The Awkward Radical: Spence in and against Revolutionary History

by Alastair Bonnett

reprinted from: The Hive of Liberty: The Life and Works of Thomas Spence, edited by Keith Armstrong. 2007

(the argument developed below can also be found in Bonnett, A. 2010 Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia Continuum)

We cannot see Spence directly. We peer at something that resembles him through two centuries of revolutionary history. And it is hard, most likely impossible, to talk about Spence without using words that would have meant nothing to him. Words like ‘socialist’, ‘working class’, ‘communist’, ‘proletarian’ are all creations of the nineteenth century. Spence was a product of an earlier period: he had his own vocabulary and his own traditions, some of which can seem very remote today.

So there he is: an odd, diminutive and hazy figure, a reassuringly distant subject for historical archival murmuring … and yet … his anger, his visceral disgust at oppressors of all types, still leaps off the page and slaps us in the face.

It’s ironic. Spence has been covered over by nearly two hundred years of Marxism, Bolshevism, Maoism, et al. But today it is these ‘isms’, not Spence, that seem wheezy and grey with age. To read Spence is to be reminded of the earthy, ever fertile, roots of radicalism. It is also to be confronted with the stark fact that Spence was a mortal enemy of tyranny and ‘giantism’ of all kinds. Later left-wing ideologies fitfully claimed him as an eccentric forefather. But Spence is awkward. He doesn’t fit our stereotypes; and he still has the power to break our moulds

What I want to do is look at the way one particular radical ideology, Marxism, tried to lay claim to Spence. I argue that this attempt was always ill conceived. Spence was not a grunting Neolithic ancestor of the more sophisticated and long-winded radicals of later years. He was a fully formed political critic and what he had to say presents as much a challenge to state-centred socialism as it does to capitalism.

To trace the misappropriation of Spence is to take an increasingly uncomfortable journey. It starts well, with creative intellectuals, like Marx himself. But it soon takes us into the territory of those wishing to carve out new bureaucracies. Before long we are deposited in the wastelands of Marxist-Leninist modernity; and in states in which Spence, who always prided himself on being ‘as free as a cat’, would have surely spent even more years locked up than he did in England.

Spence was already dead four years when Karl Marx was born, in 1818. But Spence’s name lived on in English radical circles as a legend of incorruptible defiance. In The German Ideology, Marx included Spence in his short roll call of early English communists. In Theories of Surplus Value he speaks warmly of Spence as the author of a tract called Private Property in Land, and as a ‘deadly enemy’ of this form of property. This odd title - Private Property in Land - is presumably a reference to Spence’s lecture The Rights of Man. The lecture’s original title, when first delivered in Newcastle in 1775, appears to have been ‘Property in Land Every Man's Right’.

It is worth staying with this variously titled lecture a moment. It is Spence’s earliest statement and he stuck to its basic principles thereafter. It isn’t hard to grasp: Spence’s language is very plain and addressed to the ‘free liberty’ of the ‘whole people’. Spence wants to see land ownership in the hands of democratic parishes: ‘Thus are there no more nor other lands in the whole country than the parishes; and each of them is sovereign lord of its own territories’. In keeping with his consistent ‘anti-giantism’ Spence envisages that ‘the land is let in very small farms’. Spence was not ideologically opposed to government but he was deeply suspicious of power that is not exercised at a local level. Thus he looks forward to the time when,

What Spence wants is the return of the land to a free, self-governing, people. The idea that parishes could largely regulate their own affairs had considerable popular appeal in a society where locality and land still meant a great deal. But Spence had to repeatedly defend the possibility that ordinary people were capable or fit to be trusted. In the following dialogue from his The End of Oppression (1795), he uses a wondering ‘Young Man’ to elicit a Spencean defence of this principle:

Spence’s ideal of democratic and local self-management found a place in the hearts of the labouring poor in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, it made few inroads into literate, polite society. Thus, when the British Marxist Henry Mayers Hyndman came across Spence’s work in the British Museum Reading Room in the early 1880s it was a bolt from the blue. Hyndman ‘discovered’ Spence and began shaping the way he was to be interpreted. He issued a work in 1882 called The Nationalisation of the Land in 1775 and 1882, which reprinted Spence’s 1775 lecture. In this way Spence became an advocate of ‘nationalisation’; a strange fate for an arch-enemy of big government.

Frederick Engels enthused to Hyndman (in a letter of 13^th March 1882) that he was ‘very glad that glorious old Tom Spence has been brought out again’. But what was happening to Tom Spence? He was developing what the Marxist historian Max Beer called ‘a thoroughly honest, proletarian and consistent character’ (Social Struggles and Thought 1750-1860). Thomas Spence, dismissed and impoverished in his lifetime, was being recognised, but as what? Spence was praised because his thought ‘can justly be regarded as leading onto Marx’ (as William Stafford put it, in Socialism, Radicalism and Nostalgia). We meet a similar Spence in E.P.Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class : an embryonic working-class militant, a crude prototype, impressively dogged yet prevented from gaining political maturity (a.k.a. Marxism) by an ‘inadequate’ ‘preoccupation with agrarian socialism’ and that baffling nostalgia for organic community that Thompson (like Marx) casts as the Achilles heel of English popular radicalism.

Others were less generous. Spence was a matter-of-fact radical: his ‘Plan’ was a practical fix, a remedy for a broken society. The elaborate verbiage of Marxism, which places so much emphasis on abstract economic ideas, is a far cry from his practical, sociable invective. Marxism encouraged an elevation of theory and the ability to theorise within radical life. By this measure Spence was ‘a poor creature of little capacity and less gifts’ (Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition), with ‘little practical bearing on the contemporary development of British radical or working-class thought’ (G.D.H.Cole, Socialist Thought).

Thus, Spence is misappropriated and dismissed in similar terms. Once one has cast his political beliefs as a kind of primitive fumbling towards the true light of proletarian consciousness, it becomes a matter of personal taste whether to patronise him (‘glorious old Tom Spence’) or dismiss him (‘a poor creature’).

The most diligent attempt made to pull Spence into a Marxist lineage was by Mary Kemp-Ashraf, an English communist historian who died in the GDR (i.e., the former East Germany) in 1983. The year she died, Kemp-Ashraf’s marvellously detailed little book The Life and Times of Thomas Spence, was published by Frank Graham, in Newcastle. Kemp-Ashraf had been a researcher at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism in Moscow, where she undertook a study on the history of black radicals in Britain. She then moved to a university post in the GDR. Her most well known work is The History of English Working-Class Literature. A number of Marxist historians in the USSR were already familiar with Spence: he was a part of an existing debate on the origins of revolutionary communist consciousness. Kemp-Ashraf was challenging the view associated with V. P. Volgin (1928) that Spence was an egalitarian but not a socialist (because he did not reject private property in anything other than land).

With Kemp-Ashraf we have finally arrived at the end of our journey. Here is Spence being put to work to legitimise authoritarian state socialism. It is a depressing lesson in how even the most prickly and oppositional views can be absorbed and neutralised. Kemp-Ashraf knew Spence’s work inside out. But she remained determined to see him as blessing her own political journey. Thus she fills in holes in Spence’s account, such as the ownership of non-agricultural industry, with her own conjecture:

This is not innocent academic inventiveness. It is the kind of history the authorities in the USSR/GDR needed, expected and duly got.

But Spence will always disappoint this kind of analysis. Indeed, there is an undertow of frustration in Kemp-Ashraf’s attempts to corral him. For Spence is not a good enough proto-Marxist; he is too wild in his determination to bang on about freedom, liberty and democracy, too localist, too contemptuous of authority. Kemp-Ashraf expresses a certain disappointment with her would-be hero:

Spence tries to ‘articulate’ but he can’t; he’s unfinished, ill formed, not really ‘one of us’. But he is a taunting figure. And between the lines I’d hazard a guess that Kemp-Ashraf didn’t want him to entirely fit into the GDR’s state sanctioned socialism. Between the lines was how criticism expressed itself in that society. Perhaps, then, Kemp-Ashraf was using Spence to voice criticism of the regime in the GDR. What a sad end for Spence. From being ‘ as free as a cat’ to being flattened out to fit tiny, uncertain, millimetres of freedom.

The attempt to appropriate Spence’s name must be judged a failure. Even Kemp-Ashraf’s diligent attempts seem to prove that Spence is as at least as much a challenge as a forerunner to state socialism. In the first decade of the twenty-first century Spence stands unscathed by the grandest narrative of the last hundred years, the rise and fall of Soviet communism. Today just over 30% of the world’s population live in countries run at one time or another by Marxist regimes. Marxist government has been tried a hundred times over. People are no longer prepared to listen to the drone of balcony hogging revolutionaries. But they are also sick of capitalism and wage-slavery. It is time we tried to hear Spence’s voice uncluttered by the debris of subsequent theorists and state-makers. It can be hard going. For his voice is travelling from a long way away and we don’t quite catch everything he says. Some of the things he is talking about refer to ideas and practices so old, so forgotten, that they seem to have nothing to do with our lives. But other parts are coming through loud and clear. Common ownership of the land and local democracy are ideas as radical today as when Spence first offered them. Indeed, in many ways, people need these ideas now more than ever. We have little sense of control over our own localities; indeed, many of us have little sense of connection to anything beyond our immediate family circle. Reading Spence can remind us what we are missing and what liberty and democracy might look like.

Spence tokens

'THE BEGINNING OF OPPRESSION, CAIN ABEL'

'BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, 1795'

(the Bastille?, imprisoned man playing pipe)

flip side: 'AFTER THE REVOLUTION'

(with tree of liberty)

The Town Moor

Newcastle upon Tyne

The battle to save the Moor in 1771 from enclosure was Spence's first taste of political conflict. His life-long conviction that common property can be defended was established at this time. In later life he recalled that he ‘took a lesson’ from the Town Moor affair ‘which I shall never forget’.