Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

1
Introduction
This book was strongly recommended to the commissioning editor of one of Britain’s
best-known firms by a reputable historian whose latest work he was publishing. The
editor replied that personally he would be extremely interested but he would never
dare to take it to his editorial board. The problem presumably lay in my subject, for
anarchism continues to engender at the beginning of the twenty-first century the
passionate opposition it aroused at the end of the nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries when it became irretrievably associated with bomb-throwing and violence,
a violence that has re-erupted in recent years with the widely publicized activities of
self-professed anarchists in the anti-globalization and similar movements.
Yet anarchism – or left libertarianism, if one requires a less emotive term – is a
long-established political position and ideology, associated with a substantial body
of necessary, radical thought. In other countries this is taken for granted and intellectual
respect is paid to anarchism, even if very much a minority tradition, but it has
never been in Britain and the other Anglo-Saxon nations. Here anarchism continues
to be shunned in polite circles, whether social or academic. Herbert Read tells of
finding himself at a dinner sitting next to ‘a lady well known in the political world,
a member of the Conservative party’, who ‘at once asked me what my politics were,
and on my replying “I am an anarchist”… cried, “How absurd!”, and did not address
another word to me during the whole meal’. 1 Similarly a close friend has delighted
for many years in introducing me as ‘an anarchist historian’, a description unfailingly
met with at best bemusement, and otherwise appalled silence. Things have
been no better on the left and in the working-class movement, for, as Read explained
elsewhere: ‘In calling [my] principles Anarchism I have forfeited any claim to be
taken seriously as a politician, and have cut myself off from the main current of
socialist activity in England.’ 2 And whereas the manifestations, especially British
but also inter nationally, of Marxism, Communism, democratic socialism, liberalism,
conservatism, nationalism and even fascism, in terms of movements as well as theory,
1 Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 13.
2 Herbert Read, Annals of Innocence and Experience (London: Faber & Faber, 2nd edn, 1946), p.
134.
1