08.02.1996

Anarchist arrogance

Danny Hammill reviews ‘I couldn’t paint golden angels: sixty years of commonplace life and anarchist agitation’ by Albert Meltzer (AK Press, 1996, pp386)

In this book we are presented with the autobiographical ramblings of the ‘ambassador’ of anarchism, Albert Meltzer. According to whom you believe, Meltzer is “the doyen of the British anarchist movement” (Special Branch comment, 1977) or, “a rascal who knows nothing of anarchism or syndicalism” (Emma Gold-man, veteran anarchist militant, 1937).

While I am not the one to pass judgement on his anarchist credentials, it is quite apparent that he is not a serious revolutionary - more a highly energetic ‘radical’ individualist. He more or less admits it himself, when he proudly states: “Though I knew so far as anarchism was concerned I was backing a lost cause, it didn’t seem to matter” (p29).

If you are looking for a mildly amusing insight into the sub-world of ‘alternative’ culture, this is the one for you. Meltzer describes some of the characters who turned up to anarchist London Freedom Group meetings in the 1930s. This included a Count de Potocki - “who considered himself rightful King of Poland ... though originally a New Zealand milkman” (p30) - and Jomo Kenyatta, “who came to meetings ... dressed in full tribal costume complete with feathers and fly whisk” (p31).

However, if you want to develop a scientific understanding of the world, this is not the place to start. Meltzer informs us: “Mao was not all that he was cracked up to be” (p189); Brenda Dean “put the case against [Murdoch] on television clearly and convincingly” (p317); and even tries to convince us that “the American government ... set out to destroy the Official IRA. They created the Provisionals” (p356).

You will not be shocked to discover that Meltzer was “pleased to have communism collapse in my lifetime” (p343). Hardly surprising. His ‘career’ amounts to a sustained and profoundly ignorant attack on all communists and revolutionaries, particularly Trotsky, “the despotic suppresser of the Kronstadt mutiny” (p301).

Meltzer’s self-professed advocacy of stateless/libertarian communism is a flimsy sham. His arrogant dismissal of all “vanguard parties” makes him, objectively if not subjectively, a supporter of the bourgeois-democratic state - even if he does claim to have “worked out a strain of stateless communism for myself and was surprised when I later found I wasn’t the first” (p25).

Danny Hammill