Sparrows Nest: Good News for Radical Researchers

This is an excellent source for little-known byways of libertarian history.

Watch this space for some exciting discoveries coming shortly.

The Sparrows' Nest opened in December 2008. They held a very interesting meeting at the London Anarchist Book Fair last October.

Information from http://thesparrowsnest.org.uk:

Online Catalogue:  Online catalogue with searchable keywords: ANARCHIST BOOKS/PAMPHLETS - note this is a table of all content with fairly large file size (6MB) so wait to load before searching. Use search facility on your browser. Alternatively, Download/print catalogue ordered by author or by title (no keywords, around 700kB filesize). Last updated 19-April-2013.

Digital Libary of scanned publications: newest project scanning the content of The Sparrows' Nest Public Archive. Previously scanned in: the Soldarity Federation archive and the personal archive of one of its founding members, Ron  - converted into PDF format.

Plus scans of miscellaneous material such as unique local anti-Poll Tax campaigning newsletters, leaflets & press-cuttings. Select the Digital Library menu item for all this. Originals of digitised material are also available(in Nottingham)  but please note many of these documents are fragile and are kept in acid-free and lignin-free archive boxes and require special handling.

More details on their home page.

After Cable Street - Joe Jacobs, 1940-77 - Meeting

Wednesday 12 October, 8 p.m.
at the Wood Green Social Club, Stuart Crescent, N 22.
(The WGSC is 100 yards up the hill just up from the tube station, cross the gardens and there we are, opposite the Civic Centre)

Joe Jacobs' life was important for two reasons. The first was that he was one of the best examples of a political working class activist who automatically associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain at its peak. Yet within a few years, the CPGB had lost the leadership of many of this group and in Joe's case had expelled him twice, simply over their Stalinist politics and practices. His example could be written tens of thousands of times in the CPGB's long decline into political conventionality and disintegration.

Secondly Joe did not just hide himself away and pack in political activity but joined what was by far the best example of a libertarian marxist group , Solidarity, sometimes called Solidarity-for-workers'-power. Here he participated in full and worked in both an industrial and political context - he was an ace reporter and writer.

Even so, Joe found himself increasingly in conflict with the organisation and through his contact with more libertarian politics eventually was expelled here as well. Joe had made contact with the Echanges et Mouvement group, effectively a council communists off-shoot, that is sitting outside both the marxist and main anarchist movements. His relations with E&M were terminated by his early death in 1977.

Hence Joe's life and times are hugely significant especially for socialist libertarians who identify themselves as being in this broad category. The events of his life, outlined below, should be put into these two contexts.

In 1936, Joe had defied the CPGB and mobilised dissident communists organising against the fascists of Oswald Mosley. His comrades did stop the fascists from marching through the East End, but at great personal risk. In the following years Joe played a less public role but was active right up to his death. His story is at last told here.

He did war service and did a spell in the nick after a clash with an officer. After returning to his work in the clothing trade, Joe was as active as ever in the workplace and led a strike/occupation at a factory in Warren Street. He fell out again with the Communist Party, too much thinking for himself, and moved towards less authoritarian politics. Joe had always been critical of the CPGB policy of concentration on the official trade union structure, favouring building up the working class organisation at the workplace. Eventually he left manufacturing and began work at the Post Office at Mount Pleasant. After brief contact with trotskyists he also turned to a more radical alternative, libertarian marxism.

He joined Solidarity for workers' power and was active in writing reports of industrial events . He was a very diligent writer about the important Post Office workers' strike in 1971, as he had just retired from employment at the PO. Next he was prominent in the dispute with the Big Flame over the 1972 Fisher Bendix strike and that organisation was forced to back down. Joe also wrote for the [at best] monthly journal doing reviews and suchlike.

Available from Housmans bookshop
(84pp)

Joe was increasingly involved in international contacts. He had lost friends as volunteers in the Spanish Revolution [/Civil War] and later took a serious interest in French libertarian groups. He was enthusiastic about the council communist group Echanges et Mouvement. Ultimately this new version of politics took him away from Solidarity and he was expelled after a pointless campaign for change. His politics were now centred in this aspect of ideas and activity. Joe had worked on his autobiography and had practically finished the key passages when he died in 1977. His daughter completed his manuscript and published the book privately, the great classic Out of the Ghetto.

Alan Woodward has written up his life story since 1940 for Gorter Press, and the book will be available at cost price. Currently celebrations are taking place of the 75th anniversary of the great Cable Street Resistance which gave Joe his most important role in organising against the fascists of Oswald Mosley. This curiously has been written out of the official version.


Numerous other events and publications will be involved in the events of the never-ending fight against fascism. We celebrate Joe's life, mourn his early death and continue the struggle of his efforts.

[A.W.]

New pamphlet on Workers' Control

The New World: perspectives on workers' control in revolutionary Spain 1936-39
Alan Woodward
Available from Housman's bookshop, Housmans, Peace House, 5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross, London N1 9DX, UK

In Alan Woodward's new publication he looks at the whole tradition of workers' control, covering the libertarian tradition from the 1905 Russian revolution, and the theorists of the 1920s on to the Spanish revolution.
Looking at the Spanish revolution Alan examines all aspects of the cooperatives from transport, food production, and small workshops tothe health serivce and local government. The pamphlet is also a polemic against those socialists who are ideologically against workers' control.

It is an inspiring story of workers taking control of their own political and economic lives; as he says:

"The essence remains the same - to help the formation of a collective, open, federated, responsible society without repression by capitalism or its state. This allows maximum freedom for the individual and a fair permanent structure in which it operates. This is a New World many are seeking and your help in realising it is invited." (p65)

See also on this blog (online pamphlet):
 Spain and the World : Aspects of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War

What is libertarian history - Continued

Liz Willis continues her examination of libertarian history - This article is published in Black Flag issue 233 for mid 2011 with the title 'History turned on its head by class'. Part 1 is available on this blog 'What is Libertarian History - part 1'

Revolutionary Theory


For committed marxists who came into the system, the real and earnest, especially economic type of history was preferred among the growing number of options and specialisations, and it was obligatory to fit political events into the appropriate categories.

Two Trotskyist students going into a history exam: one (not a Trot swot) calls to the other, ‘Was 1848 a bourgeois revolution?’ The other indicates affirmative: sorted. Or up to a point – they may not pass but at least they can write something, more than likely involving the conclusion that what the revolutionaries needed was correct leadership.

The Communist Manifesto (K Marx and F Engels, 1848) begins with the assertion that ‘the history of all hitherto-existing society has been the history of class struggle.’ This proposition was of course more

What is libertarian history?

A differently formatted and illustrated version of this (half) article is published in

Black Flag, Issue 232, 2010/11, pp.28-29, under the title ‘The history of history itself.’

Part 2 is due to appear in the next issue of Black Flag in May 2011 (watch this space).

There are a number of historical contexts which might be expected to attract a libertarian historian looking for a research topic, those times when significant numbers of people did appear to be acting collectively to take control of their lives and inaugurate a fairer, non-authoritarian form of society: the Paris Commune of 1871, workers’ councils in the Russian Revolution, Spain 1936-37, and Hungary 1956 spring to mind. A lot of good work has been done on these and there is room for plenty more, not only to draw the lessons – that what was achieved once could be possible again; what went wrong and why – but as a corrective to the disinformative history that the opponents of libertarianism tend to propagate. In the case of Spain, there are still books being produced which manage almost entirely to ‘disappear’ the anarchists. 

Hungary Revolution 1956

It has been well observed that history is written by the winners, and libertarians have not won in the long run (yet), although the proposition is less tenable now that your actual working historians are a comparatively large and varied set of people and many amateurs have access to a range of resources for research and communication. Historians of medicine sometimes tell the story of the brain surgeon who said ‘I think I’ll take up history when I retire’ to a historian, who replied ‘Good idea. I’m retiring soon too, maybe I should take up brain surgery!’ It doesn’t quite work, though: while taking the point that history can claim to be a serious occupation rather than a hobby and a bit of study and training in techniques is likely to be useful, it isn’t really rocket science, or brain surgery, and there is some sense in the idea that anyone  can decide to do it. This article will look at some ways in which it has been done, and at some of those who have done it, and consider whether a case can be made for a distinctive libertarian contribution to the theory of the subject as well as to its content.