Guy Aldred: bridging the gap between Marxism and Anarchism

This article examines the political thought of the socialist campaigner, Guy Aldred, in order to reflect on divisions between anarchism and social democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aldred’s thought drew on a diverse range of ideas and he labelled this rich synthesis communism. Believing that his position captured the best of Marxist and anarchist traditions, he argued that socialist factionalism was based on a distortion of Marx’s work and that the relationship between Marxism and anarchism was properly understood as one between the head and heart of the movement. His claim not only subsumed the anarchist critique of social democracy into Marxism, it also relied on a system of classification which undercut the creative tensions in his political thinking.