Читать книгу Sewing Freedom - Jared Davidson - Страница 6

FOREWORD BY BARRY PATEMAN

This is a fine book that sheds another clear beam of light on the complex puzzle that is anarchist history. Meticulously researched, sometimes following barely perceivable trails, thoughtful and incisive, it presents us with an as yet uncharted anarchist history in a controlled and engaging way. Like all good history, it leaves us with much to think about; and, like all good anarchist history, it encourages us to consider how we read, interrogate, and assess the long and sometimes confusing journey towards anarchy.

Individuals and their actions are the fuses running through our movement and it is right that we recognize Philip Josephs as part of this tradition. His journey from Latvia to New Zealand was long, arduous, and—one senses—educational. Somewhere along the journey the experiences of his life, the influences of his milieu, and his own emotional make up led him to anarchism. That in itself is a marvellous story and needs to be discovered and told, not only about Josephs but about so many other comrades as well. Josephs’ remarkable journey led him to play a seminal role in how anarchism developed in New Zealand.

That there was anarchist practice in New Zealand before the arrival of Josephs is made clear by the author. Anarchist contributions to pubic debates, strike actions, and suggestions of influence from exiled comrades were all part of this milieu. Some obviously identified with some sense of ‘anarchist’ and carried that influence within their communities. By working with the most prolific English-language publishers of his day (Freedom Press in London and the Mother Earth Publishing Association in New York), Josephs organized a regular flow of current anarchist-communist propaganda into Wellington. All this helped to build a working class, oppositional counter-culture in New Zealand, one that proved to be persistently resilient.

We are reminded again by Josephs’ experience of the role of the bookshop in the history of, and developments within, anarchism. Bookshops such as Charlie Lahr’s in London during the 1920s and 30s and William McDevitt’s in San Francisco in the early part of the twentieth century played similar roles as Josephs’ store did (if they were, at times, a tad more literary!). They provided a place where people could engage with written and spoken ideas; ideas that clashed, contradicted, or complimented each other, but ideas nevertheless. Some of these ideas were new, some simply re-enforcing previously held feelings and thoughts, some were confusing and never fully understood, and some apparently irrelevant. These stores provided a physical place for people to meet, to argue, to think, and to make friends and enemies. Ideas left the safety and confines of their author’s head and became tested and refined by the experience of the world at large. We can find these places in every town and every city where anarchism began to grow, full of newspapers, pamphlets, books, scraps of paper advertising meetings and above all, possibilities. Bookstores were a link to a wider world, a community of which you were a member. Besides pamphlets and books, Josephs’ shop stocked papers such as The Herald of Revolt from Glasgow and The Agitator from Home Colony, Washington State, US. Beyond your neighbourhood, beyond New Zealand, there were others thinking like you and offering support and solidarity. You and your friends were not alone.

This book reminds us of those tiresome but still critical questions that reverberate across the years, questions that need to be addressed even now. Who can and should anarchists work with as they mount their attacks on capitalism? What tactics should we use, and how malleable and flexible can they be, yet still remain anarchist? How can anarchists adapt to the national situation they find themselves in, while still remaining internationalists in outlook and practice? Above all, what is it that makes people anarchists and not syndicalists, or libertarian communists, or individualists, or whatever? Make no mistake—they saw a difference and the very least we can do is to explore it. To ignore their self-perception leads to the danger of building a reductive and one-dimensional view of history. These complexities and differences are ignored at cost to us and with some arrogance to them.

Josephs’ life gives us pause to reflect on an equally critical matter. As we have already mentioned, it was Josephs who brought so much current anarchist propaganda to New Zealand. It is hard to judge what was already available, but probably very little. We do know that some people had moved organically towards some definition of anarchism. What Josephs did was bring accepted written anarchism to New Zealand—Kropotkin, Goldman et al set the parameters of anarchist communism and, perhaps, formalized what people had been thinking and doing for all those years. Just how people move to anarchist ideas without the help of these writings continues to be a rich area for research and discussion. Some concentrated understanding of how people framed the written word would also bear fruitful examination. All those pamphlets folded and put in a pocket to read at work, at home, in the pub, or on the bus. Did they simply re-enforce what these people already felt—that marvellous shock of recognition when your feelings and thoughts are validated by the written word? Did they confuse the reader? Did they make them too self-critical or puzzled? We need to ask how these readers processed what they had read in the light of their own experiences. They were not empty vessels waiting to be filled by the word. A dialogue of sorts took place between each one of their ideas and experiences and the written idea. Finding that dialogue and tracing how it developed just might lead us to consider how anarchist ideas and practice progressed. The published word aimed at a public audience can only take us so far, and the very last thing we should do is mistake it for a finished history. Anarchists often make themselves rather than being made.

New Zealand has a rich history of anarchism and a rich present of practice. Some comrades have recently shown exemplary courage and resilience when faced by the might of the state. Many are working tirelessly in their communities, taking on the countless repressions and cruelties that make up the personality and practice of capitalism. Such courage and resilience echoes that shown by Josephs and his comrades all those years ago. We are extremely lucky to have Jared Davidson to remind us of it.