Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 31
Roads to Freedom, routes identified in the sub-title as ‘socialism, anarchism and syndicalism’,
he was firm in holding back from anarchism, since ‘pure Anarchism, though
it should be the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate, is
for the present impossible, and would not survive more than a year or two at most if
it were adopted’. On the other hand,
both Marxian Socialism and Syndicalism, in spite of many drawbacks, seem … calculated
to give rise to a happier and better world than that in which we live. I do not,
however, regard either of them as the best practicable system. Marxian Socialism …
would give far too much power to the State, while Syndicalism… would … find
itself forced to reconstruct a central authority in order to put an end to the rivalries
of different groups of producers.
His conclusion therefore was that ‘the best practicable system is that of Guild
Socialism, which concedes what is valid both in the claims of the State Socialists and
in the Syndicalist fear of the State’, although considering that the Guild Socialism he
advocated was a form ‘leaning more, perhaps, towards Anarchism than the official
Guildsman would wholly approve’. 57 When the narrator of Siegfried Sassoon’s
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer visits Thornton Tyrrell (the name under which Russell
appears), he finds him reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. 58
Russell explained ‘Why I Am a Guildsman’ for the Guildsman in 1919, the year
of maximum industrial militancy and when his own left libertarianism also climaxed,
ending an article on ‘Democracy and Direct Action’ with a flourish:
Direct action has its dangers, but so has every vigorous form of activity. And in our
recent realization of the importance of law we must not forget that the greatest of all
dangers to a civilization is to become stereotyped and stagnant. From this danger, at
least, industrial unrest is likely to save us. 59
Although Russell himself identified a position of ‘aristocratic anarchism’ and Beatrice
Webb regarded him as an ‘aristocratic anarchist’, the latter description derives
from the Webbs’ suggestive habit of dividing radicals between ‘bureaucrats’ and
57 Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (New York:
Blue Ribbon Books, n.d.), pp. xi–xii, 211. (The American edition of Roads to Freedom had the
more tentative title of Proposed Roads to Freedom.) See too an interview of 1917, ‘Guild Socialism
and Education’, in Bertrand Russell, Pacifism and Revolution, 1916–18, ed. Richard A. Rempel
et al. (The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 14) (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 467–70.
Freedom’s review of Roads to Freedom is reprinted in a useful article: Vivian Harper, ‘Russell and
the Anarchists’, Anarchy, no. 109 (March 1970). Marshall, Demanding, pp. 566–70, also discusses
Russell’s relationship to anarchism.
58 Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Reprint Society, 1940), pp.
478–9.
59 Bertrand Russell, Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919–22, ed. Richard A. Rempel,
Beryl Haslam et al. (The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 15) (London: Routledge, 2000),
pp. 36, 80–81. ‘Introduction’ to ibid., pp. xxix–xxxii, has a helpful handling of Russell’s position
with respect to Guild Socialism and direct action.