Decentralised socialism and anarcho-communism in Britain and the United States

However, if Gronlund, Bellamy and Blatchford advanced what might be termed a statist socialism, a very different vision was articulated by William Morris (1834-96), whose political economy was influenced by Marx but, more profoundly, by John Ruskin (1819-1900).

However, in contrast to the statist socialists, Morris looked ultimately to a decentral­ised socialism where power resided with communes and where that of the state withered away. His vision was therefore an essentially anarcho-communist one; a vision that was to receive its fullest expression in News from Nowhere (1890 [1920]). In that work he painted the picture of an economy characterised by small-scale, relatively unmechanised units of production, where the values of craftsmanship were prioritised, where “useless toil” had been transformed into “useful labour” and where the creative impulse was no longer constrained and corrupted by the pressures of commercialism; a society in which labour would be transmuted into artistry and characterised by fellowship and social equality.

A communitarian anarcho-communism was also to have its counterpart in the United States; though here the inspiration was largely drawn from Marx and was to assume, on occasion, a violent revolutionary form. While the spirit of communitarianism that had characterised the mid-century period was sustained and socialist communities and colonies continued to be established into the early twentieth century, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both Britain and the United States saw the emergence of a more militant, non-statist, decentralised and often syndicalist socialist political economy, with movements pressing for workers’ ownership and control of productive capacity. In the United States syndicalism was embraced by the Socialist Labor Party under the leadership of Daniel de Leon (1852-1914), who advocated the overthrow of capitalism by militant industrial action and its supercession by a trade-union based organisation of economic activity, to which end the syndicalist International Workers of the World was established in 1905.

In Britain, prior to 1914, figures such as Tom Mann (1856-1941) and James Connolly (1868-1916) played an important part in spreading syndicalist ideas to Britain. The years prior to the outbreak of the Great War saw the growth of rank and file movements, one of which, the South Wales Miners’ Federation Unofficial Reform Committee, produced one of the classic texts of British syndicalism, The Miners’ Next Step (1912).

Further, if out of step with an increasingly complex, urban, industrial economy, the Morrisian political economy noted above also proved influential on other British thinkers who took a decentralist view of the economic organisation of socialism. Most obviously, Morris’s emphasis on creative labour, fellowship and the decentralisation of power left its imprint on the political economy of guild socialist writers such as S.G. Hobson (1870-1940) and G.D.H. Cole (1889-1959). For them, what the Fabians offered smacked more of “state commercialism” than socialism; prioritising the needs of the consumer for cheapness and efficiency over the interests of the producer.

As Hobson saw it, the way forward was through the creation of guilds of producers which he believed would emerge out of an increasingly puissant trade union movement. Once established these would be responsible for all aspects of production in a particular industry and they “would [also] assume, instead of the State, complete responsibil­ity for the material well-being of their members” (Hobson 1914: 135). These entities would therefore enjoy considerable autonomy. That said, ownership of the means of production was to be vested in the state which would have a role, alongside the guilds, in co-managing the economy. So while, for Hobson, guild socialism “rejects State bureaucracy... it [also] rejects Syndicalism because it accepts co-management with the State... subject to the principle of industrial democracy” (Hobson 1914: 132).

Cole’s critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Fabian socialist alterna­tive was very similar to that of Hobson and, similar to the latter, his emphasis was on economic arrangements that allowed the liberation, not the attenuation, of the creative impulse. Again, in works such as Self- Government in Industry (1917) and Guild Socialism Restated(1920), his vision was predicated on the decentralisation of economic decision-making to worker-controlled units of production; though with the state still having a substantial role to play in terms of representing and defending the interests of consumers. For while the national guilds, and a National Guilds’ Congress, would assume responsibility for “the organisation of supply and demand... [and] the control of prices”, this function would be performed “in consultation with the consumer”, rep­resented either by the state or specific institutions representative of consumer interests (Cole 1917: 272).