Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 33
unionists and Guild Socialists, supplemented during wartime by the leadership of
the Shop Stewards’ Movement, had no sympathy for this political programme, yet
were impressed by Belloc’s analysis, sharing his rejection of ‘the servile state’. 64
Belloc’s political origins in Liberalism help to explain the apparent paradox that in
their anti-statism the revolutionary socialists had drawn very near to the concerns
of the radical-liberal ‘Old Unionists’ who had been resisting state socialism since the
1890s and continued to represent a major current within the trade unions, and hence
also within the early Labour Party (established in 1900–6). 65
By the end of the war the mental landscape of much of the labour movement had
been, although only temporarily, transformed. As Tawney commented in 1920:
It is a commonplace that during the past six years the discussion of industrial and
social problems has shifted its centre. Prior to the war students and reformers were
principally occupied with questions of poverty. Today their main interest appears
to be the government of industry. An increasing number of trade unionists regard
poverty as a symptom of more deeply rooted malady which they would describe as
industrial autocracy and demand ‘control’. 66
But the traditional moderation of British trade unions was soon to reassert itself;
the first phase of the interwar depression arrived during the second half of 1920,
overwhelming the chances of success for militant action; and the Labour Party’s
electoral advances, above all the breakthrough in the election of 1922, went far to
restore faith in parliamentarianism and to set the British working class, after the
decade-long dalliance of some of its sections with libertarian alternatives, firmly on
the parliamentary road to socialism. Cole and his wife Margaret had from 1919 edited
the Guildsman, which they kept going as the Guild Socialist down to 1923, and then
brought out their own New Standards until they were obliged to admit defeat the
following year, overwhelmed by the statism of both the Labour and the Communist
Parties. It was in 1922 that Orage, although by then obsessed by Social Credit and
occultism, abandoned the New Age, to counter the youthful and provincial ‘anarchism’
of which the Webbs had launched in 1913 the aptly titled New Statesman; and it was
the latter’s metropolitan ‘bureaucracy’ which was to flourish in the coming decades.
64 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (London and Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1912), pp. 5–6. See Hinton,
Shop Stewards’ Movement, pp. 43–8, and Holton, British Syndicalism, pp. 181–4, for the book’s
influence. The socio-political ideas of Belloc and Chesterton are discussed by Barker, pp. 84–91;
Margaret Canovan, G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1977), esp. pp. 81–99; Ian Boyd, ‘Chesterton and Distributism’, in D.J. Conlon (ed.), G.K.
Chesterton: A Half Century of Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
65 See, for example, Alastair J. Reid, ‘Old Unionism Reconsidered: The Radicalism of Robert Knight,
1870–1900’, in Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (eds.), Currents of Radicalism: Popular
Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 228–43, for a key member of the previous generation.
66 R.H. Tawney, ‘Foreword’ to Carter L. Goodrich, The Frontier of Control: A Study in British
Workshop Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), p. vii.