CHILDREN AND BOLSHEVISM. R EADERS of the Spectator are evidently much
interested in the statements which Mr. Tom Anderson, the well-known Glasgow revolutionary, has made about the teaching of revolution to children. We have received more letters on this subject than we can find room for. Mr. Tom Anderson is the editor of the Red Dawn, described as " a revolutionary magazine for young workers," and he is President of the International Proletarian School in which he has interested himself for years. Our readers would probably like to learn more in detail what Mr. Tom Anderson teaches. We have before us a pamphlet entitled The Story of a Communist, by Mr. Anderson. It is No. 23 of the " Proletarian School series," and it contains the report of an address given by Mr. Anderson to the Parkhead Socialist Sunday School on Sunday, February 9th, 1919. Mr. Anderson's address is ostensibly a description of the life of one James Muir, who called himself indifferently a communist and an anarchist, but for the greater part of his address Mr. Anderson forgets " Jimmie Muir " and pours out incitements to revolution, though these are no doubt relevant to the biographical sketch. Mr. Anderson begins by saying that " the State " has taken the place of " some- thing akin to the three persons of the Godhead," and dismisses with contempt all the schemes of the State nationalisers. Thus the ideas of Mr. Clynes and Mr. Thomas and of the Fabiana like Mr. Sidney Webb are dismissed at one swoop. " James Muir did not believe in any of these things. He was a communist." " The communist," Mr. Anderson tells us, " does not want the State as we know it to-day ; he will have nothing to do with it. He wants individual freedom ; he wants groups of individuals to be allowed to form associations after their own desires. He does not want government as we know it to-day—government and slaves." It is strange how precisely the extreme Communist can resemble the extreme Individualist. We remember reading in an organ edited by that arch-Individualist the late Mr. Auberon Herbert a passionate advocacy of a system under which everybody would ba allowed to pay just as much in taxes as seemed to him to be right. Extreme communists and extreme individualists meet on the common ground of anarchy. We need not doubt that Mr. Anderson is sincere. He believes what he says, and when he attacks either ordered government or Christianity he is not a proper subject for persecution. He has a right to his opinions so long as he confines them within the limits which the experience and good sense of this country—expressing themselves through a majority of votes—have set for the purpose of preserving public order. To transgress those limits is a crime and should be treated as such ; but within these limits Mr. Anderson has a right to believe and to preach what he likes. On the other hand, those who disagree with him have a similar right. The best thing we can do, then, is to sum- marize Mr. Anderson's teaching as fairly as we can, in the firm conviction that publicity will bring, as it always does, its proper cures. We cannot imagine what the children in the Parkhead Socialist Sunday School can have made of the passage in which Mr. Anderson laid it down that a proper " conception of freedom " makes a man " a rebel to all governments." During the previous week no doubt they had been in- structed to discipline themselves and submit themselves to authority, or at least if they were not so instructed that instruction was implied in everything which they had been taught and in everything which they had been required to do. Yet on the following Sunday they were told that all discipline was rubbish, that rebellion, so far from being " as the sin of witchcraft," was a positive virtue, and that the supreme aim of their lives when they grew lip would be to follow their own interests selfishly. Mr. Anderson, in describing how oppression goes on through Governments, declares :— " The man, woman or child who said anything against their State and their State rule they cast into prison and deprived them of every right belonging to human beings, simply because they would not submit to what their State said they should do. One can scarcely believe this, and yet it is only too true."
" Is it true ? Did it really happen ? " are the instinctive questions of children to the story-teller. Mr. Anderson does not even wait for the questions to be asked. He lays on the emphasis—" it is all too true." So the child goes away seriously believing that in this country men and women who want to be free, or who say what they are thinking, are clapped into prison and are not even treated as human beings. Poor children, what a world they must think they are living in—if they believe Mr. Anderson ! Mr. Anderson next analyses the kind of " political action " which has been taken against the State. He does not hold by political action, because it is tainted with constitu- tionalism, but he has no great objection to it if and when " it is used to destroy the political State." He says, " We are all engaged in a class war, and if we can torment or harass our enemy from any point of vantage we would be foolish not to do so."
On p. 9 of his pamphlet Mr. Anderson arrives at the nominal subject of his address—Jimmie Muir the joiner. Jimmie Muir's father had fought in the Chartist movement. " His mother was a very fine type, representing the early revolutionary movement forty years ago. I am certain she was the most devout woman in the city, and she was a great reader. She simply devoured books and never went to church." Jimmie Muir, we are told, was " the first man, so far as I am aware, that always carried in his pocket Kropotkin's Appeal to the Young." Like the Ancient Mariner, "he was the first that ever burst into that silent sea "—silent because Jimmie Muir was no speaker. " I never heard him speak in my life at a meeting," says Mr. Anderson ; " he was a worker." His work for revo- lution took the shape of endlessly distributing leaflets. Evidently Jimmie Muir was a straight man ; he used to buy the propagandist literature with his own money. So strong was his belief in communism that he emigrated with others to form a communist colony in South America. We wonder whether this was the Socialist Colony in Paraguay founded by William Lane in the nineties of the last century. The experiment of course failed. It started with seventy- five members, and when Jimmie returned to Glasgow there were only four left. " Jimmie was a great atheist ; it was grand to see the smile break over his face as he would hand a man one of Ingersoll's pamphlets, say The Mistakes of Moses. The smile was one you could never forget." (Why do atheist writers and lecturers always attack what does not very much matter ?) One of Jimmie's chief virtues, in Mr. Anderson's estimation, apart from his atheism, was that he would never " hash." To hash means to " do as much work as you possibly can without consideration for anyone working at the same job as yourself. For example, if you and your mate get dozen of doors to make, you would go into it like ' hell and make as low a time for thejob as possible." In other words, the hashers were regarded as the infamous allies of the employer. The time taken by the hasher to do a particular job was adopted as the standard time, and then other men had to work against the standard, as it were, for the regulation of their wages, just as the golfer plays against the standard score of the intolerable Colonel Bogey. The example of Jimmie who would not hash is therefore held up to the girls and boys of the Proletarian school : " It is yours to regulate the day's work • leave it to no other one. This is one of the powerful functions of the workers in the various departments—to decide what is to be the amount." Mr. Anderson justifies this injunction by quoting the Marxian fallacy that " every- thing you see in the world is created by labour." Although Jimmie would not be a hasher, he did for a time become a " gaffer." He regarded the extra pay he received in his gaffer's job as " blood-money." He spent his blood-money in buying pamphlets to give away. " And that is what Jimmy did, and his gaffer's job lasted him three months, for he lifted his tools from the shop and started on another job. And his boss said he was a bloody fool." The mention of gaffers is enough to set Mr. Anderson off describing the proper attitude of workers towards gaffers. " Look up there, he's coming ! " he tells the children is a current phrase in the factories. He then goes on to urge children to ask their fathers why this phrase is used when the gaffer is seen approaching. " Father will cough and in his very best language tell you that it is meant to warn you to get your eye on the job, and if you happen to be talking to the man at the next machine that it is time you were back at your own machine." Altogether this is a pleasant little essay in deception as a principle of life—a principle with which children are invited to associate their own parents ! Daring in defying the gaffer is what Mr. Anderson tries to inculcate, and for this purpose he describes an episode in which " a brave woman ' named Mary Davis adopted the proper attitude towards a gaffer. The gaffer dismissed her because " she had committed an offence against the rules of the factory. . . .. She looked straight in the gaffer's face and said : ' If I leave next Saturday you will be a dead man before the following Saturday.' It took some courage and strength of character to say that." By way of other incidents in the workshops, Mr. Anderson comes back to the grand subject of revolution and again inculcates deception as justifiable in a great cause. " This brings me to the point," he says, " where I think I would be right in saying that you might enter the service of the enemy for the definite purpose of assisting the revolutionary movement by getting information of how they were using their power to overcome. You might, for example, take a gaffer's job, or a manager's job, or a secret service job ; in a word, you would be doing quite a good thing by taking any kind of job if it were done to assist the revolutionary movement."
Towards the end of the address Mr. Anderson returns once again to Jimmie, and informs the children how Jimmie used to tell stories of how the rich spoiled the poor. " Jimmie would start one, then I would have a go, and you ought to have .heard the rude jokes that our work- mates made on those stories. With eyes full of wonder they would listen, and now and again one would chirp in, It's a hell of a sin,' and another would say, We should go and drown the swine.' " There is a good. deal about the rottenness of titled aristocracy, and then Jimmie is quoted as exclaiming ironically : The blue blood has died 'out, the myth has passed away, and a dirty grease manufacturer now sleeps with the daughter of a lord of the realm. What mockery ! What sacrilege ! " The whole matter, of course., must be summed up for the children, and Mr. Anderson reaches the Lenin-like con- clusion that the real enemy is the bourgeoisie. The bour- geois are represented as cynically enjoying all attacks upon nearly all institutions—so long as they can keep their hands on private property :- ` You might abolish the Church, you might make parsons work for their living, you might say there was no God, you might laugh at everything of a sacred nature, you might put the king off the throne and elect a President, you might say that lords and dukes, and knights and squires, and all the other handles given as honours from a grateful country, were simply. one huge farce. to be laughed at by any thinking man or woman ; you might, in a jubilant mood, say ' to hell with the lot of them' ; they, the bourgeois, would simply laugh. But if you put your
little finger on private property, all the powers in the State would in an instant be down on the top of you."
One more quotation and we think we shall have conveyed to our readers a fair idea of the contents and style of this Sunday School lesson :- " The proletariat is slowly but surely moving upwards and onwards, step by step. He [sic] can as yet scarcely believe the deductions of his own mentality, but, like Samson, he has his hands on the pillar, and the edifice will come down some day, and that before long."
Samson, unfortunately, buried himself in the ruins, but meanwhile a little detail like that does not trouble Mr. Anderson.
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