The World That Never Was (56 page)

With even the
Illustrated Police News
depicting Jack the Ripper as a vicious caricature of the eastern European Jew, thick-nosed and with large crude ears, Rachkovsky, now back in Paris, could surely not have been more satisfied had he planned the whole gruesome sequence of murders himself. Coming at almost the same time as the publication by his erstwhile agent Madame Blavatsky of
The Hebrew Talisman
, which claimed the existence of a Jewish conspiracy for worldwide subversion, such prejudiced reporting of the Whitechapel murders was more grist to the mill.

Before long the press was peddling fresh rumours and proposing new criminal types – the butcher with the bloodied apron or the aristocratic dandy – for their readers to chew over and, by early 1889, with no new murders to report, interest in the Ripper began to wane. Nevertheless, the brutal myths that the killings had generated seeped into the fabric of
the East End, adding their hellish stench to what was, as three contemporary observers commented, ‘a kind of human dustbin overflowing with the dregs of society’, or a ‘vast charnel house’ whose denizens lived ‘in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth’ and from which, it was predicted, a plague would soon spread across the city.

Charles Booth’s investigators were just beginning their survey of London, pounding the streets to collect data for the Poverty Maps that would first appear in 1889, coloured to represent the life experience of the capital’s inhabitants according to a seven-point scheme: a firelight glow of oranges and reds for ease and affluence, chilly blue for those slums whose inhabitants suffered the greatest deprivation. The areas from Whitechapel out to the docks of Limehouse and Wapping were coloured like a great, sprawling bruise.

For Malatesta, though, back from four years in South America, the workers of the East End, immigrants and indigenous alike, possessed an energy to force change that impressed him.

Since his sojourn in England after the 1881 London Congress, Malatesta had seen a lot of the world. In Egypt he had fought the British in the cause of independence; returning to his homeland of Italy he had evaded a police hunt for the perpetrators of a bomb attack by hiding in a container of sewing machines; then in Patagonia he had laboured for three months in sub-zero temperatures prospecting for gold to fund anarchist propaganda, only to have the few nuggets he had found confiscated by the Argentine state. In Buenos Aires, though, he had discovered something more precious still: with 60,000 peasants from Mediterranean Europe arriving in the city each year, at a rate higher even than those of eastern Europe pouring in to London and New York, he found a receptive audience for his ideas.

Working in a range of industries to win his colleagues’ trust, Malatesta had galvanised their belief in anarchism. In January 1888, the Bakers Union in Buenos Aires, whose members had previously satisfied their anti-authoritarian urges by turning out dough-based products with names such as ‘nun’s farts’ and ‘little canons’, staged its first strike, and later in the year the Shoemakers Union followed suit. Learning from those he taught, and under the guidance of the older Irish anarchist Dr John Creaghe, Malatesta realised how militant trade unionism might advance his ideas of social revolution, and in four manifestos published in the
space of two years he refined his ideological position. Whether or not his return to London in 1889 was due to pressure from the vexed Argentine authorities, there was no doubt that in the time he had been away both Britain and Europe had become more receptive to his ideas.

Industrial action continued intermittently in the French mining regions, and in Italy there were the first signs of the
fasci
groups of radical syndicalists challenging landowners over their mismanagement of agriculture. Meanwhile, the frequency of anarchist meetings and weight of anarchist publications in Belgium surpassed that of any other socialist group, and recent years had seen strikes and protests tend towards insurrectionary violence that the Catholic government had struggled to quell. In Spain too, where Malatesta had travelled on a mission for Bakunin more than a decade before, anarchism had taken deep root, unifying the peasantry of Andalucia and the industrial workers of Catalonia with uncommon success, setting the stage for a long-lasting struggle against the clerical and political authorities. From a base in London, Malatesta could reach out to this diffuse body of support, through frequent forays to the Continent and the regular publication of a new paper,
L’Associazione
. But as Kropotkin had found before him, the British capital could now afford inspiration of its own, even to a veteran anarchist.

Trade with the empire was the lifeblood of Britain, and London’s docks its fast-beating heart. Only a few weeks after London’s gas workers had won themselves an eight-hour day by striking, a walkout by 500 men from one dock in the summer of 1889 caused it to miss a beat. Then, almost immediately, 3,000 stevedores, nearly the entire workforce, followed suit. Within a fortnight, they were joined by 130,000 more Londoners from all trades and industries, omnibuses abandoned in the streets as their drivers and conductors flocked to protest. ‘The great machine by which five million people are fed and clothed will come to a dead stop, and what is to be the end of it all?’ wondered the
Evening News and Post
. ‘The proverbial small spark has kindled a great fire which threatens to envelop the whole metropolis.’ And it seemed it would rage on. Just when a lack of funds threatened to force the dockers back to work, a huge donation arrived from their colleagues in Australia to save the strike. Solidarity seemed to stretch around the globe.

It was a moment of the kind that the leading anarchists of the last decade had long awaited, brimming with the potential for revolutionary change. Yet the most outspoken foot soldiers of the Socialist League remained on the fringes of the strike, preferring to exploit the holiday atmosphere that engulfed the East End to propagandise rather than engage
with the more reformist agenda of those trade unionists who had devoted so much time and effort to preparing the ground among the dock workers. ‘Members of the league do not in any way compromise their principles by taking part in strikes,’ pronounced the
Commonweal
, whose editorial policy William Morris could no longer effectively steer. When the strike ended with the dockers settling for their initial pay demands being met, Malatesta, Kropotkin and others, though unsurprised, could not hide their disappointment. The scale of the popular protest had changed the political game in Britain, radically altering any calculation of how best the transformation of society might be effected. But the strike had also underlined just how cripplingly close the internal divisions within the anarchist movement – between ‘associationists’ such as Malatesta and the firebrand ‘individualists’ – came to being an outright schism.

Among each nationality to be found in London, the differences were writ large, with the ‘individualists’ eschewing the hard work and onerous compromises of practical politics and collective endeavour in favour of the untrammelled egotism of the criminal. So absolute was their position, indeed, that it seemed less as though anarchists were sloughing off the repressive dictates of society by illegal action, than that those disposed to criminality were adopting anarchism as a political figleaf.

Prominent among the Italian émigrés, Parmeggiani and Pini were so outraged by the suggestion of a socialist newspaper in Italy that their political espousal of expropriation was merely a cover for robbery, and that their pernicious influence suggested them as police agents, that they had travelled across Europe to attempt the assassination of its editor, Farina, by stabbing. After Pini’s arrest in Paris during their return journey to London, Malatesta would frequently meet with Parmeggiani, but it was an uneasy relationship. Jean Grave, since Kropotkin’s imprisonment, the effective editor of
Le Révolté
, renamed
La Révolte
since its move to Paris, came out in favour of the individualists’ position among the French, arguing that each man must act according to the dictates of his conscience, though the suggestion that this might extend as far as pimping his wife or turning police informant suggests a certain irony. When Grave in turn was imprisoned, however, the newspaper’s line would further harden under the caretaker editorship of Elisée Reclus’ nephew, Paul. Meanwhile, 1888 had seen hardliners and outspoken firebrands take over the Socialist League, among them Henry Samuels, Charles Mowbray, David Nicoll and even Frank Kitz, all of whom drifted ever more towards the individualist extreme.

William Morris strived to maintain the organisation as a broad church, but the strain was growing. ‘He disliked the violence that was creeping
into his meetings,’ Ford Madox Ford would recollect, wryly adding that ‘He had founded them solely with the idea of promoting human kindness and peopling the earth with large-bosomed women dressed in Walter Crane gowns, and bearing great sheaves of full-eared corn.’ But there was a growing swell of resentment towards Morris among the more headstrong anarchists who, on one occasion, terminated a meeting in Hammersmith by throwing red pepper on the stove: an event observed and noted by a Special Branch informant. ‘Morris, who used to walk up and down the aisles like a rather melancholy sea captain on the quarterdeck in his nautical pea jacket was forced to flee uttering passionate sneezes that jerked his white hairs backwards and forwards like the waves of the sea,’ Ford would remember.

‘Agitate! Educate! Organise!’ Morris had written only a few months earlier. ‘Agitate, that the workers may be stirred and awakened to a sense of their position. Educate, that they may know the reasons of the evils they suffer. Organise, that we and they may overthrow the system that bears down and makes us what we are.’ But for Morris socialism had always been about the imagination: the capacity to inhabit, in prospect, a better world of spiritual and artistic fulfilment. When he started writing
News from Nowhere
in late 1889, it was not simply out of the need to reconcile his practical and ideal politics, nor to answer the ugly, mechanised and corporatist version of socialism predicted in the American Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book
Looking Backward
. It was to present a cogent vision of the world as he wished it to be, as a means to inspire hope and courage.

‘There were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent anarchist opinions,’ the narrator tells us in the preface, preoccupied with the factionalism of the league. A night of tossing and turning, however, propels him into a twenty-first century in which the nuisances of the 1880s have vanished, replaced by the communism of which Morris dreamed, realised down to the last detail: a federalised society, living in simple harmony, its craftsmanship underpinned by technology that supported the relative leisure enjoyed by its citizens rather than alienating them from the creative pleasures of work. It was a neo-medieval Utopia, informed perhaps by Kropotkin’s research into guilds as a model for post-revolutionary organisation, but also Morris’ belief that medieval man had accepted limits on his freedom willingly because they were ‘the product of his own conscience’.

Whilst Morris moulded his ideal society of the distant future from the best of the past, the proximate cause of the revolution out of which it
was born was drawn from his own experience: a massacre of demonstrators in Trafalgar Square by troops serving the military dictatorship of ‘a brisk young general’. Conflating Boulanger and Bloody Sunday, along with strong echoes of the Paris Commune, Morris demonstrated how in minds permeated by socialist education such brutality from the authorities would provoke revulsion and a successful general strike. Aided by ‘the rapidly approaching breakdown of the whole system founded on the world-market and its supply; which now becomes so clear to all people’, and a food supply guaranteed by the revolutionaries, the logistics of which Kropotkin was also researching and would present in his
The Conquest of Bread
, power would shift from the privileged to the workers with relatively little bloodshed.

Dynamite would be held in reserve as a last resort: the passive resistance of unarmed protesters would win the day. Sailing up the Thames at the end of the book, and back into the reality of 1890, the narrator expresses the hope that ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then may it be called a vision rather than a dream’. There were darker visions at work, though, beside which Morris’ promised Utopia would struggle to take root.

16
Deep Cover

Paris, 1887–1890

From the centre of his web of operations in the Russian Embassy, Peter Rachkovsky’s operations against the émigrés continued, his methods becoming ever more subtle and various. The psychological game he played during 1887 with Lev Tikhomirov, the effective leader of the rump of the People’s Will in exile and among his highest priority targets, called for particular patience and self-restraint. By forgoing the simple gratification of eliminating the man who had ordered Sudeikin’s murder, he hoped to achieve an altogether more profound reward.