 KSL's Yiddish Anarchist Bibliography LINKS |
Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library Albert Meltzer Albert Meltzer: 1920 – 1996 Many of you will know of Albert’s involvement with the Kate Sharpley Library. He was one of the original enthusiasts for the creation of an archive that would reflect the complexities and cross- currents of Anarchism and be accessible to comrades. This is not an obituary of Albert - they’ve been written - but
some things do need to be said. Albert was a kind, loyal man whose essential humanity
permeates the pages of his autobiography (I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels AK
Press/KSL). Albert was always concerned about how Anarchism had drifted away from its
natural base in the working class. To Albert Anarchism was not a philosophical/
intellectual idea but how working class people behaved, lived and struggled in times of
calm and social crisis. The Anarchist who influenced him most was Billy Campbell (killed
in the Second World War) - not by his writings but by his behaviour. As Fransisco Torres says in his introduction to our pamphlet The Anarchist Resistance To Franco by Antonio Tellez: "What is important is the attempt to wipe out from memory the generosity of spirit and physical courage of these combatants and to convert the absence of this reality into normality." Albert could be a fierce opponent -but always tried to make sure that his criticism was informed by his beliefs. The obituary published in Freedom was disgraceful. Others around KSL had never particularly shared Albert’s antipathy to this paper. The fact that the editors of Freedom published such an obituary riddled with personal vindictiveness has changed that. Letters from all over the world to us have echoed our feelings of anger and disgust. we now know where we stand ROBERT LYNN GLASGOW 1924-1996 The Wee Man is dead and we have lost another veteran militant. Stuart Christie’s obituary (Guardian 10/9/96) says it all, but we would like to pay tribute to him: Egoist, Syndicalist agitator, author and moving spirit behind the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School. so, with a clenched fist and a bent elbow, Bobby Lynn - goodbye. Kate Sharpley’s Story One of our frequently asked questions is who was Kate Sharpley? Many of our readers will know of her as One of the countless unknown members of our movement ignored by the official historians of anarchism We Hope this tribute, written by Albert Meltzer in 1978 will help to fill that statement out a little. There are more details in Albert’s autobiography I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels. Kate’s Tinwear The girl was Kate Sharpley, who had been active in the Woolwich anarchist group and helped keep it going through the difficult years of World War 1. After her clash with the police she was sacked from her job on suspicion of dishonesty (there was nothing missing but a policeman had called checking up on her...) and, selling libertarian pamphlets in the street, she was recognised by the police and warned that if she appeared there again she would be charged with soliciting as a prostitute (which in those days would have been a calamity, and even today a disaster, if once convicted). Isolated from her family, and with the group broken up, she moved out of activity, away from the neighbourhood, and married. I met her, by chance, last year in Lewisham. Twice widowed, she remembered the anarchist movement with nostalgia, and gave me a fascinating account of the local group in the years before World War 1. Unfortunately, she was already very ill, and a few weeks ago, she died, I was told by one of her neighbours. I had, though, asked her for a message to the Anarchist movement
today. Her answer: Tell the kids they’re doing all right, they don’t need any
advice from me. Especially she praised the young women of today: I wouldn’t have had
to take cover like I did if women of my day had any guts. she said. But she did have guts.
A few only in 1917 dared take any action in bereaved England. Matters Arising KATE SHARPLEY LIBRARY Not only have we been involved in cataloguing the materials we have,
but more have arrived. Our list of pamphlets is printed on the back of this issue – an
sae to our address will get you an up-to-date publications list. Simon Radowitsky And The Peoples Justice by Osvaldo Bayer The Anarchist Secret Service In The Spanish Struggle A Work On Anarchist Literature As well as these we are involved in various joint efforts - in varying degrees of completeness - With AK Press of Edinburgh & San Fransisco: Albert Meltzer’s Essays No God No Master The Black Cossack (Biography Of Makhno) The Friends Of Durruti Complete Works of Bakunin @-------- @ This issue of the KSL Bulletin was produced in September 1996, by the KSL Collective. Andre Prudhommeaux- Profile By Charles Jacquier
Posthumous fate is often curious. Whereas everybody, inside the anarchist movement and some outside knew the name Voline (1882 - 1945), the same cannot be said of Andre Prudhommeaux (1902- 1968).1 However in the years between the world wars, they were most certainly among the handful of anarchist militants whose thinking was grappling most directly with the great issues of the day. In the few years that saw the failure of a flurry of working class movements and social revolutions in Russia, Germany and Spain, they were the clear-sighted observers as well as the enthusiastic militants, always swimming against the tide. Yet there was nothing to suggest that the path of Vsevolod Mikhailovitch Eichenbaum (aka Voline) should intersect with that of Andre Prudhommeaux, who was born in the Phalanstery in Guise (Aisne Department) in 1902. When the young Voline was embarking upon his career as a militant, Andre Prudhommeaux was still wet behind the ears. His mother, nee Marie Dollet, was niece to the second wife of Jean-Baptiste Godin, a late convert to and practitioner of Fourierism and founder of the familistery. His father, Jules, author of a remarkable thesis on Icaria and its founder, Etienne Cabet was not merely an historian of the social movement but a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist and active co-operator as well. Andre Prudhommeaux became an activist at a very early age, but unlike Voline, his choices did not bring him quite so directly to anarchism, in that he first was an habitué of opposition communist circles. Thus he contributed to the monthly Clarte , using the pen name of Jean Cello, and was active in Albert Treint’s group Redressment Communiste, finally breaking with that in 1928. He was then involved with a short-lived Communist Vanguard Group that published Le Reveil communiste, which, after August 1929, turned into L’Ouvrier communiste, organ of the Communist Workers Groups which were close to the German and Dutch currents subscribing to council communism. Thus Andre Prudhommeaux was the translator of Hermann Gorter’s Reply to Lenin (published in 1930 by the librairie ouvriere) which Voline reviewed for the Revue anarchiste (No 17, February 1932) run by Fernand Fortin. According to Voline, the document was an interesting one but Lenin had turned into a counter-revolutionary long before 1920, in that, as early as February 1918, he had made peace with the German imperialists in defiance of the views of most workers organisations. Prudhommeaux replied to this review in a letter of March 1932, which was subsequently published by the review in question (No 20, August- September 1934), in which he mentioned that Gorter’s disciples, whilst critical of The original sins of Leninism as Russian practice had stopped muddling the empty formulas of State and dictatorship of the proletariat with their proletarian conception of the social revolution. FROM COUNCIL COMMUNISM TO ANARCHISM Between September 1932 and May 1933, along with Jean Dautry, Prudhommeaux issued a bi-monthly bulletin, Correspondance internationale ouvrier, the object being to offer an unsystematic, non- doctrinaire view of the proletarian movement and of social revolt in all its guises. Hitler’s advent to power and the Reichstag fire finally drove him into the arms of anarchism, as a result of the manifest powerlessness of the old workers movement. Dutch council communists and some anarchists, particularly individualist anarchists rallied to the defence of the alleged arsonist, Marius Van der Lubbe against the calumnies of the Stalinists. After having weighed up twelve years of the bolshevisation of the German proletariat, in a series of articles in Le Libertaire (Nos 90 to 92, 17-31 March 1933), he stopped writing for it when the paper labelled Van der Lubbe Hitler’s agent. He reserved his co- operation for other publications committed to defending Van der Lubbe (publications like La Revue anarchiste or Alphonse Barbe’s Le Semeur) and was one of the labour stalwarts of the French section of the International Van der Lubbe Committee. From then on, Prudhommeaux was to contribute to the same publications, especially, in addition to La Revue anarchiste, La Voix libertaire and Terre libre, and had a hand in the setting up of the French- speaking Anarchist Federation (FAF) at the congress in Toulouse on 5-16 August 1936. In the view of Henri Bouye, who was to be a member of it, the FAF embraced those anarchists who, in their notions about militant activity, their analyses of potential social revolution, of the transformation of society and of the new human relationships which the latter were to make possible, placed the emphasis upon the primacy of a freedom of the individual that was never to be sacrificed, without thereby lapsing into a twee humanism overly forgiving of the inequalities, injustices and cruelties of this world. (2) In response to events in Spain, with anarchist ministers involved in the Generalidad government in Catalonia and the Central Anti- Fascist Militias Committee being abolished Andre Prudhommeaux was, along with Voline, one of those who most forcefully articulated the dissenting current within the French anarchist movement. (3) According to them, instead of pursuing a policy of compromise, it would have been better to restore to the Spanish conflict its social importance, and proceed with the complete liquidation of politics and press on with producer- consumer administration of things. But Spanish libertarians refused to win as anarchists and agreed to go to their deaths as governmentals, as defenders of the states legitimacy. The completion of the Spanish defeat in March 1939 did not, for Prudhommeaux, spell the failure of the anarchist idea: quite the opposite. That defeat offered confirmation of the libertarian contentions about the necessity of destroying the state if on wanted the social revolution to succeed. (4) With the Second World War, both men were separately swept up in the storm. Voline, a Jew and a freemason, stayed in Marseille until 1944. There he lived in some straightened circumstances, but nonetheless carried on being active with a clandestine group made up of anarchists of a variety of nationalities. Worn out and stricken with TB, Voline passed away on 18 September 1945 in the Laennec Hospital in Paris Andre Prudhommeaux fled to Switzerland to his partners family after war was declared. Finding it impossible to engage in any open political activity, he specialised instead in literary translation, but kept in touch with personalities like Louis Bertoni, the publisher of the weekly Le Reveil anarchiste or the First World War French war resister Jean-Paul Samson To launch The Unknown Revolution in an edition published by Jaques Doubinsky and a group of Voline’s friends, the anarchist movement organised a Voline Commemoration on 2 November 1947 at the Salle des societes savante in Paris. Andre Prudhommeaux spoke there, alongside Fontenis, Franssen and F.Granier, whilst Le Libertaire the following week carried a tribute to Voline, stressing the significance of his contribution to The Anarchist Encyclopedia and to the French-language libertarian press. As far as Le Libertaire was concerned, certain of his essays such as Real Social Revolution figured among the most important writings of the inter-war period. As an editor with Le Libertaire Prudhommeaux rejected the conversion
of the Anarchist Federation into the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL) and was one of
a circle of militants which reverted to the FA initials after a foundation congress on
25-27 December 1953 and brought out Le Monde Libertaire after October 1954. Prudhommeaux
also contributed to numerous French or French-language ( Cahiers de Pensee et Action,
Contre-courant, Defense de l’homme, L’Unique, Le contrat social, Preuves,
Temoins ) or foreign ( Freedom, L’Adunta del Refrattari, Volonta ) publications.
Among his translations pride of place must go to French translations of Czeslaw
Milosz’s The Captive Mind (Gallimard 1954) and Milovan Djilass The New Ruling Class
(Plon 1957). One need only read the pamphlets he published with the aid of Rene Lefeuvre
to appreciate the importance of this anarchist whose career was as original as it is
little known.(5) Double Lives, Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the seduction of the intellectuals. Stephen Koch - Harper Collins 1995. It has an interesting title. It has interesting things to say about Stalinist policy in Spain. It could be a good book. But how on earth can you trust the research skills of someone who can write a sentence like this: "By June the slaughters in Barcelona were shrieking forward in full cry. Many thousands of Spanish anarchists, organized under an umbrella organization known as the POUM, were executed." (p285) Maybe the poor fellow has been over-exposed to Stalinist gibberish? Disregarding the fact that the POUM were Marxists and that the Anarchists could organise quite well on their own, the figures strain the umbrella to breaking point: Bolloten estimates CNT membership at between 1.5 and 1.75 million during the Civil War (The Spanish Revolution. 1980. p526 n20). Whereas The POUM had 6000 members in Catalonia on the eve of the Civil War, and perhaps another 1000 in the rest of Spain (The Spanish Civil War- The View From The Left. Revolutionary History Vol 4, No 1/2, p52 n111) Halldor Laxness (1902- )
There will be further details in the next issue of the KSL Bulletin
TMP Pamphlets From The Kate Sharpley Library George Cores Albert Meltzer David Nicoll Antonio Tellez Wilf McCartney Odon Por David Nicoll Ossip Tsebury Antonio Tellez and others Stefan Anarkowitz O.Alberola and A.Gransac Nestor Makhno Antonio Tellez A.Ferrari and A. Aguzzi Tom Brown Richard Cleminson Max Nettlau Efim Yartchuk |