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Book Review
| Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, AK Press, Oakland CA, 2005. pp. 228. US $21.95 paper.
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| This is the extraordinary story of a German anarcho-syndicalist, from a catholic provincial background, organising mass demonstrations and mass strikes of the Jewish immigrant workers in the tailoring sweatshops of London's East End before the First World War. Rudolf Rocker, himself a political refugee, did not even speak Yiddish when he arrived in London from Paris in 1895, but was soon invited to edit the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Arbeter Fraint (Workers Friend) and spoke at countless Jewish workers' meetings. The high points of his influence were the demonstration of 25,000 Jewish workers in Hyde Park against the Kishineff pogrom, and the 1912 strike that broke the sweatshop system in the East London tailoring industry. An extraordinary and today largely forgotten chapter in the history of the British labour movement indeed, made possible by the mass influx of East European and especially Russian Jews fleeing persecution at home and forming a tightly knit East End enclave around Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets, and by the political backwardness of the British labour movement and the xenophobia then rife in its trade unions. Some aspects of this story are highly relevant for today's new generations of East London immigrant workers, coming from very different regions of the globe. |
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Rocker's skills as a popular writer which served him so well as a propagandist and organiser are very evident here. We live through years of hardship culminating in his internment by the British government as an 'enemy alien' during World War I — even though the anarchist revolutionary openly opposed the war and could hardly be suspected of working for the Wilhelmine regime — and encounter many of the great figures of the pre-war Left, not only internationalist anarchist leaders like Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and Francisco Ferrer but there are also many affectionately drawn portraits of now nameless activists of the East London Jewish workers movement. A good third of the book is taken up by his four years of war-time internment which may be understandable from Rocker's point of view but is disappointing for today's historian wanting to learn more about the much more interesting pre-war Jewish anarchist and labour movements. |
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There are other disappointments. While The London Years may be an essential starting point for specialist research, the more general reader soon grows a little tired of the endless procession of thumbnail portraits and events, yearning for a more reflective discussion of historical contexts and political perspectives. This is not a contemporary diary, after all, but was written many decades later when Rocker had semi-retired in the USA, but even at that temporal distance he seems unable to offer more than a vivid but not very thoughtful narrative. Perhaps he was too much of an anarchist — and that is, essentially, a radical individualist — for that: other socialist currents of the time are dismissed as various brands of 'authoritarianism' and 'parliamentarianism', while the very fundamental differences between Rocker and his hero Kropotkin over the question of support for the war are played down in their significance. Most seriously, he misleads the reader by suggesting that the Jewish workers movement of the East End evaporated after the war because
every immigrant movement depends on immigration; the Jewish movement in Britain more than others, because the great majority of the immigrants remained only for a while, and then went on to America and elsewhere, so that the movement could only be kept alive by fresh immigrants. Without immigration it was doomed (p. 8).
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That would have come as news to the many Jewish trade union, communist and Labour militants of the inter-war years such as those who resisted Oswald Mosley's brownshirts in the famous battle of Cable Street in 1936. In truth, the Jewish workers movement had matured, linked up with the now politicised British workers movement, and outgrown anarchism. |
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| University of New South Wales |
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