Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 27
conditions’, that is a share in the control of the industry. 43 Its struggle over dilution
was lost when a strike of March 1916 was broken with the fining of strikers, the
deportation of ten of the leaders and the imprisonment of five others. Leadership of
the movement then shifted towards Sheffield. In August 1917 the Shop Stewards’
and Workers’ Committee Movement was inaugurated at a national conference in
Manchester; and five more conferences were held before the end of the war, at which
at least 33 towns were represented. There was a weekly paper, the Worker, published
in Glasgow, and a monthly, Solidarity, in London. The movement was to disintegrate
rapidly with the coming of peace, as war production ended and former militants
found themselves unemployed. Its remnants were to form a constituent – part of the
SLP, with which it overlapped, was another – when the Communist Party of Great
Britain was founded in 1920. 44
Another variety of libertarian socialism, Guild Socialism, had also been influential
during the second decade of the twentieth century. An anonymous article in
the Syndicalist, written presumably by the editor Guy Bowman, complained:
Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings … of the middle-classes
writ large across it, ‘Guild Socialism’ stands forth as the latest lucubration of the
middle-class mind. It is a ‘cool steal’ of the leading ideas of Syndicalism and a deliberate
perversion of them.
We do not so much object to the term ‘guild’ as applied to the various autonomous
industries, linked together for the service of the common weal, such as advocated by
Syndicalism. But we do protest against the ‘State’ idea which is associated with it in
Guild Socialism.
Middle-class people, even when they become Socialists, cannot get rid of the
idea that the working class is their ‘inferior’; that the workers need to be ‘educated’,
drilled, disciplined, and generally nursed for a very long time before they well able
to walk by themselves. The reverse is actually the truth. 45
There is considerable justice in these much quoted criticisms of what was undeniably
a very middle-class form of socialism, yet Guild Socialism was theoretically more
important than they could allow, becoming more original and also non-statist.
The origins of Guild Socialism are customarily traced to 1906 and the publication
by the former York architect, Arthur J. Penty, of The Restoration of the Gild System.
43 Quoted by Branko Pribićević, The Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control, 1910–1922
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959), p. 124.
44 J.T. Murphy, Preparing for Power: A Critical Study of the History of the British Working-Class
Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), chaps. 5–10, and Hinton, Shop Stewards’ Movement,
need to be read alongside Iain McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Edinburgh: John Donald,
1983), Part 1, and Alastair Reid, ‘Dilution, Trade Unionism and the State during the First World
War’, in Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical
and Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). But see also James
Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974 (Brighton:
Wheatsheaf Books, 1983), pp. 96–108; Clegg, chaps, 4, 5; and Pribićević,
45 Syndicalist, February 1914. For Bowman, see Brown, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–13, 26 n12.