London Letter to Retort by George Woodcock; Retort, A quarterly journal of Anarchism, art and reviews, Spring, 1945

reprinted in Retort Special Anthology Issue, 1942-1951. Retort was originally published by the Retort Press, Bearsville, New York; Holley R. Cantine, Jr., Editor.

Christmas has passed in an atmosphere of gloom and justified pessimism. The sudden change of events on the Belgian front--which seems to have extended the war by several months--and the periodic clatter of bombs falling somewhere in the vicinity of London, have made it the most uneasy Christmas since 1940. And, so far as Christmas comforts were concerned, it was the least abundant since the war started. Toys were shoddier and dearer than ever. Drink, when one could get it, was from ten to twenty times the peacetime prices. And, in London at least, it was only by the use of good lines of influence that one could procure any appreciable amount of food outside the official portions of rationed goods.

A visit in Christmas week to the Welsh Marches, a district fairly remote from London and moderately inaccessible except by car, gave me some idea of the contrast which exists, after five years of war, between town and country in England. There, in the small Elizabethan towns, I saw geese, ducks, chickens, pigeons, hanging in the shops to be bought freely by all comers. The fish shops were full of sole and plaice, the bakers' shops of mince pies and Christmas cake, the hardware stores still had large stocks of enamel ware, rubber cushions, oil stoves, commodities which in London have become almost as rare as the Great Auk. I mention these facts for two reasons. Firstly, they demonstrate the low level of varied living for the ordinary town dweller and the astonishment he experiences in encountering anything like a pre-war variety of food and other commodities. Secondly, they show to an extent the resilience and resourcefulness of a rural as distinct from an urban economy. I do not bring this up as a romantic plea for a return to the land, but merely as a point in favor of a more balanced integration of town and country life.

But most of the people would have endured a lean Christmas, if they could have had some kind of assurance of an early end of the war. Late in the summer no-one doubted that the war would be over very soon. Most people thought October a likely date--only the most pessimistic mentioned December. The government spokesmen and the military brasshats encouraged these beliefs by their own optimistic statements. This proved a very bad tactical line. Accompanied by relaxation of blackout and fireguard duties and the abolition of the Home Guard, it at first succeeded in placating the growing discontent, but when the military results failed to justify the hopefulness of the people, they became very cynical and disgruntled. Never, since 1939, have so many people been so completely tired of the war. Even those with the soft jobs are finding the nervous strain too great to carry on comfortably, and the flying bombs have done more than any quantity of anti-war propaganda could have achieved. "The war's been on too bloody long!" is a remark one hears everywhere, and now that the hopes of an early end are gone, there is no limit to the pessimism of the Jeremiahs, a pessimism largely justified by the unexpected demonstration of German strength in Belgium, and the large new call-ups in this country. No-one, of course, expects a German victory, but the end of the war is regarded as a good long way off.

Discontent, of a kind, is almost universal. There is much grumbling, but very few people do anything about their annoyance. The Labour Party, the Communists and the Trade Unions are useless as organs of popular anger--they have sold out to the government and survive as little more than state auxiliaries for disciplining the workers and keeping them loyal to the government 'line'. The remaining left-wing organizations, political and nonpolitical, are little more than nuclei, and for the most part, have much less influence than they claim. A few small papers, and a few groups of individuals, anarchist, pacifist, and left-socialist, maintain a steady opposition to the war and provide relatively honest social criticism. They often give themselves pretentious names, but their influence is little more than potential. In the right circumstances they might wield an influence completely disproportionate to their numbers and affect radically the course of political events.

This possibility the government appears to realize, for lately the police have been persecuting the Anarchists, Trotskyists and other objectors to social slavery. So far their efforts have been clumsily executed, and have only resulted in wider publicity for the movements concerned.

There is little real revolutionary feeling among the people, and large-scale demonstrations of popular discontent, such as strikes, have been considerably less formidable than many of the party-line revolutionaries maintain. They have been considerably smaller than at a comparable stage in the last war, and so far, except for the pitmen's strike in South Wales, have affected only a fraction of the war workers.

I fear all this seems gloomy, but I find in general among organized revolutionary groups an uncritical optimism and an inflated sense of their own importance which usually gives an unrealistic tone to their assessments of the state of mind of the workers, and often results in downright dishonesty in their propaganda.

The English workers in general have no revolutionary knowledge, and the traditions of the Owenites has long died out in the sleepy century of national education and parliamentary politics. They have endured probably a longer period of political conditioning than any other race, and so far they show few signs of discarding their political lethargy. Many of them have become disillusioned with the political party game, but so far very few of them have gone beyond apathy. They realize that politics today is a crooked game, but this results only in an attitude of leaving it to the politicians and attending to their own business. Even such scandalous events as the betrayal of the Warsaw rising and the British intervention in Greece, which fifty years ago would have roused a storm of popular indignation, have evoked scarcely a ripple of response from the mass of the people. A great decline has taken place recently in the sales of every kind of political book and pamphlet. But there is no positive realization that the institutions of political coercion are evil in themselves and can be dispensed with.

I do not think there is any likelihood of a spontaneous social revolution in this country in a measurable space of time, and even if some form of widespread popular demonstration of anger takes place, I fear that the people are politically so naive that they will allow themselves to be led by authoritarian adventurers, either Communist or neo-Fascist (perhaps a successful military hero). All this might, of course, be changed by the emergence of an influential libertarian movement on the Continent. On the whole, however, I think that the ruling class has used the war to establish itself in a position where it will be virtually impregnable until a major economic crisis happens some years after the war. In spite of clumsy actions in recent months, the British ruling class remains the most cunning in the world, and is certain to continue its methods of educational and political conditioning coupled with economic bribery of the Beveridge type. On the old principle of 'divide and rule', any popular feeling that remains will be drawn off into the innocuous combat of party warfare between the two sections of the ruling class.

That a real struggle of interest does exist between the Tories and the Labour bureaucrats is undoubted. But it is a struggle for personal interests, in which the interests of the people are remote and secondary objects. Now, when the war may be over within a year, both parties are maneuvering into strategic positions for the post-war election struggle. So far, the Labour Party has acted with incompetent clumsiness and the Tories with a tactical subtlety which shows that the old capitalist ruling class is by no means so decadent as we had fondly imagined. Early in the war, the Tories prepared for their own future by appointing the Labour leaders, Bevin and Morrison, to the ministries whose operations would arouse the greatest resentment among the people. Then, having pretended to be cold over the Beveridge plan, they induced the Labour Party to adopt it as a basis for social security proposals, and in the end took the wind from the Labour sails by bringing forward a Churchillian social security scheme which in some respects was even better than Beveridge. Their great strategy, however, lies in the field of controls. The Labour Party, whose idea of socialism is little more than modified capitalism plus an enormous bureaucratic scheme of regulation, has talked glibly and foolishly of the need for maintaining controls after the war. The Tories, however, have realized that the people are completely tired of controls, and they are already preparing to launch a pseudo-libertarian programme, as the party who will abolish wartime restrictions. On such a programme they will win the elections hands down, unless in the meantime they commit some really fatal blunder. They will also be assisted by the half-conscious willingness of the Labour leaders to be defeated, because they doubt their own ability at the same time to govern and to retain any following among the people. Every indication shows that, for at least a decade, the Labour Party will be eclipsed by a triumphant Toryism. So far as the workers are concerned, I do not imagine the result will make much difference either way.

This is indeed a gloomy picture. But it is only if we take a completely realistic attitude towards political situations, and if we realize the strength of the forces against us, that we can really progress towards our ends. The major weakness of revolutionaries in the past has been their own unbounded optimism. In England today there is little reason for optimism, particularly concerning the immediate future.

January, 1945