Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism

Between Reason and Romanticism

M. Adams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349678822, 9781137392602
• eBook ISBN: 9781137392626
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although marginal as a political force, anarchist ideas developed in Britain into a political tradition. This book explores this lost history, offering a new appraisal of the work of Kropotkin and Read, and examining the ways in which they endeavoured to articulate a politics fit for the particular challenges of Britain's modern history.

1

Contexts: Anarchism in British Intellectual History, 1886–1968

In his fulminating manifesto, Blast 1 (1914), Percy Wyndham Lewis went to great pains to identify the Vorticist aesthetic as quintessentially British. Frequently derided as a pale imitation of continental Futurism, Lewis insisted that given Britain’s industrial pre-eminence, the Vorticist celebration of the mechanical found a natural home in the scepter’d isle. ‘Machinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came far more from here than anywhere else’, he wrote, adding that natural wonders also found their proxy in the otherwise ‘characterless material climate’:

Our industries, and the Will that determined … the direction of the modern world, has reared up steel trees where the green ones were lacking; has exploded in useful growths, and found wilder intricacies than those of Nature.¹

While a champion of Vorticism, Herbert Read was more sensitive than Lewis to the essential dualism at the heart of British modernity. These tensions were apparent in the work of the painter Edward Wadsworth, signatory of Lewis’ manifesto, and producer of a number of woodcuts examining industrialisation in the North of Britain. One of these, ‘The Black Country’, appeared in Arts and Letters: An Illustrated Quarterly, the journal that Read temporarily edited in the aftermath of the First World War.² In thick black ink, Wadsworth’s image shows a landscape bisected by a train track leading the viewers’ gaze to a cluster of chimneys encased by black hills, spewing white smoke into a dark sky. Wadsworth’s earlier work may have celebrated this industrial strength, but this is a foreboding, ‘claustrophobic’ image, detailing the effacement of the country by the modern industrial city.³

Peter Kropotkin and Read were both chroniclers of the potential, and the depredations, of industrial modernity, and the dichotomies it created. Arriving as an exile in London, Kropotkin was not enamoured with his new city. In the Russian edition of his memoirs, in a chapter tactfully expunged from the British version, he commented on the difficulties of émigré life and his first impressions of the nation’s capital:

London is a dreadful city, a monster grown to enormous proportions. The cost of living is … high … for a man to whom the sum of sixpence represents a day’s or … two days’ sustenance. If work, or simply fate, has cast him to one end of the city, and his acquaintances or comrades live at the other … he must go … weeks … without seeing anyone close to him.⁴

London’s poverty, and its contrasting extremes of opulence, also provided Kropotkin with a rich stock of images. He contrasted those ‘plush’-wearing ‘West End ladies’ with the ‘workmen … sleeping between two newspapers in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square’.⁵ Similarly, he decried the ‘universalised’ antagonism between ‘capitalists and labourers’ that divided people into ‘property-holders and masses living on uncertain wages’. Recent ‘revelations’ had highlighted this ‘pitiless oppression’ in the ‘sweating system at Whitechapel and Glasgow’ as well as ‘London pauperism and York unemployment’.⁶

Kropotkin’s allusion to Seebohm Rowntree’s 1899 investigation into poverty in York is indicative of the growing popular sensitivity to the issue of social deprivation in nineteenth-century Britain. As Alexis de Tocqueville had noted decades earlier though, the problem was that not only was this penury immortalised in bricks and mortar, but that urban poverty existed in tandem with unrivalled prosperity. Manchester, he wrote, encapsulated this cruel symmetry:

A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work … From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.

Despite its brutishness, the city’s demands were insatiable, and its attraction undiminished. ‘We hear in Manchester that crowds of country folk are beginning to arrive’, Tocqueville added, ‘wages, low though they seem, are nevertheless an improvement on what they have been getting’.⁷ Victorian Britain was a society defined by these contrasts: wealth and poverty; opulence and degradation; power and powerlessness.

The industrial cities of the North embodied these contrasts, and in a different era, Read saw lingering echoes of this apparently Victorian problem. Coming of age in pre-First World War Leeds, his instinctive boyhood Toryism faded as his social conscience grew in response to the inequality he saw encapsulated in the city around him. Aside from the inequality, however, Read’s distaste for life in the modern city was aesthetic. ‘I passed through areas in which factories were only relieved by slums’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘slums by factories – a wilderness of stone and brick, with soot falling like black snow’. Deprivation and repulsiveness were tandem aspects of modern life, he added, ‘ugliness and poverty, dirt and drabness, were too universal to be ignored’.⁸ Confronted with the realities of urban life, Read reassessed his political beliefs and, finding them wanting, looked to the past for more instructive guides. There he found an outcry against the despoliations of capitalism that seemed enduringly relevant, and the skeleton of an aesthetic reaction to industrialism that held hope for the future.

Though forty years of dramatic political change divided them, for both Kropotkin and Read capitalism was a floundering project. Capitalism and the deprivation that they believed greased its wheels was not only dehumanising and inhibitive of meaningful freedom, it also mutilated the landscape. The poverty of the powerless was therefore not only economic and existential, but also aesthetic: memorialised in an environment of slums, slagheaps, and smokestacks. Kropotkin and Read coalesced in seeing anarchism, with its commitment to anti-statism, emphasis on collective action, and belief in the constructive potential of non-hierarchical organisation, as the solution to the crises of capitalism, and an antidote to this aesthetic barbarism. Yet, as much as they were united in this crusade and Read looked back to Kropotkin for inspiration, their politics were decisively shaped by the context of its articulation. For Kropotkin, moving from Russia to France before settling in Britain, this took the form of striving to locate a political vocabulary forged in reaction to continental autocracy, to a society on the path towards representative democracy and state-led social reform. Read, growing politically conscious in the pre-war years, imbibed some of the theoretical openness that had characterised the late-Victorian radical milieu. As his politics matured in the 1930s, as capitalism wallowed in fresh crises and the Spanish Civil War fleetingly presented an alternative to official communism, he explored these lessons afresh. But Read’s adoption of the language of Kropotkin’s anarchism was itself shaped by its broader intellectual context. Emphasising the constructive aspect of Kropotkin’s vision and presenting his politics as contiguous with that of William Morris and John Ruskin, Read diminished the role of violent revolution. A member of the generation thrown into the maelstrom of the First World War, Read’s taste for a quietly constructive politics and efforts to rehabilitate romanticism as a vital source of modern art, echoed both a broader thirst for modesty, and a respect for the past as an anchor of stability. For Read the return of war, rather than invalidating these lessons, made this modest, Kropotkinian politics, all the more urgent.

Progress and Poverty: Debating the state

For the American economic thinker Henry George, writing in moments snatched from his precarious career as a gas-meter reader, the kind of urban poverty deplored by nineteenth-century social explorers was a clear product of industrial modernity. As the title of his major work implied, there was absurdity in a political economy that achieved such material progress, but also engendered desperate poverty. As he wrote:

The ‘tramp’ comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are surely the marks of ‘material progress’ as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.⁹

George identified the monopolisation of land as the root of this evil, with rising land values reducing wages and the power of capital, as rents increased. His enemy was therefore the landlord, and his ‘radical and simple’ corrective the abolition of all taxes and their replacement with a single tax on land. Socialism would arrive and fruit trees would line the streets of previously foetid cities, with government assuming a role of Saint-Simonian ‘administration’, rather than securing socialism through ‘repressive decree’.¹⁰

Victorian political thought derived its richness from the varied attempts to resolve, or at least ameliorate, the effects of the progress and poverty paradox. When it appeared towards the end of the century, George’s book was a fillip for radicals seeking a solution. J. A. Hobson was unconvinced by the ‘panaceic simplicity’ of George’s theory, but noted that his tome nevertheless exerted a real influence, ‘stir[ring] the issue up to boiling-point’.¹¹ Kropotkin concurred, noting that George’s book had roused socialist feeling in Britain, but argued that while discontent at landed monopoly was ‘ripe’, agitation focusing solely on the land issue risked merely enthroning a ‘new landed gentry composed of the middle class’.¹² Central to Kropotkin’s hesitation was a concern that political methods would dissipate the radicalism of any land reform movement and that authoritarianism would reappear in fresh garb. His position also reflected a broader quandary shared by other late nineteenth-century political thinkers, concerning the state’s role as an agent of social and moral improvement. This rethinking of the state’s purview engendered a new political language of intervention that political theorists endeavoured to accommodate, even if, like Kropotkin, they were fundamentally antagonistic to the direction in which it pointed.

Herbert Spencer was one of those anxious about this process of increasing regulation. While famous for his irascibility, Spencer’s agitated tone in his polemic The Man Versus the State (1884) stemmed from a fear that the argument over state involvement was being lost. As an early critic of land monopolisation in Social Statics (1851), where he declared that ‘equity’ does ‘not permit property in land’, and proposed nationalisation as a corrective, it might be expected that Spencer was sympathetic to Georgist economics.¹³ By the time he came to write The Man Versus the State, however, Spencer had grown wary of the coercive potential of this notion. ‘Pressed by Mr. George’, he wrote, the land-nationalisation movement shows ‘avowed disregard for the just claims of existing owners’, and is a ‘scheme going more than half-way to State-socialism’. Animating Spencer was a concern that intervention had moved from the margins of political thinking to the heart of political action. After detailing a number of acts introduced by William Gladstone’s second administration, he observed wearily that these ‘measures of coercive rule’ were the ‘doings of the party which claims the name of Liberal’.¹⁴ Spencer’s fear that liberals had abandoned their shibboleth of contractual freedom hints at an intellectual struggle that had characterised the recent history of British liberalism. As the ‘hegemonic’ political tradition in Britain, liberalism had deep and varied roots, which informed its essentially protean character.¹⁵ Nevertheless, a characteristic feature of liberal political thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century was a more conciliatory position on state intervention. The Oxford intellectual T.H. Green, who, despite his early death, exercised a ‘compelling’ influence on his generation, adopted a language of contractualism familiar to Spencer when offering a revised theory of the bounds of state intervention.¹⁶ ‘Freedom of contract’ and ‘freedom in all the forms of doing what one will with one’s own’, he wrote, ‘is valuable only as a means to an end’. This ‘end’ was ‘freedom in the positive sense’, the ‘liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to a common good’. State action could therefore be beneficial, not in ‘directly’ promoting ‘moral goodness’, but in maintaining ‘the conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible’.¹⁷

Whilst it is tempting to situate Green’s thought in a narrative that sees a fundamental shift in Victorian political thought from individualism to collectivism, the reality is more complex.¹⁸ Rather than an ‘emphatic movement from one mutually exclusive position to another’, the intellectual history of the period is more fruitfully seen as a time in which the central concepts of key political traditions underwent decontestation against a background of ‘changing scientific fashion, new sets of ethico-cultural beliefs, and specific events that made their mark on ideological assumptions’.¹⁹ Pioneers like Green were not committing apostasy, but sought to retain the central precepts of a liberal political identity whilst keeping the tradition in tune with changing political circumstances. Stronger connections exist between a thinker like Green and older liberals like John Stuart Mill than the characterisation of a shift to collectivism in Victorian liberalism might imply. Indeed, it is not true to characterise mid-Victorian intellectuals as unswervingly attached to a laissez-faire ideal.²⁰ These debates, and the conflicts over the nature of state involvement, contributed to a rich intellectual backdrop before which all political traditions had to perform.

For traditions other than liberalism, the developing appreciation of state power might seemingly have involved less soul searching. The idea that the conciliatory attitude towards intervention that characterised ‘new liberalism’ stemmed from a closing of the gap between liberalism and socialism, assumes that British socialism held a more beneficent view of the state.²¹ While socialism, ‘one of the most elusive, vague, and diverse concepts of English social and political thought’, was always a heterodox movement in Britain, towards the end of the century there was increasing weight behind the notion that social emancipation would be achieved under the aegis of state action.²² In part, this conclusion emerged from an assessment of the history of socialism in Britain, and a se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Contexts: Anarchism in British Intellectual History, 1886–1968
• 2. Foundations: System-Building Philosophy
• 3. Statism: The Power of History
• 4. Revolution: The Journey to Communism
• 5. Utopia: Imagining Post-capitalist Society
• Conclusion: Inventing a Tradition
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index