This post briefly describes 25 anarchist thinkers, following on from the political ideology post. I took the list of anarchist thinkers from ‘Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism’ by Peter Marshall.
William Godwin
William Godwin (1756-1836) is said to be the founder of philosophical anarchism. In his book An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), he argued that “government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge and the expansion of the human understanding. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged personal morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. In this development the rigorous exercise of private judgment, and its candid expression in public discussion, plays a central role, motivating his rejection of a wide range of co-operative and rule-governed practices which he regards as tending to mental enslavement, such as law, private property, marriage and concerts.”
Inspired by the optimism of the French Revolution, Godwin believed a time would come when the mind would dominate matter so ‘mental perfectibility’ would take physical form so it would be possible to control illness, ageing resulting in humans becoming immortal. Godwin’s moral theory is described as utilitarian. [1]
Max Stirner
Max Stirner (1806–1856) is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844). In English, it is known as The Ego and Its Own or The Unique Individual and their Property. It is argued that “the form and content of Stirner’s major work are disconcerting. He challenges expectations about how political and philosophical arguments should be conducted and shakes the reader’s confidence in the moral and political superiority of contemporary civilisation. Stirner provides a sweeping attack on the modern world as increasingly dominated by “religious” modes of thought and oppressive social institutions, together with a much briefer sketch of a radical “egoistic” alternative in which individual autonomy might flourish. The historical impact of The Ego and Its Own is sometimes difficult to assess, but Stirner’s work can confidently be said: to have had an immediate and destructive impact on the left-Hegelian movement; to have played an important contemporary role in the intellectual development of Karl Marx (1818–1883); and subsequently to have influenced significantly the political tradition of individualist anarchism.” [2]
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865) was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, economist and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to describe himself as an anarchist and is a very influential anarchist thinker, with some describing him as the ‘father of anarchism’.
“Proudhon became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as “the synthesis of communism and property”. Some consider his mutualism to be part of individualist anarchism while others regard it to be part of social anarchism.
His first major work was What Is Property? (1840), where is asserted that ‘property is theft’. His work interested Karl Marx and they become friends. This ended with their disagreement over Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846).
Proudhon advocated workers’ councils, associations and cooperatives, plus individual worker/peasant possession over private ownership or the nationalisation of land and workplaces. He believed social revolution was achievable peacefully. “Proudhon unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans.” [3]
Michael Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1976) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, socialist and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is also a very influential anarchist and believed to be the founder of the revolutionary socialist and social anarchist traditions.
His revolutionary politics caused him to move between several countries, be deported from Germany and be imprisoned in Russia. He joined the International Worker Men’s Association and led the anarchist faction. There was a conflict between Bakunin and Marx, with the latter arguing for the use of the state to introduce socialism. “Bakunin and the anarchist faction argued for the replacement of the state by federations of self-governing workplaces and communes.” The anarchists lost the conflict and Bakunin was expelled from the International. Bakunin founded the Anti-Authoritarian International in 1872. From 1870 Bakunin wrote several texts on the State, anarchism and God. He was also involved in several European movements including insurrections in France and Italy.
Bakunin is believed to have “had a significant influence on thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Herbert Marcuse, E. P. Thompson, Neil Postman and A. S. Neill as well as syndicalist organizations such as the Wobblies, the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and contemporary anarchists involved in the modern-day anti-globalization movement.” [4]
Peter Kropotkin
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (184 – 1921) was a “Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, economist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, political scientist, human geographer and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism. He was also an activist, essayist, researcher and writer.”
“Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended a military school and later served as an officer in Siberia, where he participated in several geological expeditions. He was imprisoned for his activism in 1874 and managed to escape two years later. He spent the next 41 years in exile in Switzerland, France (where he was imprisoned for almost four years) and England. While in exile, he gave lectures and published widely on anarchism and geography. Kropotkin returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but he was disappointed by the Bolshevik state.”
“Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, but also Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, his principal scientific offering. He contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition[14] and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy.” [5]
Élisée Reclus
Jacques Élisée Reclus (1830 – 1905) “was a renowned French geographer, writer and anarchist. He produced his 19-volume masterwork, La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes (‘Universal Geography’), over a period of nearly 20 years (1875–1894). In 1892 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Paris Geographical Society for this work, despite having been banished from France because of his political activism. Reclus advocated nature conservation and opposed meat-eating and cruelty to animals. He was a vegetarian. As a result, his ideas are seen by some historians and writers as anticipating the modern social ecology and animal rights movements.” [6]
Errico Malatesta
Errico Malatesta (14 December 1853 – 22 July 1932) “was an Italian anarchist and revolutionary socialist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and in total spent more than ten years in prison. Malatesta wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of Mikhail Bakunin.”
It has been described that Malatesta had a two-part strategy by the start of the nineteenth century. First, the unification of the anarchist and anti-parliamentary socialists into a new anarchist socialist party as anarchism was a minority movement on the Italian left. The other part was to advocate a syndicalist strategy to encourage socialists into insurrections and to maintain their revolutionary conscience. Malatesta’s form of anarchist communism can be described as ‘anarchism without adjectives’.
Others describe Malatesta’s form of anarchism to be ‘anarchist socialism’, which promoted the socialist character of anarchism and the need for anarchists to regain contact with workers, especially through the labour movement. [7]
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Born into an aristocratic Russian family and best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878).
“In the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly Resurrection (1899).” [8]
Josiah Warren
Josiah Warren (1798 – 1874) “was an American utopian socialist, individualist philosopher, polymath, social reformer, inventor, musician, printer and author. He is regarded by some as the first American anarchist (although Warren never used the term anarchism himself) and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, the first anarchist periodical published, was an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and made his own printing plates.” [9]
Lysander Spooner
Lysander Spooner (1808 – 1887) “was an American individualist anarchist. He was also an abolitionist, entrepreneur, essayist, legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian, writer and a member of the First International. Spooner was a strong advocate of the labor movement and anti-authoritarian and individualist anarchist in his political views. His economic and political ideology has usually been identified as libertarian socialism and mutualism. His writings contributed to the development of both left-libertarian and right-libertarian political theory within libertarianism in the United States. Spooner’s writings include the abolitionist book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, which opposed treason charges against secessionists. Spooner is also known for competing with the Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company. However, it was closed after legal problems with the federal government.” [10]
Benjamin Tucker
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854 – 1939) “was an American anarchist and libertarian socialist. A 19th-century proponent of individualist anarchism which he called “unterrified Jeffersonianism”, Tucker was the editor and publisher of the American individualist anarchist periodical Liberty (1881–1908) as well as a member of the socialist First International. Tucker harshly opposed state socialism and was a supporter of libertarian socialism which he termed anarchist or anarchistic socialism as well as a follower of mutualism. He connected the classical economics of Adam Smith and the Ricardian socialists as well as that of Josiah Warren, Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to socialism. Later in his life, Tucker converted to Max Stirner’s egoism.” [11]
Adin Ballou
Adin Ballou (1803 – 1890) “was an American proponent of Christian nonresistance, Christian anarchism and socialism, abolitionism, and the founder of the Hopedale Community. Through his long career as a Universalist and Unitarian minister, he tirelessly advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery, the principles of Christian anarcho-socialism, and promoted the nonviolent theory of praxis (or moral suasion) in his prolific writings. Such writings drew the admiration of Leo Tolstoy, who frequently cited Ballou as a major influence on his theological and political ideology in his non-fiction texts like The Kingdom of God is Within You, along with sponsoring Russian translations of some of Ballou’s works. As well as heavily inspiring Tolstoy, Ballou’s Christian anarchist and nonresistance ideals in texts like Practical Christianity were passed down from Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi, contributing not only to the nonviolent resistance movement in the Russian Revolution led by the Tolstoyans, but also Gandhi’s early thinkings on the nonviolent theory of praxis and the development of his first ashram, the Tolstoy Farm. In a recent publication, American philosopher and anarchist Crispin Sartwell wrote that the works by Ballou and his other Christian anarchist contemporaries like William Lloyd Garrison directly influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., as well.” [12]
John Humphrey Noyes
John Humphrey Noyes (1811 – 1886) “was an American preacher, radical religious philosopher, and utopian socialist. He founded the Putney, Oneida and Wallingford Communities, and is credited with coining the term ‘complex marriage’.” [13]
Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866 – 1912) “was an American anarchist known for being a prolific writer and speaker who opposed capitalism, marriage and the state as well as the domination of religion over sexuality and women’s lives which she saw as all interconnected. She is often characterized as a major early feminist because of her views. Born and raised in small towns in Michigan and schooled in a Sarnia, Ontario, Catholic convent, de Cleyre began her activist career in the freethought movement. Although she was initially drawn to individualist anarchism, de Cleyre evolved through mutualism to what she called anarchism without adjectives, prioritizing a stateless society without the use of aggression or coercion above all else. De Cleyre was a contemporary of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of de Cleyre’s essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth in 1914.” [14]
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) “was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Goldman was born in Russia and emigrated to the US in 1995. She was attracted to anarchism after the Chicago Haymarket affair and became a write and lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights and social issues. Goldman and Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate financier Henry Clay Frick, as an act of propaganda of the deed. It was unsuccessful and Berkman served 14 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times for ‘inciting riots’ and illegally distributing information on birth control. Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth in 1906. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were given two-year prison sentences for encouraging people to avoid the First World War draft. Once released they were arrested again and along with 248 others were deported to Russia.
Goldman was initially supportive of the Russian Revolution but following the Kronstadt rebellion, she denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of opposing voices. She left the Soviet Union in 1923 and wrote about her experiences. In the 1930’s Goldman moved between England, Canada, France and Spain and wrote her autobiography.
“During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking rebel woman’ by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women’s suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.” [15]
Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman (1870 – 1936) “was a Russian-American anarchist and author. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century, famous for both his political activism and his writing. Berkman was born in Vilna in the Russian Empire (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) and immigrated to the United States in 1888. He lived in New York City, where he became involved in the anarchist movement. He was the one-time lover and lifelong friend of anarchist Emma Goldman. In 1892, undertaking an act of propaganda of the deed, Berkman made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate businessman Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike, for which he served 14 years in prison. His experience in prison was the basis of his first book, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. After his release from prison, Berkman served as editor of Goldman’s anarchist journal, Mother Earth, and later established his own journal, The Blast. In 1917, Berkman and Goldman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiracy against the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country’s Bolshevik revolution, Berkman and Goldman soon became disillusioned, voicing their opposition to the Soviets’ use of terror after seizing power and their repression of fellow revolutionaries. They left the Soviet Union in late 1921, and in 1925 Berkman published a book about his experiences, The Bolshevik Myth.
While living in France, Berkman continued his work in support of the anarchist movement, producing the classic exposition of anarchist principles, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism. Suffering from ill health, Berkman committed suicide in 1936.” [16]
Gustav Landauer
Gustav Landauer (1870 – 1919) “was one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He was an advocate of social anarchism and an avowed pacifist. In 1919, he was briefly Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918–1919. He was killed when this republic was overthrown. Landauer is also known for his study of metaphysics and religion, and his translations of William Shakespeare’s works into German.” [17]
Johann Most
Johann Joseph “Hans” Most (1846 – 1906) was a German-American Social Democratic and then anarchist politician, newspaper editor, and orator. He is credited with popularizing the concept of ‘propaganda of the deed‘.”
In Germany, he edited several revolutionary socialist newspapers. He argued against patriotism, conventional religion and advocated violent action to bring about revolutionary change. He was forced to leave Germany and moved to France, then London. He founded a new anarchist newspaper there. He was imprisoned by the British state for 18 months for writing about his delight of the assassination of Alexander II of Russia. Following his release, he moved to the US. He continued publishing his newspaper in New York and was imprisoned there too for supporting the assassination of US President McKinley. [18]
Rudolf Rocker
Johann Rudolf Rocker (1873 – 1958) was a German anarchist writer and activist. Some describe him as an anarcho-syndicalist, he described himself as an anarchist without adjectives. He believed that anarchist schools of thought represented “different methods of economy” with the main aim for anarchists was “to secure the personal and social freedom of men”.
As a young man, he joined the SPD and was part of the German labour movement. He was a follower of Bakunin, a revolutionary, radical leftist and anti-Marxist. Rocker moved around Europe in the early twentieth century. He became a regular writer for a syndicalist publication and was part of the 1920 international syndicalist conference that led to the founding of the International Workers Association (IWA) in 1922. Rocker returned to Germany in 1926 and was concerned by the rise of nationalism and fascism. He was later exiled from Nazi Germany.
Rocker published a well-known text, ‘In Pioneers of American Freedom’, “a series of essays, he details the history of liberal and anarchist thought in the United States, seeking to debunk the idea that radical thought was foreign to American history and culture and had merely been imported by immigrants.” [19]
Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) “was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule and in turn to inspire movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.
Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, Gandhi trained in the law at the Inner Temple, London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891. After two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years. It was here that Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India. He set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women’s rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and above all for achieving swaraj or self-rule.
Also in 1921, Gandhi adopted the use of a short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a mark of identification with India’s rural poor. He began to live in a self-sufficient residential community and to eat simple food; he undertook long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in calling for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.
Gandhi’s vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a Muslim nationalism which demanded a separate homeland for Muslims within British India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, the Hindu-majority India and the Muslim-majority Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Abstaining from the official celebration of independence in Delhi, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress. In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop the religious violence. The last of these, begun on 12 January 1948 when he was 78, also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan. Some Indians thought Gandhi was too accommodating to Pakistan. Among them was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who assassinated Gandhi on 30 January 1948 by firing three bullets into his chest.” [20]
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC (1893 – 1968) “was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism.
Politically, Read considered himself an anarchist, albeit in the English quietist tradition of Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Nevertheless, in 1953 he accepted a knighthood for “services to literature”; this caused Read to be ostracized by most of the anarchist movement. Read was actively opposed to the Franco regime in Spain, and often campaigned on behalf of political prisoners in Spain.
Dividing Read’s writings on politics from those on art and culture is difficult, because he saw art, culture and politics as a single congruent expression of human consciousness. His total work amounts to over 1,000 published titles.
Read’s book ‘To Hell With Culture’ deals specifically with his disdain for the term culture and expands on his anarchist view of the artist as artisan, as well as presenting a major analysis of the work of Eric Gill. It was republished by Routledge in 2002.” [21]
Alex Comfort
Alexander Comfort (1920 – 2000) “was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, The Joy of Sex (1972). He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, anarchist, pacifist, and conscientious objector.
A pacifist, Comfort considered himself “an aggressive anti-militarist”, and he believed that pacifism rested “solely upon the historical theory of anarchism”.
Comfort was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a conscientious objector in World War II. In 1951 Comfort was a signatory of the Authors’ World Peace Appeal, but later resigned from its committee, claiming the AWPA had become dominated by Soviet sympathisers. Later in the decade he actively endorsed both the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War, 1957, and the Committee of 100, 1960. Comfort was imprisoned for a month, with Bertrand Russell and other leading members of the Committee of 100, for refusing to be bound not to continue organising the Parliament Square/Trafalgar Square protest of 17 September 1961.
Among the publications by Comfort concerning anarchism is ‘Peace and Disobedience’ (1946), one of many pamphlets he wrote for Peace News and PPU, and ‘Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State’ (1950). He exchanged public correspondence with George Orwell defending pacifism in the open letter/poem, “Letter to an American Visitor”, under the pseudonym “Obadiah Hornbrooke”. Comfort’s book ‘The Joy of Sex’ (1972) earned him worldwide fame and $3 million. But he was unhappy to become known as “Dr. Sex” and to have his other works given so little attention.” [22]
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) “was an American author and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen’s duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one’s own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his outward bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich’s radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist. Goodman became known as “the philosopher of the New Left” and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.” [23]
Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin (1921 – 2006) “was an American communalist, political philosopher, trade-union organizer, and educator. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning, within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were ‘Our Synthetic Environment’ (1962), ‘Post-Scarcity Anarchism’ (1971), ‘The Ecology of Freedom’ (1982) and ‘Urbanization Without Cities’ (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical ‘lifestylism’ of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called communalism, which seeks to reconcile Marxist and anarchist thought.
Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and more recently, the democratic confederalism of Rojava. He was a central figure in the American green movement and the Burlington Greens.” [24]
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born 1928) “is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called ‘the father of modern linguistics’, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Born to Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodelling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. Chomsky began teaching at the University of Arizona in 2017.
One of the most cited scholars alive, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarship, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.” [25]
Editor’s note: From the 15th to the 22th of November, in different countries, the Glasgow Agreement is articulating mobilizations, protests and blocks against one of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world: Total.
The social alliance to take on global capitalism must be global, radical, popular, tactically, and strategically focused, while at the same time flexible and imaginative.
Is climate collapse close to being averted? How close are we to winning? Is the climate justice movement organized to win? Are current strategies and tactics enough? What else do we need to try and how fast? The Glasgow Agreement, People’s Climate Commitment, is a global platform of grassroots and social movements for climate justice. It is planning on going after French multinational Total simultaneously all around the world this November, in an action called Collapse Total, and organising climate justice caravans in all continents next Spring.
As fossil fuel investment and projects jump from country to country, as their destruction-ridden profit keeps on building on the collapse of the climate, tactics and strategies on the global scale must be tried.
The climate justice movement is pursuing the task of taking on the entire global fossil industry, that is, global capitalism. Yet, as it remains mostly a group of dispersed, uncoordinated, and loosely connected movements, how can this task become achievable? Fossil capitalism has its fingers everywhere, in each government, every press agency, every media outlet and network, in anything that money can buy. It articulates its strategies, coordinates its wars and dictates the policies that have been dooming us to climate collapse. They have known about climate change since the 1960’s. They have coordinated for decades to spread misinformation to mislead Humanity and cut the essential action to prevent climate chaos.
The climate justice movement needs a lot of imagination to break the mold of its own business as usual, like most social movements that have gotten used to normality, procedure, method and repetition. To overcome these challenges, the movement needs to permanently test new tactics and strategies.
Collapse Total is focusing on one of the many and influential tentacles of fossil fuel capitalism. From the 15th to the 22th of November, in different countries, the Glasgow Agreement is articulating mobilizations, protests and blocks against one of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world: Total. This French multinational is neck deep into promoting the climate collapse, with mass investments in new fossil fuel projects, oil and gas fields, pipelines, offshore drilling, fracking destruction, tar sands and the destruction of lives and the livelihoods of millions of indigenous communities, peasants and every landscape they set their eyes on. They have spent billions to make trillions. They have hired armies of lobbyists, mercenaries, and political campaigners to keep oil and gas flowing, in whichever situation. They have known about their impact on the climate since at least 1971, yet have always promoted denialism. They are the glowing example of the fossil fuel multinational, dooming us while hiring public relations’ experts. It has recently changed its name to Total Energies, changed its logo and announced a net zero target for 2050. Yet, Total it is planning to drill around fifty exploratory oil and gas wells this year alone (in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, Lebanon, Oman, USA, Bulgaria, Bolivia, two in Angola, two in Papua New-Guinea, two in Norway, two in Malaysia, two in Mexico, three in Cyprus, three in the UK, four in Brazil, four in Myanmar, six in Guyana and eight in Suriname).
Total is one of the biggest historical contributors to the climate crisis, with higher emissions than most countries in the world. With the pushback from climate protests in the last years, they have greenwashed themselves to try and look like something else, while pushing for EACOP, a new massive pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania, increasing the production oil and gas in war-devastated Iraq, prompting a military dictatorship in Myanmar or receiving full state protection in Northern Mozambique, while local communities are devastated by climate change and gas-related terrorism. They maintain their support for fracking in Vaca Muerta, Argentina, for tar sands in Canada and oil and gas all around. They never stopped. They never will. Unless they are forced to stop.
As fossil fuel investment and projects jump from country to country, as their destruction-ridden profit keeps on building on the collapse of the climate, tactics and strategies on the global scale must be tried.
Has a similar tactic to this been tried before? Shell Must Fall is probably the referential for going after a single company, with a strong focus on Royal Dutch Shell’s AGM in the Netherlands and its shareholders, with a focus on disrupting it to prevent the company from proceeding with its regular business by disrupting its administrative order. Collapse Total proposes to act in a broader sense, by going after Total’s infrastructures, headquarters, offices, banks and gas stations, with different tactics that fit local conditions.
This is, of course, only a small step, as there are dozens of other companies willing and able to take over Total’s place that need to be dismantled, and after this action, a thorough evaluation of its impact must be made. Will it be something to replicate, to adjust or to be written off the movement’s parafernalia of tools? Does it contribute to building up the movement and to weaken fossil capitalism? Only experience will provide the answer.
On the other hand, in the Spring of 2022, a great climate justice caravan will travel in different continents, crossing territories in the frontlines of the climate crisis and the climate justice struggles to directly connect to communities. Much like great historical political caravans—the Salt March, the Selma to Montgomery march, the World March of Women—this caravan will walk for hundreds of kilometers and talk to thousands of people, to bring the climate crisis and its connections to the capitalist system of destruction and oppression to the fore. It will signal top-emitting infrastructures in its path, pointing out the culprits for the current situation. It will look to broaden alliances, campaigns, connecting struggles and peoples to achieve an ever broader scope of action and a vision for the future.
The social alliance to take on global capitalism must be global, radical, popular, tactically and strategically focused, while at the same time flexible and imaginative. It must try, try and try until it finds the tools to win. It is quite an enormous task, to take on global capitalism, and it will need to be taken one step at a time, but there’s a deadline. We need to win before we are out of time.
Ending systems of domination: Reclaiming our bodies and politics from global trauma
By Eva Schonveld and Justin Kenrick
As the sun goes down on a system that cannot save us from itself, our only option is to bring that system to an end. But what is that system, and how do we replace it?
We begin from the understanding that systems of domination are, both, inside and between us, and that transforming social and political relations starts as much from our hearts and the personal as from the predicament of the earth, and all our societal relations. We begin from Scotland where we live, and where COP26 will yet again make grand promises but do nothing to stop us all hurtling off the climate cliff edge.
Colonization’s torment continues
Scotland has been both colonized and colonizer. Without the history of colonization of Scotland and England, there would have been no British Empire colonizing overseas. Without the vicious clearing of highland communities from their lands here, there would not have been the families desperate for food and a future, with no choice but to work for a pittance in the factories and furnaces of empire, or to fight its wars.
The mass murder wreaked by empire, the evisceration of others’ cultures and stealing of their lands, and the forced residential schooling of the youth, has viciously harmed indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia, while being dressed up as a ‘civilizing mission’ or ‘progress’. The same is true of how this system treats the vast majority of those living precariously in the British Isles, who are told that they benefit from a system that blames them for the inequality they suffer. But do even the 1% who supposedly benefit, really benefit? Those whose empathy is broken through the boarding school system, and whose shallowness is groomed by a compliant fawning media perpetuating its life-destroying feudal, corporate and political world?
Finding a way through
It is not by chance that our system is stumbling us into extinction.
We need to find new ways to gather, to make decisions, to organize, and to take responsibility for each other, so that we can respect and nourish all life, since those tasked with this responsibility have so disastrously and inevitably failed, since the dominant system’s purpose is not to respect and nourish but to control, co-opt and exploit.
We also need to re-imagine how we rediscover, create and maintain the enduring or emergent alternatives. Too often they unintentionally include (or fail to challenge) assumptions based on our dominant lived experience of (mostly) patriarchal, racist, hierarchical cultures. The growing understanding of personal and cultural trauma – its ubiquity, its unconscious nature, its debilitating effects, and, most crucially, our ability to learn and heal from it, provide radical possibilities for uncovering and shifting those unconscious (traumatized) assumptions and for (re)discovering genuinely fresh and emancipatory ways of being and working together.
Understanding trauma
Trauma is a complex neurological process, but in brief it is the way our mind deals with events, which we experience as physically or emotionally overwhelming. These are not stored as memories, but are patterned into the nervous system: the unconscious: the body. These patterns can be ‘triggered’ when we are reminded of the initial experience. Because this triggering happens instantaneously and unconsciously, we rarely even notice that we have been plunged into an emotional state which now has little to do with what’s going on in the present.
We all accumulate some level of trauma during our childhood. This can show up in adulthood in disparate areas of life, for example public speaking, standing up for ourselves, managing our anger or coping with rejection, where we know we tend to act differently to how we would like. Dig a little into these uncomfortable feelings and the roots always lead back to childhood within a dominating system. Every one of us experiences our own versions of this, but the underlying reasons are rarely acknowledged. The socially condoned view is that because we largely forget them, these early experiences are over. In fact, unaddressed, they continue to shape our lives.
Imperialism, colonization, supremacy, stratification, capitalism… these are culture level traumas: legacies of past damage that continue to re-inflict it. They play out in the world in many forms: in the stratifications of class or caste, sexism and racism, in economic inequality, wars, biodiversity loss, climate change… and as with personal trauma, the root causes of our cultural traumas are obscured, making what are essentially breaks with reality seem absolutely normal and inevitable, at least to those experiencing it.
Power and society
This system of domination also lives inside of us, within our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, our attitudes, our social structures, the way we act towards those we see as different to ourselves, other species and the wider natural world. We can see it in the way we bring up our kids, in our family and work relationships, and also in our health, education, economic, and political systems.
The casualties of power by domination include those currently at its apex, many of whom have been through a traditional ruling class upbringing of distant or proxy parenting, separation, physical punishment and/or emotional denial combined with treats and rewards, sometimes with visibly crippling results, but intended to result in the smooth, controlled and controlling presentation of the elite. These child-rearing practices are designed to cauterize empathy in the next generation of the ruling class. This vicious cycle of unacknowledged intergenerational personal and cultural trauma, combined with a hereditary system of domination turbo charged by the neoliberal agenda over the past 40 years, is now running close to costing us everything.
Wherever any of us experience or perpetrate domination, it is traumatic and traumatizing. Our personhood, our capacity for loving connection, our innate health are defiled and traumatized by this system. The implications of this collective blind spot for our capacity to create collaborative, rather than dominating, cultures and social infrastructure is monumental: if we can’t name it, we can’t change it.
But at the same time as all this, that innate health (both personally and collectively) is still alive, active and accessible to us. And this is where hope lies. If we address the root cause of our problems – we may even yet be able to change some of our outcomes.
Changing the power dynamic
Given the rapid unraveling of the natural systems that all us living beings depend on to survive, only the deepest of change is enough. We don’t need system change, if that means some changes to this system. We need to turn the dominating system into compost that can nourish the living systems we are. Carbon emissions have never been the real problem; they are simply a consequence of the fact that our system leaves us too traumatized to act rationally, even in the face of possible extinction.
Personal and collective inner work is needed to unpick the systems of domination that play out in our bodies and psyches, in our personal and work relationships, in our organizations, our social systems, our relationships across cultures and with other species and ecosystems. Doing this difficult, often painful work is the only viable way out of this mess. Luckily, it is also the work of healing and liberation. It takes courage and determination to start, and it is not easy, but once we have begun it is a movement towards health and wholeness that brings with it increasing capacity for connection, pleasure, love and joy.
From shaming to learning
It is impossible to transform toxic power relations without venturing into the emotional realm. Without understanding and working to heal the unconscious drivers, which suppress our empathy, we inevitably end up disempowering others and ourselves, and often unintentionally replicate that which we are trying to change.
None of this is socially acceptable!
In dominating cultures we laugh at and judge harshly people who show their care too clearly – those who go to therapy (screw-ups), who show vulnerability (failures), who take care with language (politically correct) who work for the environment (tree huggers), who protest and get arrested (attention-seeking privileged, or dirty criminals), who dance (hippies), who cry (embarrassing), who try to make a difference (do-gooders).
Standing up to this can be tough, but we can support one another and know that the fact that we feel such social censure is a good indication that we’re successfully challenging the system. Transforming attempts to shame us into opportunities to learn more about the system we need to change is core to this work. We (collectively) need to be doing this work at every level: in ourselves and our relationships, in our families, in our workplaces, in our professions, in the way we do politics, education, healthcare, nature-care, but we also need to be sure that the changes we are making are genuinely coming from a different root and will give us different results.
Resisting, and trusting our guts
Much of the cultural genocide practiced during the (ongoing) colonial period was and is done by people convinced that they are acting well: freeing others from ignorance and ungodliness, bringing health, education and democracy, stimulating new markets.
So how can we tell what change is genuinely helpful?
There are no road maps, but there are processes and practices that can help guide us. Understanding how trauma works, and how to process and heal it is crucial. We know how to work with trauma in the personal mind-body. Working with trauma in our social and cultural systems is not all that different: what we know works in personal therapeutic processes we can apply out in the world.
We can bring curiosity, tenacity, compassion, generosity, sensitivity, honesty, courage, spaciousness and patience. We can look at the history and the painful triggers together. We can express and unwind our hurt, shame and loss together. We can open our hearts, practice mindfully, use our imaginations and our creativity to build new ways of doing things (pretty much everything), get comfortable with making mistakes (and learning from them), with not knowing, with showing our vulnerability, and also with showing the strength of our care.
We don’t have to shrink from hard truths. We can make a stand when we see domination in action, we can pay attention to and resist the old patterning, and we can pick ourselves up over and over again as we inevitably fail. We can apologize, make reparations. We can forgive, build relationship across all kinds of perceived differences, prioritize connection over performance, treasure the local, challenge the global, center the earth, and learn how to trust our collective guts.
We need to resist the cultural programming that says there’s nothing we can do, that those in power know best, that genuine social change is a myth. Let’s resist it by proving it wrong: facing our fears and doing it anyway. Let’s take whatever first small, wise steps we need to towards creating a world where we know and act on the truth that our well- being depends on ensuring the well-being of others, not on exploiting them.
We can’t now stop the reckoning that’s underway. We can only wake up, take responsibility, get over our egos and start working together for our collective, planetary healing. This is the ONLY work that matters now. We don’t necessarily need to change what we are doing. We simply need to do it with this in mind/ heart, in community/ society, in relationship with all.
The Sunset assembly
As the sun goes down on the 29th of October, a unique assembly will begin. It will continue for 24 hours, following the sunset around the world, passed from community to community.
Community members will speak and listen to one another from the heart. Each community will use different forms of meeting, as we collectively seek a path towards a politics of wholeness where our decisions are based on being deeply present to each other, rather than speaking at each other. Our common focus is on:
“How the system is impacting on me and my community, and how we are resisting, creating alternatives and maintaining connectedness in the face of it”
The timing is no coincidence: COP26 starts on 1st November and will be no different to the previous 25. The Climate COPs are mind-bogglingly successful at pretending they are tackling the climate crisis, while enabling the fossil fuel industry to receive billions in subsidies, emissions to rise exponentially, and corporate interests to perpetually delay real action.
Grassroots to Global, which has sparked this assembly, is working to build alternatives to our current collective decision making processes. Most of what democracy we have has been wrung from the hands of those with power who have given up only the absolute minimum amount of power they have had to in order to stay in power – most often followed by their rapidly retracting the real power to decide.
We need to rediscover enduring – and explore emerging – ways to gather, to deliberate and to decide together – developing a ‘relational democracy’ that can deepen and replace an easily captured ‘representational democracy’, and that can prevent democracies from sliding into outright authoritarianism.
Enabling the future
This is an ongoing area of exploration (you can read early thinking on that here and here) and will continue to develop as we learn through processes like Reworlding and the Sunset Assembly. Some essential elements of such relational decision-making processes include:
Building relationship: Ensuring all groups are included, specially those that are marginalized – ideally as partners in developing processes – to ensure the whole picture is addressed and that everyone is included. Given experiences of co-option and marginalization, people may start out skeptical, and the proof of inclusion will be in the practice not the promise.
Dealing with power: Having strategies for managing those who are conditioned to take, or give away, personal power, e.g. ensuring those used to speaking, to listen; and, those used to listening, to speak.
Centering empathy: Having strong input to support the development of relational skills e.g. listening, confidence, self-reflection and expression, emotional self-management, empathy.
Addressing trauma: Dealing early and well with conflict and trauma responses when they are triggered, and taking a transformative approach to trauma, reactivity and conflict (they are complex, nuanced and full of incredibly useful information) while also maintaining safety to ensure care for anyone re-experiencing trauma, and to limit triggering of others.
We have to become slow and deep enough to swiftly make the fundamental changes that are needed.
It is not our humanity that is the problem; it is an inhumane system of appropriation and exploitation that persuades us to rely on it for our survival and well being, while it devours both. Our wellbeing can only ever rely on ensuring, not exploiting, the well-being of others.
From few to many, we are everywhere
Groups who will join the Sunset Assembly include:
a diverse group of people from the Andes, the Amazon and the coast in Peru
a group in North Sulawesi, Indonesia who will be opening with a sunset ritual held by Minahasa elders
elders from West Papua reflecting on the devastation of palm oil and other colonial impacts
the Ogiek of Mount Elgon in Kenya, who are holding over part of a wider community meeting so that it can happen within this assembly
And more, including from Aotearoa, Scotland, Australia . . .
Alongside these assembly-holding groups, anyone from anywhere in the world is invited to join as witnesses at any point. Witnesses are invited to deeply experience and listen to the holding groups. We believe witnessing is an active process in which attention and intention make a real difference to the process.
In between each section, we will hold a “Sharing Circle’ which is open to all, taking turns to speak for a few minutes each, speaking from the heart without the need to prepare, bringing our own feelings and reflections, and hearing other Witnesses’ voices.
We hope this can be the beginning of a whole-globe check-in. If you would like to participate as a witness, please sign up here.
Beyond the sunset, we aim to hold a Sunrise Assembly after COP, hopefully joined by many new collaborators, focusing on how communities can gather locally and trans-locally to make heart-centered decisions, and so take responsibility for the future in a way that can replace a global decision-making system that is paralyzed by its own trauma.
These around-the-world assemblies are sparked by Grassroots to Global, building on the Reworlding gathering. Our river is joining with many others on different versions of the same journey, and we encourage everyone who is not already engaged to explore and develop their own streams of inspiration, so we can flow together towards a politics of wholeness, which confronts and overcomes the very real obstacles in our way.
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Eva Schonveld is a climate activist, process designer and facilitator, supporting sociocratic system development, decision-making and facilitation. She co-founded Starter Culture and is currently working on Grassroots to Global, a project which asks: can we co-develop a more empathic, democratic, political system which could connect internationally in a global assembly to address the root causes of climate change?
Justin Kenrick co-founded Heartpolitics, is a Quaker, and trained in Buddhist psychotherapy. He is an anthropologist and a Senior Policy Advisor at Forest Peoples Programme where he works for community land rights in Kenya and Congo. He is a director of Life Mosaic, and also works on land reform in Scotland. He lives in Portobello, Edinburgh, where he chairs Action Porty which undertook the first successful urban community right to buy in Scotland. He writes in many contexts , and was on the Stewarding Group of the Scottish Government’s Climate Citizens Assembly which XR Scotland campaigned for but ultimately had to leave.
Editor’s note: As a radical environmental and social justice organization, we believe it is important to study the history of capitalism. Only by learning about all the force, the violence, the exploitation, and the class struggle involved can we understand how an insane system like industrial capitalism could eventually succeed and create the worldwide mess we are facing today.
The series about the history of trade unions in Britain has six parts. Interested readers can continue reading here:
This is a summary of “In Cause of Labour: History of British Trade Unionism” by Rob Sewell. You can find the whole book online here.
It was published in 2003 and gives a radical history of the British trade union movement from the 1700s until 2002. I’m going to summarise this book in four posts. In the fourth post I will summarise from 2002 to 2019. Rob Sewell is a Trotskyist so follows Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. So some of his terminology comes from that tradition and I’ll stick with it as it’s useful. I have left out a lot of Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyist propaganda and focused on the history plus some of Sewell’s excellent analysis. He is highly critical of the Labour Party and trade unions and I think this is a useful analysis. I’ve included links to web pages with more information on the historical events, mostly strikes, unrest, groups, organisations or parties.
In this post, part 1, I will cover the 1700s until the end of the First World War in 1918.
The birth pains 1700s
Sewell describes the Enclosure Acts in the 1700s and early 1800s, forcing large numbers of peasants off the land and into the towns looking for work and provided cheap labour for capitalist factory owners. This process created industrial capitalism and resulted in overcrowding and unsanitary conditions for the workers. There was no clear drinking water, infant mortality was high and the average age of workers in Bolton was 18, Manchester 17 and Liverpool 15.
There was a mass migration from Ireland in the first half of the 1800s. Hundreds of thousands of Irish came to work in English northern towns and cities. Employers used them to undermine wages but the Irish were more likely to make demands, speak out and enforce their demands with bad language and strikes. Many radical union leaders were Irish.
From the age of 7 children and adults worked 12-15 hours a day, 6 days a week. The intensification was increased by the introduction of large machinery. Workers existed to work or rest to recover to start work again the next day. Near Gateshead, children from the age of 7 worked 18-20 hours a day until they could not work any more, life was cheap. There were no legal protections.
Inventions revolutionised the methods of work and transformed the factory system – handlooms to power looms and gaslighting. Work was intensified further – nightshifts, double-shifts, weekend work, 24-hour work, 7 days a week, all to increase the capitalists’ profits, with the workers barely surviving. Workers were seen as old at 40. Attempts to introduce regulations about the conditions met strong resistance from the employers. Any regulations that were introduced were weakly enforced.
Workers were forced to buy what they need from ‘tommy’ shops, the factory store at extortionate prices and inferior quality. Employers paid their workers in beer as well. Many workers would end up in debt to the tommy shops.
During the 1700s workers resisted the conditions with ‘go-slows’ and ‘turn-outs’ against the “starvation wages, excessive hours and insufferable conditions.” Illegal trade clubs were formed and the state responded with anti-union legislation. The trade unions were forced underground to continue their fight to survive in self-defence.
Into the Abyss of Capitalism 1790s-1820s
The French Revolution of 1789-94 popularised the ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality. This caused a lot of fear in the British ruling class. There was also widespread bread riots and a naval mutiny in Newhaven in 1795.
The French Revolution led to the founding of Corresponding Societies from 1792 that shared democratic, radical and Jacobin ideas. Tens of thousands joined them and they were heavily repressed by the government and reactionary mobs. In response to the ongoing uprisings and spread of seditious ideas the state worked to crush them through martial law, imprisonment, public floggings, capital punishment, deportation and the suspension of Habeas Corpus (the right to a free trial). The government came down hard on the printers, publishers and sellers of seditious literature, including a stamp duty to tax newspapers and price them out of reach of the masses. This resulted in a revolt and resistance by the ‘unstamped’ press.
In 1798 there was a failed uprising in Ireland against English rule and naval mutinies in Spithead and Nore. These were severely repressed and the leaders killed.
The Corresponding Societies were driven underground resulting in oath-taking becoming a common practice. Harsh legislation was introduced to punish any form of worker organising to increase wages or decrease hours. The laws were also meant to stop employers’ conspiring together but were never enforced. These laws gave employers unlimited power to reduce wages and make conditions worse.
The British capitalist state used its full force to crush the spirit of revolt in the working class and the trade unions. Soldiers were used to putting down local disturbances. A network of army barracks was created to prevent contact between people and the soldiers. Government spies, agents and informers infiltrated the workers’ groups. Their ‘evidence’ was used to imprison organisers and leaders. A price was paid for every worker found guilty leading to false convictions.
Forcing the trade unions underground resulted in these early illegal unions enforcing iron discipline to keep out informers, which tightly bound their members together.
The Luddite unrest in 1811/12 was a response to the desperate conditions but they knew they couldn’t win. They were named after the mythical ‘General Ned Ludd.’ They destroyed employers machines and property. In response, the state increased the punishment for frame-breaking from 14 years deportation to a capital offence. Those caught in this northern and midlands resistance were dealt with harshly.
Sewell lists strike that took place under these high repressive circumstances: Scottish weavers (1812), Lancashire spinners (1818, 1826, 1830), miners on the NE coast (1810, 1830-1), Scotland (1818) and South Wales (1816, 1831). An underground General Union of Trades formed in 1818 in Manchester bringing 14 trades together. Communication between different underground trade unions across the country was also taking place.
The high levels of state repression from 1800-1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the introduction of the Corn Laws, which kept bread prices artificially high, resulted in high levels of social unrest from 1815 onwards. In 1819 there was a large working-class rally in St Peter’s Field in Manchester of between 50,000 – 60,000 people. They were attacked by cavalry, with 400 being badly wounded. It is known as the Peterloo Massacre. The ‘Cato Street conspiracy’ was stopped by informants, it aimed to overthrow the government.
Trade unions continued to form: the Calico-printers, Ironfounders, the Steam Engine Makers and Papermakers. There was also widespread public agitation for the repeal of the anti-union laws. This was successful in 1824. This was a huge victory for the working class. Those in the ruling class and some workers involved in the repeal process in parliament, did so because they believed it would reduce the conflict. This was a big mistake as it resulted in a flood of strikes. So the new legislation was changed in 1825 to restrict picketing. Legal trade union activity was limited to dealing with wages and hours. Following the legalisation, hundreds of new unions and association were formed and new sections of workers became organised.
Schools of war 1820s-1830s
The 1820’s strike wave over wages mostly resulted in defeat. But it did provide important education for class struggle and lay the foundations for the establishment of the large-scale national trade unions such as the Spinners’ union 1829, Potters’ union 1831 and Builders’ in 1831-2.
Government troops were used to violently break strikes and workers responded by forming ruthless clandestine organisations that hunted down and killing traitors and informers. They also destroyed employers mills.
In 1830 the National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL) formed and enrolled 150 local unions in the north and midlands. It also established a weekly journal. It grew to 100,000 members but following the defeat of the Spinners’ union in 1831 and most of the local unions fighting bitter struggles, the NAPL broke up. The General Union of Carpenters and Joiners formed in the years after that with 40,000 members and fought a series of strikes.
Severe poverty and starvation outside the town and cities resulted in the 1830-31 agricultural uprisings. These started in the Southeast rural counties, with threshing machines and hayricks destroyed. They spread to the Southwest and midlands, under the name of the mythical ‘Captain Swing’. Historians have identified 1831 as the year that Britain was most close to revolution since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Those caught were harshly punished – hangings, transported to Australia, imprisoned, flogged. The British establishment use repression when they could and when faced with mass movements gave some concessions to gain some breathing space.
Sewell describes how the mass agitation for electoral reform resulted in the government increasing the electorate through the Reform Act to those that owned property. This benefited the capitalist business owners by giving them the vote resulting in their dominance over the land aristocracy.
The Grand National Consolidation Trade Union (GNCTU) formed in 1833. It aimed to fight for day-to-day issues and also to abolish capitalist rule and bring about the revolutionary transformation of society. It quickly gained 500,000 members including many women. This led to several strikes nationally across different sectors. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were agriculture labourers that contacted the GNCTU to set up an agricultural union in Dorset. The local magistrate found out and sentenced 6 of them to 7 years transportation to Australia. A national campaign started for their freedom resulting in a 200,000 demonstration in London. The campaign was successful and after 2 years their sentences were cancelled and they returned in 1839. They were involved in the Chartist Movement. Five Glasgow cotton-spinners were transported for 7 years in 1837 resulting in equal national-wide protests to the Whig government, with a national campaign to free them.
Employers were using the ‘Document’, making workers sign it saying they would not engage in union activity, or be sacked. This resulted in many workplace lockouts and by the end of 1837, the GNCTU’s funds were depleted. This combined with differences among the leadership resulted in it breaking apart.
Sewell describes the ‘Hungry Thirties’ when the conditions for the working class were terrible. Factory legislation was introduced in 1833 but only to reduce children’s working hours to 12 and it was not enforced. The New Poor Law of 1834 made things worse, removing the limited government support to be replaced by philanthropy. The failures of the trade union movement drove workers into the ranks for the Chartist Movement.
Breaking the yoke 1830s-1840s
Chartism was a national working-class protest movement for political reform with strong support in the North, Midlands and South Wales. The movement started in 1836/7 and support was greatest in 1839, 42, 48. The Chartist Movement involved a complete spectrum of action: mass petitions, mass demonstrations, lobbies, general strikes and armed insurrection. It presented petitions with millions of signatures to parliament, combined with mass meetings to put pressure on politicians. There were splits in the movement between the old leadership that was more middle class and advocated ‘moral force’, and the new membership from working-class factory areas supported ‘physical force’.
The People’s Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic:
A vote for every man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
No property qualification for Members of Parliament in order to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
Annual Parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in each twelve-month period.
The Newport Rising of 1839 was the last large-scale armed protest in Great Britain, seeking democracy and the right to vote and a secret ballot. The army was deployed to support the police and fired on the crowd, killing and injuring. The leaders of the uprising we transported to Australia.
In 1840 the Chartist Movement formed the National Charter Association (NCA), the first working-class political party in history. It reached a total of 40,000 members. The 1842 Plug Plot Riots (also known as the 1842 general strike) started with miners in Staffordshire and spread to mills and factories in Yorkshire, Lancashire and coal mines in Dundee, South Wales and Cornwall.
The combination of the pressure from the Chartist Movement and the European revolutionary wave in 1848 forced the state to give some concessions to the working class including repealing the Corn Laws and factory legislation was passed improving the working conditions.
The “Pompous Trades” 1840s-1880s
British capitalism dramatically developed a grew in the 1850s and 1860s so it dominated the world market, with the help of the unchallenged British navy ruling the waves. This changed the unions from the earlier decades from revolutionary unions for the workers as a whole to a focus on skilled craft unions with sectional interests.
The super-profits from Britain’s industrial monopoly in the world, combined with the British Empire, meant that the ruling class could give concessions to the upper layers of the working class. This ‘divide and rule’ tactic had been perfected throughout the British Empire. In 1847 the Ten Hour Act was introduced. Sewell describes how this cultivated an ‘aristocracy of labour’, that are above the majority of workers. This privileged layer were on higher wages than most workers and developed a more conservative disposition that corresponded with their new social position. They were supportive of alliances with ‘the liberal bourgeoisie’ and were against class struggle and class independence. Sewell describes how this privileged layer grouped together in the newly formed craft unions.
An example of the craft unions or ‘new model unions’ was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) formed in 1851 from several local craft societies. Sewell describes how these new unions had high contributions and benefits, centralisation of control, and a ‘class-collaborationist policy’ – working with the establishment.
The high dues (regular member payments) meant they could create a strong centralised organisation run by full-time officials. Instead of radical leaders from the previous decades, leaders with different characters to charge – ‘conservative-minded officials and opportunist negotiators’. They asked for a ‘fair share’ of the bosses profiles in the form of ‘friendly benefits’ such as unemployment, sickness, accident and death allowances. Sewell explains that to protect their section of privileged workers they restricted the support labour into the trades and left the rest of the workers to the mercy of the employers. They promoted prudence, temperance, enlightenment and respectability.
The respectable leadership of the new model unions were known as ‘the Junta’. They saw themselves as administrators rather than agitators and took on ‘the social character of a trade union bureaucracy’. These leaders were made to feel very important and respected by the capitalist Establishment to keep them onside.
The biggest industrial struggle since the ‘Plug Riots” of 1842, was the Preston lockout of 1853. Sewell describes the Nine Hours movement and the Nine Hours Strike in Newcastle that was successful in gaining the nine-hour day. This encouraged the movement for shorter working hours elsewhere.
During the 1860s there were many demonstrations in industrial towns demanding the vote. The Tory government introduced the 1867 Reform Act, giving the vote to urban male workers who paid rates. This doubled the size of the electorate. Women and those without property were excluded, which the majority of the working class.
In 1867, Parliament set up a Royal Commission on trade unions and following pressure from the ‘Junta’, legislation was introduced to parliament to give the unions some concessions. At this point there was no legal protection for trade union funds and strikes could be imprisoned for ‘conspiracy’ and ‘intimidation’. The new concessions reduced this slightly but workers could still be imprisoned for ‘aggravated’ breach of contract. Picketing was severely restricted and could result in tough penalties.
In 1871, the revolutionary masses of Paris took control of the city and announced ‘La Commune’ or Paris Commune. This was ruthlessly crushed by the French and German Establishment, with an estimated 20,000 killed. The Tory Prime Minister Disraeli introduced trade union reforms “from above to prevent revolution from below”. These reforms improved the financial status of unions.
Marx and Engles set up the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) in 1864, also known as the First International. This new international organisation received support and affiliation from several British trade unions and trade councils. Marx and the IWMA supported the Paris Commune publicly and the new model trade union leaders separated themselves from the IWMA.
During the 1860s local trade councils started forming, which was a new trade union organisation. They brought together different trade unions in a locality to work together. The trade councils had several conferences in different cities in the 1860s. The Manchester and Salford Trade Council called the first official Trades Union Congress (TUC). Sewell explains that the conservative ‘Junta’ new model union leaders were initially wary of the TUC. Following some government anti-union actions, this “forced them to lend their authority to the newly established TUC – the better to keep it under control, than risk it falling into the hands of dangerous agitators.”
Sewell describes how the two Acts in 1871 was a classic case of giving with one hand and taking away with another. The Trade Union Act of 1871 legalised trade unions in Britain for the first time and protected union funds. The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1871 deemed peaceful attempts by workers to encourage them to strike was seen as ‘coercion’ and a criminal offence. Employers of course had no restrictions on what they could do. Judges generally interpreted whatever unions did as in breach. This was threatening unions ability to operate so they decided to fight to repeal the laws and obtains ‘immunity’ for damage in the same way that business have ‘immunity’ in the form of limited liability.
From 1873 a significant campaign developed that forced the Liberal government out of office and repealed the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Master and Servant Act. Two Acts in 1875 – Employers and Workmen Act 1875 and Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act 1875 – made peaceful picketing legal, and breaches of contract became a civil matter, no imprisonment or fines. Judges responded by creating the civil law offence of conspiracy, making picketing illegal, and employers used this to claim damages. Sewell makes the point that any gains are always under threat and this is decided by the class balance of forces – do trade union and social movements have more power in workplaces or on the streets or do the ruling class and capitalists have more power in the form of parliamentary legislation, the courts, the police, the army and being supported by general public opinion.
The early 1870s saw the formation of the National Agricultures Labourers’ Union (NALU) to fight for better wages and conditions. This grew quickly to 150,000 members by the end of 1872. The capitalist gentry and landlords, plus the Church of England responded severely with a series of lockouts. By 1874 workers were staved back to work on the employers’ terms and the NALU collapsed.
There was a trade recession in the mid-1870s and several strikes. The pattern makers broke away from the ASE due to the failures of the conservative union leadership.
From a Spark to a Blaze 1880s-1890s
By the 1880s Britain was facing intense international competition from the US and Germany. Britain was still in an important global position and still had its Empire of 370 million people. This resulted in repeated crises for capitalism leading to wages cuts, mass unemployment so the majority of the working-class were extremely insecure and destitute.
The 1880s was a new period of social upheaval and revival of socialist ideas, dormant since the Chartist movement. The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) formed in the 1880s, which focused on socialist propaganda and the unemployed, rather than the trade unions. It was from this party that a new form of militant trade unionism grew to challenge the ‘Old Gang’ of new model trade union leaders. A number left the SDF and set out to reform the old trade union movement. They met resistance from the ‘Old Guard’. This was the start of New Unionism.
The Matchmakers’ strike in 1888 against the terrible conditions the women endured, won several concessions and the Matchmakers’ Unions was formed as a result. This was followed by the 1889 Beckton Gas Works struggle for better conditions and wages, which was successful. In 1889 there was also the dockers strike for better wages that were also successful and received huge support from the trade union movement. A union was established with 30,000 members.
This New Unionism spread to other parts of Britain and into other sectors such as the Railways, Miners, and Printers. Sixty new Trade Councils were established between 1889 and 1891. The first May Day in Britain in 1890 had nearly 200,000 in attendance in Hyde Park.
The ‘Old Guard’ attempted to fight against this new threat to their authority. The 1890 TUC Congress was an open battleground between the two factions, with New Unionism coming out on top.
New Unionism was put to the test with the 1893 5-month lockout/strike in Yorkshire. The army was called in and fired on crowds, with two men dying from their injuries. The 25% wage cut that was demanded by mine owners was resisted.
The 1898 South Wales strike lasted 6 months and although not successful in the wage demands resulted in significant feelings of class solidarity and the formation of the South Wales Minters’ Federation.
Sewell describes how the new unions for the unskilled were created and also the craft unions opened up their ranks to the mass of unorganised workers. He explains that even when traditional working-class organisations are controlled by the conservatives, events can result in them being transformed into organisations of struggle.
The First Giant Step 1890s – 1900s
The Scottish Labour Party was formed in 1892 and Kier Hardie and twelve other workers won seats in the House of Commons, Hardie and two others on independent labour tickets, ten as Liberal candidates. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was founded in Bradford in 1893. The Social Democratic Federation did not engage with this new political formation. Many militant trade unionists joined the ILP. The ILP ran 28 candidates in the 1895 elections but all were defeated. Sewell explains that the ILP weaknesses were its failure to build a mass base and its rejection of class struggle. The revolutionary socialists in the SDF, had they joined the ILP, could have pushed it to be more radical.
Sewell describes several union defeats in the early 1890s. The newly formed Gasworkers’ union was smashed by employers and the eight-hour day abolished. Shipowners in London, Cardiff and Hull enforced a series of worker lockouts. Employers also used legal means to cripple the trade unions in the 1890s, even though unions had more legal protections at this point. A general employers organisation was formed – the Employers Parliamentary Council – to agitate legal actions against unions by challenging the right of peaceful picketing and the union’s protection from liability for damages. All this showed the necessity for independent working-class political representation in the form of a party.
At the 1899 TUC Congress, a vote went in favour of independent Labour political representation. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) (later known as the Labour Party) was founded in February 1900. Organisations in attendance were trade unions, ILP, SDF and Fabian Society. Sewell describes three tendencies that were represented at the founding conference of the Labour Party: middle-class Fabian viewpoint of Lib-Lab politics that defended class collaboration; the Kier Hardie and ILP perspective that opposed an alliance with the liberals and advocated a union-socialist federation but did not advocate socialism publicly; and the Harry Quelch and SDF position that called for a fully class conscious Socialist Party that did not collaborate with capitalism or liberals and backed class struggle.
The ILP centrist position won and the SDF left in 1901 so the other two tenancies dominated the new Labour Party. Sewell is critical of the SDF sectarian approach and argues that had they stayed they would have prevailed. Ramsey MacDonald, a liberal, joined the new party. This new party failed to ensure that it was democratically accountable to the trade unions and workers. It was a cause of celebration though as now finally the British working class had its own party and had broken the two-party system of big business.
In the 1900 election, the LCR field on 15 candidate and many trade unions were unsure to back it or not so waited. Two were elected: Kier Hardie and Richard Bell. This was quickly followed by the Taff Vale unofficial strike in South Wales. The employers fought back through the National Free Labour Association and Employers Parliamentary Council with a successful injection. The strike was settled after eleven days but the employers took their case to the House of Lords and won huge compensation. This effectively made strikes illegal undermining the union rights won in the 1870s. The employers’ legal challenge caused a huge response in the labour movement, with 100,000 joining the LCR in 1901-2 and the same amount joining in 1902-3.
At the 1906 general election, the LCR fielded 50 candidates and 29 become MPs. The Miners’ Federation instructed another 11 Lib-Lab MPs to join this group taking the total to 40 MPs. This concerned the ruling class significantly. Sewell describes how this election result was encouraged by the 1905 Russian revolution that became a rallying cause for social democracy everywhere. It was at the 1905 LCR annual conference that the party finally adopted an overtly socialist resolution. He describes how great events can have significant impacts on mass organisations and the consciousness of the working class.
The 1906 election resulted in a Liberal government. To placate the militant nature of the working class, it introduced the Trades Dispute Act (1906) to correct the legal position of trade unions. It absolved the unions of any legal responsibility for civil damages in strikes and ensured the legality of picketing. This government also introduced several reforms on pensions, unemployment and health insurance.
The early 20th century saw intense rivalry between the European Empires that led to the First World War. In Britain, the Liberal government reforms made little difference to inequality and a 1905 report stated that out of a population of 43 million, 38 million were categorised as poor. The cost of living steadily grew, with wages increasing very little, resulting in real wages declining.
In these conditions, strikes began to take place including the 1907 music hall strike, a seven-month engineers strike and a five-month shipwrights and joiners strike. The 1907 Belfast strike was called after demands for union recognition were refused. The strike spread to other workplaces in Belfast and the police mutinied so the army had to be called in. The docker’s strike was unsuccessful but led to the formation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union.
Sewell describes the ruling class’s all-out offensive against organised labour. In 1909/10 there was the case of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants union vs Mr Osborne that resulted in workers having to opt-in if they wanted a portion of their wages to go to trade unions. This was followed by injunctions against 22 unions that forbid their political affiliation fees to the Labour Party. The Labour Party fought two elections in 1910 by scrapping together financial donations. In 1913 the Liberal government, under pressure from the working-class, introduced the Trade Union Act of 1913 that allowed Labour Party affiliation but included harsh restrictions on funding. It restricted general union funds being spent on political activities. They “could only come from a special political fund, which could only be set up after a successful ballot of union members.” No such restrictions were put on the Liberals on Conservatives and the funding they received from big business. This is still the situation today.
By 1910, union membership was at 2.5 million. There was growing frustration in the unions among the rank and file at the lack of progress. Syndicalist trade unionism became popular that focused on trade union strategy to change society without working through political parties and parliament.
This was the peak of Britain’s Empire as it was being challenged by Germany and the US. The ruling class started cutting back on the concessions they had given over the last 30 years especially to the top layers of the working class. The period of 1910-14 is known as the ‘Great Unrest” due to the revolutionary nature of the actions of the working class. The number of days lost of strikes increased to 10 million and union membership went from 2.5 million in 1910 to 4 million in 1914.
The first major strike was the South Wales Cambrian strike in 1910-11 in response to the owner’s reduction in wages and worsening conditions. The army was sent in and miners were killed but the strike was unsuccessful. But it did establish the demand for a minimum wage across British coalfields, resulting in a national stoppage in 1912.
Sewell describes dockworker strikes in 1911 in Southampton, Cardiff, Hull, London and Manchester. The government threatened to send troops to the London docks but huge demonstrations in support of the strike resulted in the employers negotiating with the workers.
The 1911 Liverpool general transport strike involved dockers, railway workers and sailers. The scale of the strike causes the government to send in troops and special police. Two warships were rushed to the Mersey with their guns aimed at the centre of Liverpool. A large demonstration was attacked by the police resulting in fighting and the death of two strikers. It ended with the employers giving in on the unions terms. The Dockers’ Union membership increased from 8,000 to 32,000.
There were 2 days of national rail worker strikes in 1911. The army opened fire on strikers in Liverpool and Llanelli, South Wales, killing two strikers. The unions and employers compromised resulting in union-management representation.
The 1912 national coal miners strike last 37 days and secured a minimum wage from the government. 1912 saw a huge dockers strike in London for 80,000 but was unsuccessful. The 1913 Dublin strike or lock-out involved 20,000 strikers and 300 employers with clashes between strikes and the army, resulting in several workers being killed. This led to a formation of an armed Irish Citizen’s Army to defend itself against the violence of the state and employers. There was a lot of support for the strike across Britain and Sewell describes how the TUC’s failure to widen the dispute undermined the resolve of strikers and they were starved back to work with no gains.
Sewell quotes strike data from those years: 1908, averaged 30 strikes a month; 1911, averaged 75 strikes a month; 1913-14, averaged 150 strikes a month. Sewell describes the revolutionary militancy of the labour movement and the fear of the ruling class.
Sewell describes the important contribution of syndicalism. The positive side being its rejection of class collaboration and opportunism from the union leadership, Labour Party and Liberal Party. Its strength came from its focus on industrial unionism, rank-and-file movements and rejection of ‘official’ leadership. The syndicalist ‘Miners Next Step’ was produced in 1912 in South Wales, it argued for placing industrial democracy at the centre of British working-class politics. Sewell praises the syndicalist support for class struggle and for workers to take control of factories. Sewell critiques syndicalism in that it sees unofficial action as a principle, rather than a tactic to respond to official union leadership being a barrier. He states its weakness is a lack of clear understanding of leadership and political parties to overthrow capitalism.
Plans for Irish Home rules caused the Ulster leader to threaten mutiny and the Tory Party leader to threaten civil war. This combined with the revolutionary militancy of the labour movement meant a political crisis was close. This was avoided by the start of the First World War.
War and Revolution 1914-1918
Sewell describes the horrors of the First World War, with 10 million dead by the end and millions more disabled. He explains that the war was caused by a “build up of imperialists contradictions and tensions prior to 1914”, caused by industrial competition between Britain, Germany, France and the US and imperial conflict in Africa and the Far East between Britain, Germany, Belgium and Portugal. There was then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which provided the final excuse for war. Sewell quotes the military historian Clausewitz, that war is a continuation of imperialist rivalry or geopolitics by ‘other means’ – war extends the horrors of capitalism to its extremes.
The Socialist International, with which the Labour Party was affiliated, had promised to oppose the coming war. It recognised that the war was between the different imperialist powers and that the working class in any country had nothing to gain from capitalism in peacetime or war. But instead, each national section supported its own ruling classes and it collapsed.
In response to the outbreak of war, the TUC passed a resolution to end all disputes and if difficulties arise to seriously attempt to reach settlements before further strikes. The brought the huge wave of industrial militancy to a halt. It was believed that the war would be over quickly. Sewell describes the Labour Party and trade union leadership, who either fully supported the war and conscription or those who initially opposed the war, eventually submitting to going along with it in some way. Trade union leaders agreed to ‘industrial peace’, all strikes were suspended, declared all worker organisations.
As the war continued the British soldier’s opposition to it grew, especially their resentment to the generals and their incompetence. In 1916 there was the Irish East Rising against the British government to establish an independent Irish Republic.
The government demanded increased production in engineering and shipbuilding. The owners pushed for continued relaxation of trade practices and restrictions. This resulted in worse working conditions and rights. The cost of living had gone up and unemployment increased. In response engineers in Clydeside (Glasgow) struck for a pay rise to help with rising food prices and rents, and won.
Sewell describes how trade union leaders and officials joined government and joint industrial councils to promote the war. All the unions signed a new agreement, the Treasury Agreement, that for the first time introduced industrial conscription in Britain. A new Coalition government was formed in 2015 including Liberal, Tory and Labour MPs. It brought in new draconian laws that gave the government greater powers over the munitions industry. These included authorising compulsory arbitration of disputes and the suspension of trade practices. “Munitions workers were not allowed to leave their jobs without a ‘Leaving Certificate’. Such measures introduced a virtual militarization of labour, allowing the complete subordination of the working class to the war machine.”
At the end of 1915, industrial action continued in Clydeside (Glasgow), with Minister of Munitions Lloyd George attending a meeting where he was shouted down. This was nationally censored in the press but a few local papers reported on it resulting in the government banning them in early 1916. The strike leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Six shop stewards were arrested and deported from Glasgow and banned from returning. By July 1916, over 1,000 workers nationally had been arrested for striking illegally and breaking the Munitions Act.
Due to the inaction of the union leaderships, shop steward committees formed around the country and joined up to form the National Shop Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee Movement. Many of its leaders were members of socialist groups and parties giving it a revolutionary focus.
In 1916, a new Coalition government formed with Lloyd George as Prime Minister. He promoted Labour MPs and trade union leaders into government posts that we responsible for the war effort and so used them to police the workers. Their authority over the workers was effectively exploited by the ruling class to hold back the growing discontent.
February 1917 was the first Russian Revolution. In Britain, a convention was called in Leeds to celebrate the event. It had over 1,000 delegates from the Labour Party and trade unions. The Russian Provisional Government failed to withdraw Russian from the First World War and in October 1917 the Bolshevik Party led an armed insurrection and took over the government in the second revolution of the year. The leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, issued an international appeal to end the war. This was followed by the Labour Party and TUC starting to oppose the war.
The Shop Stewards Movement in Britain was in a powerful position. TUC membership had increased from 2.25 million in 1913 to 4.5 million in 2018. Many of the unions joined together in amalgamations and federations. The Triple Alliance of miners, railway and transport workers was officially ratified, which had been put off in 1914.
There was a lot of support for the Russian revolution at the 1918 Labour Party conference in Nottingham. The Labour Party had a special conference in Westminster in 1918 where it adopted a new socialist constitution. This included the famous Clause Four : “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
In November 1918, the German Revolution helped bring the First World War to an end. This was followed by revolutions in other countries in Europe such a Bavaria, Hungary and more. The European ruling classes felt seriously threatened and that the existing order was a risk. Britain plus twenty other countries sent armies to support the Russian counter-revolutionary White armies. In response protest movement in several countries appeared. Sewell describes how the British labour movement was against the attack on the Russian revolution.
In December 1918 a snap general election was held and Labour Party ran with a very radical manifesto: “Labour and the New Social Order” and called for a new society. Lloyd George’s National Coalition was returned to office was a large majority but this was not an accurate reflection of society with many soldiers yet to be demobilised and the voting registers well out of date. The Labour Party got 2.5 million votes and 57 seats in Parliament. This was a big increase from 1910 when they got 0.5 million votes.
Editor’s note: Deep Green Resistance stands in solidarity with the Karen people and the Revolution against the military junta in Myanmar. We will keep it in the headlines to help them raise their voice as we do with all land protectors of Mother Earth. “Until the end of the world we will not give up our efforts…we will not let it happen.”
The Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar contains an expanse of rainforest, ocean, and mangroves where a range of wildlife – from tigers and elephants to tapirs – roam, and the Indigenous Karen people consider themselves stewards of this richness.
In 2012, the Karen and the Myanmar military signed a ceasefire to end 70 years of war in their territory, allowing the Indigenous communities an opportunity to develop new institutions, campaigns, and programs to conserve their resources and forests from destruction by outside interests.
That ended with the military coup of 2021: “Attacks by the military on Indigenous peoples and environmental defenders means that the forests are at risk – and for this reason we want to say to the world ‘this coup doesn’t just affect our country, but the future of the globe.’”
This article is a commentary, it reflects the views of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
The Tanintharyi Region in southern Myanmar is a beautiful and rich expanse of rainforest, ocean, and mangroves where we still have wild tigers and elephants, and where the forest provides all that we need in life. It is my home land. Our Indigenous communities depend on the forest for food, water, medicine, and our forests depend on Indigenous communities, who manage, conserve and protect them with great care.
The Myanmar military coup risks all our recent progress after 10 years of rebuilding our lives, following 70 years of civil war. Our people plan to fight to protect our lands and win back our lives. We want the rest of the world to understand why.
Our Territory and Our Struggle
Though it is a rich, green land, our territory and our communities have also been terrorized and traumatized by decades of armed conflict at the hands of the Myanmar military. In 1948, our Karen people began our fight for greater autonomy, for self-determination, and for our basic rights against fascist oppression by the Myanmar military. The resulting civil war saw villages burned, people were killed, raped and tortured, and over 80,000 were displaced into the forest and along the Thai-Myanmar border. Relentless oppression of our people and our Karen identity meant that we never had a chance to develop, to forge our own destiny, to manage and protect our territory.
Malayan tapirs are one of many threatened mammal species present in Tanintharyi’s forests. Image by seth m via Flickr/Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In 2012, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and the Myanmar military signed a ceasefire agreement, bringing to a halt 70 years of brutal civil war in our territory. During this time of relative peace, communities were able to re-establish their livelihoods, manage and protect their lands and forests, participate in political processes, and finally live and breathe without the fear of being shot, abducted, and tortured. We were able to mobilize our communities, develop new institutions, and create new ideas for a collective and peaceful future.
While the ceasefire stopped the bullets flying and the soldiers destroying our villages, we experienced a barrage of new challenges. Suddenly new laws, concessions, development projects, and national parks threatened to confiscate our lands – the lands that we had already been displaced from so many times before. 1.7 million acres of land were handed to crony companies for oil palm concessions, 3.5 million acres were earmarked for the Ridge to Reef project, a large-scale conservation program funded by the GEF, and other parts of our region were taken for special economic zones, infrastructure development, and mining operations. For us, it felt like the rug was being pulled from under our feet, just when we could finally stand.
In response to these new challenges, Indigenous communities and civil society organizations started to create their own conservation areas – proving their ability to conserve their own resources and protect their lands and forests from those who wished to destroy them. Communities across the region mobilized, strengthened their customary tenure systems, and documented their boundaries and land use systems. We showed policy makers how we govern our territories, and sought to have our rights recognized, and respected. We built networks with Indigenous communities throughout the country, creating new spaces of inter-ethnic solidarity, and started to join international platforms with other Indigenous activists from across the globe. We campaigned against mega projects with great success – our campaigns halted mining operations, suspended palm oil concessions and cancelled conservation projects. We knew that united, we could win.
Together with my community, we developed new visions for what our territory should look like, and how conservation and development should be carried out. We developed a grassroots alternative to the Ridge to Reef Project, a Landscape of Life that proved that communities were best placed to protect and conserve our territory, and that a peaceful future would include harmony between our Karen people and their forests and biodiversity.
Our futures are again uncertain
On February 1st 2021, however, the military staged a coup, arrested members of the elected NLD government, and brutally cracked down on resistance. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) site, over 1,000 people have been killed and nearly 7,000 have been detained or arrested, and the military has started brutal campaigns in ethnic areas once more, dropping bombs on our forests and burning down our villages.
Under the military regime, we cannot protect our land, forest and biodiversity – those who attempt to defend their territories will be detained, tortured, or killed – and we cannot protect ourselves. Environmental defenders have been targeted by the military for the work that they have done protecting their lands from theft and destruction by military companies and their cronies. Recently, Kyaw Min Htut, a forest defender from Sagaing region was arrested and beaten, along with his family, because of his leading role in organizing his community and protecting surrounding natural resources.
Further, in Tanintharyi Region the offices of many environmental civil society groups have been raided and many environmental defenders have had to flee, hiding from arrest or murder at the hands of the junta. Defending forests and the environment in Myanmar in 2021 is a crime punishable by death.
Despite attacks by the military and decades of destructive development, we still have a lot of forest in our Indigenous territories in Myanmar. Without forests, we cannot survive, and without us, our forests cannot survive. We contribute a lot to climate change mitigation internationally, and our efforts to protect our forests are clear. Attacks by the military on Indigenous peoples and environmental defenders means that the forests are at risk – and for this reason we want to say to the world ‘this coup doesn’t just affect our country, but the future of the globe.’
Since the coup, our divided nation has become united. We have united in revolution against the military who has stolen our futures from us. We stand together to change the path of history, and until the end of the world we will not give up our efforts. Over 400,000 workers have joined the civil disobedience movement – going on permanent strike, youth from across the country have joined the armed resistance, and ethnic armed groups are continuing the struggle to defend their territories – together we cannot and must not lose. Our fight is for the future of our people, our nation, our forests, our world.
While our struggle has disappeared from international headlines, we call upon international governments, global social movements, international Indigenous organizations and the international community to stand in solidarity with us and help us to raise our voice – the world depends upon it.
If we do not speak out, our futures will be lost, and our forests will be destroyed. Until the end of the world, we will not let it happen.
Esther Wah (real name redacted for safety) is an Indigenous Karen activist.
