Anarchists

This week the talk at Kia Torah was by Jared Davidson, who spoke about Philip Josephs, a Latvian born tailor, who came to Wellington from the Gorbals of Glasgow and brought Anarchism with him. His tailor's shop, first in Cuba Street, later on the corner of Willis Street and Lambton Quay was the centre of the New Zealand Anarchist movement. Josephs imported and distributed a broad range of anarchist literature and sunk so much of his money, not to mention his time, into this  that he went bankrupt. Jared Davidson mentioned a film about American Jewish anarchists, The Free Voice of Labor, Freie Arbeiter Stimme, the Yiddish anarchist newspaper that was published in America from 1890 to 1977. By the end readership dropped to the point where the cost of producing the paper exceeded the cost of posting it out. The film, focusing on the final editorial board of the paper, the members of which, charming old people talked about the heydays of the anarchist movement. Jewish immigrants, disillusioned with the conditions they found in America, joined anarchists groups not only to fight for better working conditions, but also to find like minded Jewish immigrants with whom they could share their experiences. The children of these early Jewish anarchists became assimilated Americans, with welfare provisions they grew up with a better life than the world of the sweats shops they parents experienced and Anarchism was no longer relevant to them. These anarchists, including Philip Josephs, were all remarkable people. They worked with needles, they were tailors, they probably had little if any formal secular education, yet they read widely, they were familiar with works on philosophy, economics and politics, and they mastered the English language to such an extent that they became powerful public speakers, Philip Josephs addressing large crowds at Post Office Square. Yet they were gentle caring people, not bomb throwers like some anarchists in Russia. They believed in an ideology that advocated equality between all people, the abolition of the state, and argued that workers' collectives made for a better form of human organisation than capitalism. They were also against all war and many were persecuted during the First World War for their pacifism. There is an ironic similarity between the views of anarchists who advocated the reduction of the power of the state and that of the Tea Party advocates, yet as liberal broad minded thinkers these people were at the opposite end of the political spectrum