Tolstoy and his Disciples by Alston Charlotte;

Author:Alston, Charlotte;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1834792
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

Anarchism, Socialism and the State

From the earliest inception of their movement, Kenworthy and the British Tolstoyans conceived themselves as close to anarchists and socialists. Their roots, after all, were in the socialist and cooperative movements; they had an overlapping membership with the Croydon Socialist Society and they invited ‘socialist and advanced societies’ to send details of their activities for advertisement in their newspaper. In an editorial for the Croydon Brotherhood Intelligence as early as 1895, Kenworthy wrote that:

If we wish to-day to discover men with clear purpose and earnestness for the salvation of the perishing people’s bodies and souls, we shall find them, not in the ‘house of God’ where Jesus, the poor friend of the poor, receives the worship of lips, but rather among the contemned Socialists and Anarchists of the street corner.32

They also believed this was where they were most likely to win converts. Kenworthy maintained that ‘the minds most open to receive our doctrine of life are largely to be found among socialists and anarchists’.33 Nevertheless, they were separated from the mainstream of anarchist thought by their attitude to violence and by their religion, and they were separated from the broader stream of socialist thought by their attitude to government, politics and the state.

The Tolstoyans were fortunate in their relationship with British anarchists. The British anarchist movement was small. In 1906, W. C. Hart doubted that there were 50 people calling themselves anarchists in London, and complained that the oldest established (and at this time only) organ of anarchist thought, Freedom, had a circulation of only around 500 across the country.34 Its small size meant that the presence of the Russian anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin in England had a considerable influence on the development of the movement. Kropotkin’s emphasis on mutual aid, freely giving more than one expects to receive and not avenging wrongs meant that there was not an enormous gulf between British anarchists and Tolstoyans. Kropotkin wrote very appreciatively of Ernest Crosby’s Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, for example, although he took exception to the references to God.35 The Tolstoyans advertised the anarchist colony at Clousden Hill, outside Newcastle, and hosted lectures by Kropotkin at Croydon in 1896 and at Purleigh in 1899. Kenworthy found Kropotkin’s words:

full of insight and right feeling, and I think the barrier between us is very slight. His life seems in advance of his thought on the question of the use of violence. He is one of those to whom is largely due the growing conviction that anarchism, after preaching its doctrine of liberty, must develop and live by the morality, the religion, in the observance of which liberty is obtained. Certainly, our anarchist groups are beginning to look for a morality.36

In correspondence with Tolstoy, Kenworthy claimed that the anarchist movement in England was losing its violent character, beginning to advocate voluntary cooperation and moving closer to the Tolstoyan position. ‘They have, as it were, found us out’, he wrote, ‘and now often ask me to write and speak for them, which I do as far as I can.

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