti-authoritarianism and class interest. This argument secured the ideological division he wanted to cement, but it did not sit easily with the model of decision-making that he presented in his utopian romance, News from Nowhere.
Morris opened up the gap in the debate in his letter to the readers of Commonweal where he attempted to show how anarchist defences of liberty conflicted with the idea of a common good. He imagined two sce- narios: Both scenarios, he argued, legit- imised coercion, but the tyranny assumed different forms. Opponents, he suggested, might prefer the land- scape to remain wild and to preserve its natural beauty. On the one hand, the imagined central body institutionalised the social tyranny on which socialism depended, and on the other it gave prior- ity to majority over minority or individual interests.
Yet in he drew still further from anarchist thinking by adopting a position which relied on the recognition of a universal interest, not just the priority of the numeric major- ity. The pluralism which explained the policy disagreements that socialists were likely to face was now denied.
This assumption was faulty because it overlooked the possibility of stepping between the tyranny of class interest and moral individualism, even though his own work October 6, Indeed, he fleshed out the point in News from Nowhere, where he again discussed the building of a bridge. In this picture of communism, agreement is reached through a deliberative process, supported by ordinary tyranny, capable of determining policy outcomes through the resolution rather than the subordination of differences.
Morris fleshed out a similar process of consensual and deliberative debate in Commonweal. In addition, it demanded the enforcement of majority rule the relocation of mastership from individuals to the group or, even more stringently, the recognition of a universal interest the institutionalisation of mastership as an abstract idea.
One way of thinking about the alternatives Morris explored is to return to his understanding of mastery and art. His conception of anarchist anti- authoritarianism pointed to egotism, or a form of competitive, vain-glorious mastership which was consciously transgressive. Against this, he posited a defence of majoritarianism and universal interest. This mapped onto an idea of mastership which subordinated the interests of individual artists to the well-being of the community.
A third possibility, one that he sidelined in his late critique of anarchism, was outlined in News from Nowhere. It sug- gested that creativity was primary but that the pleasure artists derived from their production was linked to its reception in the wider community. This October 6, It can be explained by the refusal to accept compromise on parliamenatary action — and perhaps the discomfort Morris felt in adopting a strategy that he knew to be flawed.
His concerns about anarchist individualism were informed by principles of fellowship, mastership and tyranny which derived from deeply- held convictions about social relations in communism, but his critique depended on reductive ideological labelling which smothered the politics of the anarchist movement. But his attempts to dismiss anarchism as individualistic by showing that it was wholly incompatible with it, failed.
Acknowledgement Thanks to Alex Prichard for repeated attempts to bring clarity to the argument. Kelmscott Press, , p. University of Exeter Press, , pp. Manifesto of English Socialists, London: Twentieth Century Press, , p. Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: Hobhouse and Political Argument in England —, Cambridge: Morris, Statement of Principles, p.
Contributions to Commonweal —, Nicholas Salmon ed. Thoemmes Press, , p. Morris, John Ball, p. Princeton University Press, , p. William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal, Nicholas Salmon ed. This shift is sometimes interpreted as a principled reversal of his earlier posi- tion, but can be explained as a pragmatic response to his disappointment with the failure of the League and his perception that workers were more interested in electoral power and welfare reform than revolution and the realisation of commu- nism in the society of art. Morris, Political Writings, p.
Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. Peter Kropotkin, in R. Auberon Herbert, The Voluntaryist Creed: Henry Frowde, , pp. Lexington Books, , p. A Discussion between the Hon. Auberon Herbert and J. Personal Rights Asso- ciation, , http: McElroy, Debates of Liberty, pp. Freedom Press, , p. McElroy, Debates of Liberty, p. Peter Kropotkin, Freedom, April Kropotkin, Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. Origin and Development, trans. Black Rose, , pp. Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism Moscow: Progress Publishers, , pp.
Morris, Political Writings, pp. Being a Critical Examination of Mr. Liberty and Property Defence League, Morris, Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. Morris, Letters III, p. Justice, 5 September Friedrich Engels, Letter to M. Hildebrand, in Marx, Engels, Lenin, p. Morris, Letters II, p. For a qualified anarchist defence of majoritarianism see A. An International Journal of Inclu- sive Democracy, 5 2 , http: Oxford Univer- sity Press, , p.
The emergence of syndicalist ideas, essentially revolutionary trade unionism, seemed fortuitously timed to give coherence and revolutionary temper to an urge to revolt evident in important sections of the organised and previously unorganised British working class. That said, self-defining Marxists also developed ideas and approaches that fed into syndicalism. Consequently, revolutionaries who self-identified as Marxists, anarchists and others all contributed to the syndicalist canon and operated on its ide- ological terrain; syndicalism thus fed from, and into, both anarchist and Marxist traditions.
Syndicalism, therefore, offers a unique forum to study at close quarters the relations between revolutionary activists of the red and the black. This chapter explores the impact of ideology on the conduct of revolution- ary struggle among activists in the Durham coalfield, in north-east England. Coal miners, especially those of south Wales, were fundamental to the syndicalist project in Britain. It expressed lessons militants had taken from the defeat of the Cambrian Combine dispute.
At its peak, the dispute involved 30, south Wales miners striking over conditions and wages, and it saw serious rioting at Tonypandy in November For the vast majority of Durham miners this was an incredibly unpopular change because it demanded they work night as well as morning and afternoon shifts and consequently brought significant disruption to family and social life. Anger from disenchanted sections of the Durham rank and file after the national strike was manifest in two main ways: Established nationally in , the ILP had become one of the founders of the Labour Party, and had since made some contested progress in establishing itself in the coalfield.
This chapter begins by discussing the ideological strands that informed the development of syndicalism in Britain. Ideological origins of syndicalism Three currents, involving both Marxists and anarchists, were crucial in shap- ing the tendencies that arose within British syndicalism. De Leon developed a theory October 6, These industrial unions were to work alongside the pre-existing unions until they supplanted them; this was dual unionism. Though ratified, the issue of political action soon split the IWW between De Leon and Wobblies under Big Bill Haywood of the Western Fed- eration of Miners, as well anarchists like Thomas Hagerty who penned the first draft of the original preamble and veteran anarchist organiser Lucy Parsons, wife of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons.
This grouping pre- vailed at the fourth IWW convention and the amended preamble precluded affiliation to any political party. The protest led to the founding of the Central Labour College, in London. However, its increasing relaxation of certain sec- tarian positions also lost it members and the still less sectarian and more flexible syndicalists began to outmanoeuvre it in the industrial sphere.
The second major influence was French. In , Tom Mann, a veteran of the New Union struggles of the late s who had been agitating in Australia, visited French syndicalists with fellow socialist Guy Bowman. While Morris developed a distinct brand of anti-statist and revolutionary anti-parliamentarianism based on Marxism, many other Socialist League activists gravitated towards anarchism.
Mann played a leading role in the industrial unrest in Liverpool in and his paper, The Transport Worker, achieved an astonishing circu- lation of 20, While the document contained a pow- erful critique of trade union bureaucracy and leadership in general terms, it still — crucially — advocated internal union restructuring rather than dual unionism.
Mates 61 go far enough. In the Durham coalfield itself, early anarchist influences were rather dif- ferent. In the s, there were anarchist meetings in a handful of scattered Durham pit villages and in several of the larger conur- bations bordering the coalfield where anarchist propaganda circulated. This regional development reflected a countrywide trend Aldred was crit- ical of Kropotkin ; as anarchism became more syndicalist orientated so the anarchist current in syndicalism became stronger. What was the interplay of these influences on George Harvey and Will Lawther, the two main Durham coalfield revolutionary activists before ?
Craik and Noah Ablett. Harvey remained committed to the SLP and industrial unionism throughout the pre-war period. Nevertheless, there was nothing October 6, Like Harvey, Lawther began his political life at the age of 15 by helping to establish an ILP branch in his pit village. A year later, the Lawthers moved to Chopwell, a new pit in the north-west Durham coalfield. Lawther soon became secretary of Chopwell ILP branch. At Labour College Lawther studied sociol- ogy, economics, politics and history.
Sociology lectures, delivered by Dennis Hird, considered the work of Herbert Spencer. In economics, the emphasis was, unsurprisingly, almost exclusively on Marx. This was evi- dent in the first syndicalist propagandising Lawther conducted in his own coalfield in May when he supported south Wales syndicalist miner W. Indeed, Lawther later appeared to have a foot in both anarchist camps, contributing to the dual-unionist Herald of Revolt and becoming a leading supporter of the Voice of Labour, which rejected dual-unionism.
He was also a pioneer of photography and a Kodak shareholder. As financial backer of W. Scrutiny of their activi- ties shows that they also developed their political activism in different ways. That they did so to some extent in different ways was more a reflection of their relative strengths as political activists and their access to different resources rather than a result of differing Marxist and anarchist October 6, Mates 65 approaches within syndicalism.
Harvey, a diminutive and unimpressive presence on the public platform whose head would wobble from side- to-side as he spoke, nurtured a talent for writing reports in The Socialist and information-rich propaganda pamphlets. By contrast, Lawther was less of a theorist than Harvey. He did not write detailed propaganda pamphlets.
Furthermore, Lawther contributed to public debates, corresponded with the local press and involved himself in community struggles. Lawther was central to the campaign in Chopwell for a return to pre-Act fees. It was an obvious place to take propaganda efforts. Lawther was also concerned that anarchists should organise effectively together in the region and nationally. In April , for example, he took a delegation and spoke at an anarchist conference in Newcastle.
These strengths, which reflected their personal abilities and inclinations, fuelled the syndicalist movement of the Durham coalfield. But what was the impact of their efforts? The verbatim reports read like a trial of the old methods by the new revolutionary ideas; this trial encapsulated the revolutionary challenge to the old DMA leadership. Harvey certainly maintained a strong local support base wherever he worked in the Durham coalfield throughout his life.
One example of the longer-term influence he exercised came in the form of Tom Aisbitt, one of his Chester-le-Street indus- trial unionist converts. One of only three in the country, it opened in December However, not all Chopwell radicals were convinced by this new gospel. Only a small hardcore, that included Lawther and two other brothers, took a militant stand against the war and became conscientious objectors.
A possible explanation is that the activists concerned lacked conviction, their propaganda deficient in substance. Since this charge has been levelled at Lawther, in particular, it bares considering, before turning to an alternative understanding. In assessing syndicalist influence in Durham, commentators have tended to focus on Harvey and Lawther and to a lesser extent their groupings , though October 6, Neither the theories nor most of the organisa- tions formed to advocate them were exclusive, ideologically pure and self-contained in this time of flux.
Lawther was thus a communist-supporting Labour Party activist by the early s. Furthermore, the birth of the British Communist Party heralded a slow drift towards more exclusivity and sectarianism among the Left. There is no reason to question the sincerity of his conversion to syndicalism from activism in the ILP in and his subsequent move to anarchist syndicalism before August The very intensity of his activity is suffi- cient evidence of the extent to which his political conversion was felt.
The shorter pieces Lawther published in the local press in the war period reveal an individual capable of grasping and expressing applied theory including that of Marx. Certainly, it is rather facile to claim that, because Lawther ended up on the political Right, that this was where he was always destined to go. Indeed, his study of the two informed his judgement that the Durham October 6, Mates 69 coalfield provided the second most important ground for syndicalism after south Wales. He noted the particularly strong unrest in the coalfield over the return to work after the national strike, but later acknowledged that the major coalfield to vote for a return to work in was south Wales where syndicalism was strongest.
While Holton explained this vote by the peculiar conditions in south Wales includ- ing a lack of resources after the Cambrian Combine dispute that engendered strike weariness, there was clearly no simple correlation between indus- trial militancy and syndicalist influence. Syndicalists, too, could have spoken to this rank-and-file discontent. How, then, did Harvey and Lawther apply their politics and how might this have blunted their potential impact in the Durham coalfield?
First, some aspects of their politics inhibited their ability to propagate their message, thereby helping to isolate them from the wider movement. Second, the revolutionary alterna- tive Harvey and Lawther offered in the Durham coalfield was, and remained, to some extent divided both theoretically and organisationally as elsewhere in Britain. His anar- chism demanded a rejection of any form of constitutional office and he did not stand for any lodge, DMA or party position until This was significant as Lawther had been a Chopwell lodge official in one of the largest and most militant pits in county Durham before going to Labour College.
Being a lodge official earlier in his life had brought Lawther into contact with influential Durham miners throughout the coalfield, as well as with significant national and international figures within the movement. But it denied Lawther access to important means of exercising local and regional influence. By contrast, two significant October 6, George Harvey did not have these particular qualms.
Harvey pointed out that in Durham any prospective party member would have to relin- quish trade union office to join the party. Naturally, they refused to do this, and yet the lodges in which these individuals were officials were also those that bought the most SLP propaganda. The growing interest in syndicalism between and seemed to allow for a blurring of the barriers between Marxism and anarchism, at least at the level of theory. Harvey was the main offender. This was evident at the Chopwell syndicalist conference in October , where Harvey and Lawther vied to convince the audience of their case.
They could call that Industrialism, Unionism [sic. There was certainly overlap: He contended that the scientific weapon was industrial unionism. They were out for industrial and political action. The two must go hand in hand. His claim in The Socialist March that SLP candidates would be the best parliamentarians as only revolutionaries could win reforms, sparked extensive internal criticism.
Nevertheless, Lawther continued to promote solidarity with Harvey. In February , Lawther made an impassioned appeal for Harvey in the aftermath of the Wilson case: It is up to us, as miners, to show to George Harvey, by word or deed, that we believe that what he said [about Wilson] was true.
And I believe that, during the forthcoming summer, the gospel of revolt, of direct action, of anti-leadership will spread, not because Harvey or any other person October 6, Their differing visions of revolutionary politics and the theoretical terms they used to express them to an interested, but not neces- sarily informed miner audience for example, at the Chopwell conference of October , must have confused more than just the local press. Lawther revealed another kind of sectarianism, however, and, while it underscored his revolutionary credentials, it hampered his ability to oper- ate effectively, denying him access to the platforms of potentially influential and sympathetic organisations and individuals in the DMA.
He did so by first attacking nationalisation, the aim of key Forward Movement activists, and thus effectively marked the gap between the apparent reformists of the Forward Movement and the revolutionaries. Again, Harvey displayed a little less principled idealism and a little more pragmatism in relations with the wider rank-and-file movement. At his libel trial in November , Harvey asked Wilson if he was aware that he had been heavily criticised by the Forward Movement.
But it cer- tainly seems to have secured him a prominent position on the platform of at least one Durham Forward Movement mass meeting. In April , Harvey October 6, Revolutionary activists are often confronted with a dilemma when faced with favourable circumstances in which to propagate their politics.
To what extent should they soft-pedal or compromise on fundamentals in order to be able to access platforms and provide a message that has the potential to chime with large numbers of individuals in some form of struggle? If they compromise too much they are open to the jibe of being opportunistic, while too little compromise means they could be denounced as zealots: In the period of industrial strife —, Lawther, certainly, adopted a purity of praxis that denied him access to certain platforms and alienated him from some potential allies. Harvey, on the other hand, seemed too sec- tarian, fixated on the finer points of the policy of his infinitesimal party.
This is not to argue that Lawther, in particular, should have abandoned the principled political positions he held.
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However, it is to recognise that main- taining such ideological positions had clear consequences and that in certain circumstances what was sacrificed for the sake of principle was potentially considerable. Yet, even when better co-ordinated in , anarchism remained a minority strand within the minority revolutionary syndicalist section of the mass labour movement. Furthermore, in its efforts to break out of this ghetto often prompted by Harvey himself , the SLP often lost as much as it gained. By the outbreak of war, like the other Left parties, both revolutionary and reformist alike, the SLP was losing members.
Still, in their interpretation and application in syndicalism, both Marxism and anarchism fell short in the pre upheaval in the Durham coalfield. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the late, great Dr Ray Challinor. The issue of political action was crucial. A Study in Ideology, and Practice Ph.
The Central Labour College, — Aberdeen: Bob Holton, British Syndicalism — Myths and Realities London: Holton, British Syndicalism, pp. Germinal and Phoenix Press, , p. John Caldwell, Guy A. The Strickland Press, Cienfuegos Press, , p. Greenwood Press, , pp. Paladin, , pp. Holton, British Syndicalism, p. Challinor, British Bolshevism, p. Spokesman Books, , pp. Newcastle Journal, 8, 10, 11, 15 March ; R. Newcastle Journal, 15 March Newcastle Journal, 17 March Blaydon Courier, 19 October Freedom, September ; Blaydon Courier, 20 September Blaydon Courier, 18 October See for example the Newcastle Chronicle, 13 April Newcastle Journal, 16 March Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Photography London: Quail, Slow Burning Fuse, p.
Evening Chronicle, 7 November Lawther did, however, contribute fairly short theoretical pieces to the local press from Mates, From Revolutionary to Reactionary: Thesis, Newcastle University, , pp. Quail, Slow Burning Fuse, pp. Blaydon Courier, 25 January May ; Evening Chronicle, 13 April Anarchism and Education in the United States Edinburgh: The Herald of Revolt, February Durham Chronicle, 15 November Political Activism and the Popular Front London: My thanks to Kevin Davies for drawing my attention to these files.
Gateshead Borough Council, , no page numbers. Church and Quentin Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Con- flict in Britain, — Cambridge: Saville, Dictionary of Labour Biography. Newcastle Journal, 11 March Challinor, British Bolshevism, pp. Brown, Introduction, Industrial Syndicalist, p. George Allen and Unwin, , p. See, for example, The Herald of Revolt, February Durham Chronicle, 12 April Blaydon Courier, 19 October ; 25 January Does Sorel belong to the Left or to the Right? If his place is with the theorists of the left, should we include him among the Marxists or among the anarchists?
To be sure, in Reflections on Violence, his most important work as a polit- ical theorist first published in , Sorel unequivocally identifies his enterprise with Marxism, and most works in political philosophy tend to classify Sorel as a Marxist of sorts. In my view, the disagreement and uncertainty stem from the fact that the theoret- ical basis for the position developed in Reflections on Violence is in essence neither Marxism nor anarchism, but rather a fairly coherent, if idiosyn- cratic, variety of anarcho-Marxism. To this end, my essay focuses on four themes, or rather positions, that figure prominently in the Reflections: To the extent that this is the case, Reflections on Violence proves successful as a statement of anarcho-Marxist doctrine.
Reflections on Violence Before turning to each of the themes mentioned above, it will be use- ful to review briefly the main argument in Reflections on Violence. His reasoning is as follows. Following Marx, Sorel assumes that capital- ism must produce the maximal development of the forces of production before socialism becomes possible; in other words, capitalism will give way to socialism only when capitalist relations of production become a fetter on the forces of production and an impediment to their further develop- ment.
Capitalism, in short, must exhaust the possibilities for development and expansion of the productive forces within the framework of capitalist relations of production before we can undertake the transition to social- ism. According to Sorel, capitalists, or the bourgeoisie, will be effective in developing the forces of production, and hence in achieving the complete development of capitalism, to the extent that they focus single-mindedly on maximising profit.
An exclusive focus on profit maximisation entails, in turn, a refusal to grant any concessions to the workers for example, higher wages, a reduced working day, measures to improve conditions in the work- place, expansion of employee benefits, or establishment of worker rights requiring new expenditures or investments which might hamper or retard the utmost development of the forces of production.
What does this have to do with violence? To put the same point a bit differently: This violence compels capitalism to restrict its attentions solely to its material role and tends to restore to it the warlike qualities it formerly possessed. A growing and solidly organized working class can force the capitalist class to remain ardent in the indus- trial struggle; if a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich bourgeoisie eager for conquest, capitalist society will reach its historical perfection.
Sorel is careful to distinguish this type of violence from acts of violence committed by the state: It is also worth emphasising that Sorel defends proletarian violence not only on account of its role in the consummation of capitalism, but also because of its beneficial effect on the workers themselves. In preparing and executing acts of violence in strikes, proletarians develop self-confidence, acquire political independence, develop skills and abilities necessary for self- management, and of course gain greater class consciousness.
Marxist and anarchist themes in Sorel Reflections on Violence is a somewhat eccentric and highly uneven work. Moreover, some of his principal theses are undeniably unsettling.
Socialism and Social Science (Routledge Revivals)
My remarks will deal mainly with the anarchist dimension of Reflections on Violence, for two reasons. Second, as noted earlier, the fact is that Sorel is most often classified as, October 6, In other words, the identification of Sorel with Marxism is somewhat less controversial than his assimilation to anar- chism.
But what about anarchism? As it turns out, in addition to his enthusiastic endorsement of numerous Marxist views, Sorel also defends some essentially and indisputably anarchist positions in the pages of Reflections on Violence. I will mention four of them. A second essentially anarchist position advanced in the Reflections is the condemnation of parliamentary socialism. Sorel stresses time and again in this work the inherently anti-revolutionary, conservative nature of parliamen- tary institutions, and their baneful effect on socialists willing to serve these institutions.
He acknowledges that the anarchists were correct in warning that participation in bourgeois institutions, with its exposure to bourgeois influences, would lead to a political embourgeoisement of revolutionaries. Proletarian violence, carried out in the proper fashion, will put an October 6, According to the doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism, autonomous trade unions, acting independently of political parties and institutions, must be both the agent of revolution and the fundamental organisational components of the future socialist society, understood as an arrangement in which these units will control production.
Unlike parlia- mentary socialism, revolutionary syndicalism is resolutely opposed to the state, which it aims to destroy. The latter does not presuppose, as does the proletarian general strike, an absolute class confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Indeed, some major anarchists, such as Rudolph Rocker and Emma Goldman, hold all four positions. So, in Reflections on Violence we find a number of standard Marxist positions alongside a number of standard anarchist positions.
One might be inclined to conclude, on the basis of my remarks and given the differences between Marxism and anarchism, that the result is a rather incoherent amalgam, or at October 6, Let me begin with first of these last two claims. Recall that these were: One might naturally approach this issue by examining the works of more mainstream Marxist theorists and thinkers, thereby determining whether or not many other Marxists have endorsed the anarchist views defended by Sorel.
For many Marxists, revolutionary syndicalism appears suspect, and impos- sible to embrace, owing to its decidedly anti-political character: This stance, which October 6, For Sorel attaches extreme importance to proletarian self-emancipation, and this principle, so central to the Marxist outlook,63 can plausibly be construed as providing warrant for privileging economic struggle over political struggle. After all, if one adheres to the principle that the emancipation of the working class must take the form of self -emancipation, and the sphere in which workers enjoy the best prospects for exercising their collective agency is in the economic realm that is, in the world of production , then it is hardly unreasonable to embrace something like revolutionary syndicalism, with its emphasis on industrial agitation, direct action, and mobilisation of the rank and file.
Furthermore, self-emancipation requires a certain degree or level of worker militancy, a point that Marx insists on, according to Sorel: Owing to the awesome, epic images October 6, In this sense, an insistence of the supreme political value of the revolutionary general strike, and strikes more generally, seems to follow quite straightforwardly from an unqualified commitment to proletarian self- emancipation. If Marx himself does not appreciate this, it is, Sorel suggests, partly because Marx gave little thought to the actual organisation of workers for revolutionary struggle,74 and partly because he could not possibly have foreseen developments that occurred after his death, developments which make it clear that adoption of the revolutionary general strike as a political strategy represents a correct adaptation of Marxist thought to contemporary realities.
For these reasons, the acceptance of parliamentarism seems be at odds with the principle of self -emancipation. Consider, for example, a problem that bedevilled Marxists throughout the twentieth century and that continues to provoke debate among Marxists and others to this day: Sorel thus represents and articulates a view that is October 6, Algozin eds and trans.
The Merlin Press, , p. Delgado Valenzuela, ; R. Pasado y Presente, , pp. Antonio Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, P. Martinus Nijhoff, , p. Empresa Editora Amauta S. Random House, , p. An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd edn. New York and Washington: Praeger, , p. See George Woodcock, Anarchism: Meridian, , p. Dell Publishing, , p. The Seabury Press, , p. Harvard University Press, , p. Fontana Press, , p. Harvard University Press, , pp. Oxford Uni- versity Press, , pp. The Humanities Press, , p. Hodges, The Literate Communist: Peter Lang, , p.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, J. See, for example, Sorel, Reflections, p. Riviere, , pp. See for example, Ibid. See, for example, G. On the material preconditions for socialism and the philosophy of history see Sorel, Reflections, pp. All the views listed here are conventionally ascribed to Marx and Engels. On the failings of parliamentary socialism, see Ibid. Ardis, , pp. Vintage Books, , p. Malatesta both criticised syndicalism — largely, it seems, because he equated it with conventional trade unionism — and expressed reservations about the gen- eral strike.
Polemical Articles — London: Freedom Press, , pp. Even so, the distinction seems useful with respect to the contrast that I wish to establish here. The Mer- lin Press, ; Theory, vol. For Marxist views on strikes, see R. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Carr underscores this point. See Studies in Revolution London: Frank Cass, , p. His relationship to the anarchists runs far deeper than an Italian variation of the tactical political ploy, which Lenin indulged in his anarchist-sounding pro- nouncements in revolutionary Russia during the spring and early summer of Not only does this solve the 96 October 6, For Gramsci, theoretical Marxist voluntarism is embodied in self-organisation in civil society.
Gramsci was no anarchist or syndicalist, but anarchism and syndicalism served as foils to forge Gramscian social thought and political action. In his arguments with the libertarians before his encounters with Lenin and what became known as Leninism, Gramsci had already opened his thought to a ready acceptance of the authoritarian solutions proposed in Russia. But it is his form of peda- gogical socialism, drenched in Gentilean assumptions, which demonstrates the theoretical gulf separating his apparent libertarian socialism from the positivist culture of the anarchists and syndicalists.
Is the Gramscian con- cept of the subaltern merely a more sympathetic but ultimately patronising and paternalist version of that old Marxist canard, the lumpenproletariat? Although they were from different generations, their relationships with the anarchists were strikingly similar. Gramsci and Labriola based the superiority of Marxism over other forms of socialism on its ability to forge a world view that required little borrowing from other systems of philosophical thought, and this caused them to fight against the marriage of positivism and Marxism.
They denied the intellectual validity of other systems of socialism, particularly anarchism, but in their search for autonomous working-class institutions immersed in civil society and with a shared hostility to state help or interventionism, they found an appreciation in the work of Georges Sorel, a close correspondent of Labriola in the s and, in his last years, an admirer of Gramsci and his young comrades in Turin in — The young Gramsci, Sorel and the anarchists Most accounts of Gramsci emphasise his sharp differentiation between the trade union, a reformist institution immersed in the logic of the capital- ist marketplace and the factory council, representative of the rank and file, subversive of labour as a commodity, reflecting the productivist and functionalist prerequisites of future socialised industry.
Consumer co-operatives were not, nor could they be, central to these politics. If co-operatives did not serve the entire working class they were protectionist, parasitical organisa- tions that gave rise to a group of privileged workers, who were successful at freeing themselves partially from capitalist exploitation, but whose actions were harmful to their class specifically and costly to production more gen- erally.
Gramsci was also attracted to the English radical liberals who founded the Union for Democratic Control, and particularly Norman Angell, whose wartime writings, Gramsci claimed, showed that protectionist state socialism or state capitalism were universal evils arising from the inherent demands of the world conflict. Concurrently, Lenin, who appreciated the mechanics of power and pro- duction, was praising the wartime German Empire as being a step closer to socialism: This became evident in an article written on 8 April when Gramsci argued: Marx expresses the identical relationship by: Fine and Saad-Filho then expand this equation to show that: See Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, p.
Two different kinds of commodities evidently play two different parts. The linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in which that value is expressed. The second commodity, y whether y represents a coat or anything else , is no longer seen as a commodity, i.
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As Marx puts it: As soon as the coat takes up the position of the equivalent in the value expression, the magnitude of its value ceases to be expressed quantitatively. On the contrary, the coat now figures in the value equation merely as the definite quantity of some article. This polarisation, as Marx makes clear, only manifests itself when things are set into relation with one another in an exchange relationship: Neither coat nor linen possess value-objectivity or objectivity as congelations of human labour per se [ It only becomes value in its unity with another product of labour.
As Rubin points out: The relation of labour to things refers to a given concrete form of labour and a given, concrete thing. This is a technical relation which is not, in itself, the subject of the theory of value. The subject matter of the theory of value is the interrelations of various forms of labour in the process of their distribution, which is established through the relation of exchange among things, i. As we have seen, the concrete labour of the direct producer, which is measured by socially necessary labour-time, is not, in itself, value-constituting.
Value only appears when two products are brought together in the act of exchange and then only in a commodity-producing society , thereby emerging as commodities equated as values, a process which necessarily abstracts from the particularity of the concrete labour that produced them. Therefore, at precisely the moment when concrete labour is reduced to an objectification of abstract labour, socially necessary labour time loses all consequence, because it is only concrete labour, and never abstract labour, that can be measured across time.
Their Rubin, , p. Marx, Engels, Freiligrath, W. Rather, their order of succession is determined by their relationship which they have to one another in bourgeois society, and that relationship is exactly the reverse of that which appears as their succession in accordance with nature or that which corresponds to the order of their historical development.
We are not dealing with the relation [to each other] which the economic relations take up in the sequence of different forms of society [ The Marxian law of value holds generally, as far as economic laws are valid at all, for the whole period of simple commodity-production, that is, up to the time when the latter suffers a modification through the appearance of the capitalist form of production. Up to that time prices gravitate towards the values fixed according to the Marxian law and oscillate around those values, so that the more fully simple commodity-production develops, the more the average prices over long periods uninterrupted by external violent disturbances coincide with values within a negligible margin.
Thus the Marxian law of value has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginning of exchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the 15th century of the present era. But the exchange of commodities dates from a time before all written history, which in Egypt goes back to at least 2, B. On closer inspection however, this proves illusory. As a general surplus can only exist in a class society, then we must suppose that Engels is actually referring to a surplus of a specific product s ; yet, this apparent solution is, effectively, another tautology in as much as a specific surplus could only derive from a society that practised specialisation, which implies a division of Marx, , pp.
Engels goes on to argue that exchange develops between communities, but later flourishes within the community itself, thereby precipitating the dissolution of the community as it is gradually subsumed under the exchange relation. Mill and Jeremy Bentham. What concerns me however, is what the explanation conceals. By focussing on what Engels wishes to include, there is a tendency to neglect what he suggests might be omitted; a simple way to illustrate this is to change the emphases on the citation above: At most, the knowledge gained here could be supported by more historical examples, etc.
In a letter to Marx, dated 24th June, Engels wrote: Some more on the creation of surplus-value: So the usual calculation follows: This presupposes a previous presentation of the process of circulation of capital, since the turnover of capital etc. If they can show in which way an equal average rate of profit can and must come about, not only without a violation of the law of value, but on the very basis of it, I am willing to discuss the matter further with them.
In the meantime they had better make haste. See Heinrich, , p. He had raised levels of expectancy to feverish proportions. Vollgraf et al, , p. I will now briefly consider the transformation problem from a value-form perspective. As we have already seen, money cannot be treated as an exogenous factor in capital circulation, because, as Murray comments: Thus production and circulation are not independent Engels had to compile volume III on the basis of seven manuscripts, written between and In his own words, Engels said he was confronted by a: For an extensive discussion see Roth, , pp.
Also Vollgraf et al , p. Cited in DiQuattro, , p. Money should therefore be understood as the necessary form of appearance of value, but when it is expressed as a specific magnitude, it then becomes the form of appearance of the value of a commodity, as Roberts states: As such, value and price are incommensurate with one another; their relationship is conceptual, and not, as classical economics would have it, quantitative. Therefore, in a monetary theory of labour value, the transformation problem cannot exist.
I will now return to this thematic, i. Furthermore, the Outlines suggested to Marx the very theoretical object which came to occupy him in his most important works, i. If one accepts both of those statements, then I think it follows that the Outlines registers as the more significant moment in the early chapters See: Marx, after all, had never fully embraced the Young Hegelian tradition; in fact, his enmity towards some of its number was initially extended to Engels, thus explaining the failure of their first meeting.
The most far- reaching shift, politically speaking, is undoubtedly to be found in the Outlines. Even the few commonalities the Young Hegelians did share: In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them.
Consequently, Marx frequently evokes unfavourable comparisons between labour and self-realisation Selbstbesthatigung , throughout the text. Alienation, for the early Marx, becomes the negation of creativity and infinitude, which are replaced by the particular, and the finite, the hallmarks of the bourgeois division of labour. If we put aside the early Marx for now, i.
In its place, Marx posits an individual, stripped of all subjectivity, whose existence is diminished, not by her exclusion from the creative labour process, but rather, by her forced incorporation into it. Here, the romanticism of the previous conception is neutralised; it is no longer the case that artisanal labour can simply be the negation of repetitive wage labour, because, in bourgeois society, all labour must be drained of its concrete character, and rendered abstract, in order to become value-constituting.
Marx thereby orchestrates an important point of departure with his earlier work. Returning to The German Ideology, for example: With the Grundrisse, Marx also turns his back on the simple linearity of a Newtonian, mathematical time and its ancillary, the evolutionary rendition of historiography. The latter of which, as Engels ably demonstrates below, was a major part of the episteme: In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended Marx writes: But this distinction, important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter that the course of history is governed by inner general laws.
This uneasy conjunction is to be found in the work of the late Engels - the extract above is from — showing just how much Marx had left his colleague behind, even by the late s. In The German Ideology, the authors follow a linear time-line, with history unfolding to reveal successive modes of production i. As Milios puts it: Turning our attention to Capital once more: I suggest this comparison, not simply for the obvious articulation of a temporal reversal, but also because Engels historical architectonic is, upon closer inspection, merely evolutionism, so drained of historical specificity that it is susceptible to collapse into a-historicism.
Moreover, if we return to the convention established in previous chapters, i. Before we do so, there is one small point that may help to contextualise this reappraisal. With its concept, Althusser was able to delegitimise the Marxism of his political foes, Garaudy most famously, but also Lefebvre, Cornu, Bottigelli and Desanti amongst others, by annexing their humanist reading from the claims to scientificity he was then able to make on the behalf of the mature Marx.
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In this vein, Blackledge, , p. Althusser addresses his reader: As we have seen, his scattered works on political economy reinscribed the anthropological fictions, shared by Smith and Ricardo, which Marx sought to destroy. It should be remembered however, that Marx did not entirely escape this enclosure himself. Indeed, the arrow points positively in the other direction.
Even upon ground where Marx had left much clearer directions behind him, Engels did not depart from the course of the classical economists. One view that did begin to emerge was the profound distance between Marxism as critique, and Marxism as weltanschauung. In the first, Marxism functioned as an attack on power, in the second it became the instrumentum regni. Despite this obvious polarity, a deluge of factors, from Stalinist publishing norms, philological issues, realpolitik, alongside successive layers of misinterpretation, and no doubt many more confounding variables besides, intervened to pollute the clear water separating each position.
Our point of departure with Althusser was over the terms of the break itself. In my opinion, Marx never completely superseded the older paradigms; a point which many of Engels apologists latch onto as evidence against any there being discordance at all between the two figures. However, this is only possible if Marxism is considered an unfinished work, and therefore unsuitable material for systematisation. It is precisely the requirement and logic of a closed system to present its founders as perfect and inseparable so that its own presuppositions cannot be challenged.
But, as has been shown historically, this dissolves into scholasticism, depriving Marxism of its critical function. The Marxism which Engels recast as a system, as a positive science, with its prescription of laws and methods, is the Marxism of collapse and dissolution.