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SWP expulsions and squabbles

You'll be telling us there's an swp freemason's section next - ranked alongside the dissaffected aristos and bitter and passed over dilettante academics.
 
The anarchist movement t the time as represented by a handful of poshoes running freedom. And of course those outside of that group would offer a ritual denunciation - in fact those denunciations were based on him not being a part of the anarchist movement, not on his membership of it.
 
genuine question - what was the anarchist movement in Britain - outside of Freedom Press - when he accepted the knighthood?

It's years since I've read about all this stuff but wasn't Meltzer still part and parcel of Freedom in the 50s? (I know he had rows with Richards down the years). He hardly qualifies as posh and was he denouncing Read as a non-anarchist when Read was writing for the Freedom Press in the 30s and 40s?
 
imposs1904 said:
genuine question - what was the anarchist movement in Britain - outside of Freedom Press - when he accepted the knighthood?

It's years since I've read about all this stuff but wasn't Meltzer still part and parcel of Freedom in the 50s? (I know he had rows with Richards down the years). He hardly qualifies as posh and was he denouncing Read as a non-anarchist when Read was writing for the Freedom Press in the 30s and 40s?
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Yes he was. The Syndicalist Workers' Federation and other class struggle groups are what you want.
 
imposs1904 said:
any links to SWF stuff. Was that people like Kavanagh?
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The SWF still exist as solf-fed. Lots of their stuff was put online by a bloke from round here a few years back (not sure if his website is till up, let me check). Kate Shapley library and autobiographies by members would be best.
 
butchersapron said:
No, i'm saying, as the anarchist movement did at the time, that accepting a knigthood is not consistent with anarchism.
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Of course it isn't. But your original reply implied that his connection to anarchism was merely literary, and I was under the impression that he had a long involvement with the British anarchist movement prior to him accepting the knighthood. A quick google search showed up that Freedom Press published a collection of his writings for Freedom Press . . . which, of course, abruptly stop in '53.

He still considered himself an anarchist post the knighthood. I wonder how he tried to reconcile the two? Probably pure vanity.
 
butchersapron said:
The SWF still exist as solf-fed. Lots of their stuff was put online by a bloke from round here a few years back (not sure if his website is till up, let me check). Kate Shapley library and autobiographies by members would be best.
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I didn't know SWF were directly connected with DAM/SolFed. I always thought there a wee gap between the two. Cheers, I'll have a root round libcom.
 
imposs1904 said:
Of course it isn't. But your original reply implied that his connection to anarchism was merely literary, and I was under the impression that he had a long involvement with the British anarchist movement prior to him accepting the knighthood. A quick google search showed up that Freedom Press published a collection of his writings for Freedom Press . . . which, of course, abruptly stop in '53.

He still considered himself an anarchist post the knighthood. I wonder how he tried to reconcile the two? Probably pure vanity.
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His 'long involvement' was, as i suggested, purely literary. He identified a non-anarchist view of anarchism, then thought to retrospectively construct (and anoint) a tradition of this anarchism through his excavation of english literary history and then tried to impose this passivist idea of what anarchism is via freedom and other outlets.
 
butchersapron said:
The SWF still exist as solf-fed. Lots of their stuff was put online by a bloke from round here a few years back (not sure if his website is till up, let me check). Kate Shapley library and autobiographies by members would be best.
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sorry to derail the thread again. :oops: Was the SWF's Tom Brown the anarchist who received a savage beating from some Rachman like henchman? I was just looking at the SWF wiki page and it mentions that he was forced out of activity but it doesn't mention the details of why.

Like I wrote before, I read about a lot of this stuff years ago but I no longer have access to the books and pamphlets.
 
imposs1904 said:
sorry to derail the thread again. :oops: Was the SWF's Tom Brown the anarchist who received a savage beating from some Rachman like henchman? I was just looking at the SWF wiki page and it mentions that he was forced out of activity but it doesn't mention the details of why.

Like I wrote before, I read about a lot of this stuff years ago but I no longer have access to the books and pamphlets.
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Very likely but can't say for sure off top of head.
 
Karmickameleon said:
From David Renton's blog:

In the SWP, we tried to prohibit for a time our members having jobs in the union bureaucracy or even on 100% facility time. Unfortunately our former National Secretary had a number of friends in these positions, so we maintained the rule, but applied it arbitrarily. In some cases, through the party’s ignorance of what its members were up to; we didn’t apply it at all. Should we have kept the comrade who serves in the bureaucracy, as a very senior manager (i.e. with a power to hire and fire), and who has an OBE for his services to trade unionism? Does it make a difference that he is one of the kindest and most genuine people you will ever meet, as well as a committed revolutionary?

Surely he's not referring to Nick G!
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Any more thoughts on who this is? I thought I knew of all the senior SWP industrial cadre, lay and FTO.
This one has completely thrown me for a loop.
 
butchersapron said:
Yes he was. The Syndicalist Workers' Federation and other class struggle groups are what you want.
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Albert wasn't involved with Freedom in the 1950s. His involvement with War Commentary ended when he was conscripted into the army. The acrimonious split between War Commentary, which would later become Freedom, and the Anarchist Federation which the SWF developed from, took place while he was away, and when he was demobbed in 1948 he declined to join either. He formed a London Anarchist Group with Matt Kavanagh and Ronald Avery. In 1953 he and Albert Grace formed an Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee and issued a paper called The Syndicalist for about a year.
imposs1904 said:
I didn't know SWF were directly connected with DAM/SolFed. I always thought there a wee gap between the two.
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There was a gap. The original SWF vanished in the mid-Sixties and its archives ended up with its old rivals at Freedom. In the 70s a former AWA member formed a group called Manchester SWF and wrote to Freedom to get the archives. The claim that there was a direct link between the two SWF's is the same kind of nonsense as the idea that there is a continuity between the original Freedom and the post-war group which adopted the name. The Manchester SWF were one of the prime movers in turning the DAM which was initially a pretty loose network of groups into a national membership organization.
 
Lurdan said:
Albert wasn't involved with Freedom in the 1950s. His involvement with War Commentary ended when he was conscripted into the army. The acrimonious split between War Commentary, which would later become Freedom, and the Anarchist Federation which the SWF developed from, took place while he was away, and when he was demobbed in 1948 he declined to join either. He formed a London Anarchist Group with Matt Kavanagh and Ronald Avery. In 1953 he and Albert Grace formed an Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee and issued a paper called The Syndicalist for about a year.
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He did write articles for Freedom and took part in various initiatives in the 50s - even seeking to work together in some manner on The Syndicalist - without joining the actual Freedom Press (Group) and keeping up his class based criticisms of the group and their activity.
 
Nigel Irritable said:
My comment about selling the paper at meetings stemmed from ESF preparatory meetings a decade ago. I remember being quite surprised that half the SWP leadership would be at them, but there'd be one rank and filer leafleting or selling papers at the end. It seemed bizarrely stratified.
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Aye, this is when I first encountered these people, Callinicos, Nineham, Rees, Neale, and the German woman who is now a MP, not a edifying sight, there would be queues to speak and they would be there every time.
 
comrade spurski said:
the swp has a lot of full timers...journalists, cc members, district organisers, a weekly paper, a monthly mag, a quarterly journal, a annual event etc...others don't

they used to be able to raise the money pretty comfortably ... but not any longer
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When you think what they could have done with that amount of resources, if they had used them wisely, democratically and with other allies.
 
Why on earth would a labour MP - a govt one at that and on the right of the party - be part of a SWP attempted dominance of the the public face of the ESFs? I suspect he means a linked german who is now an MP in germany.
 
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