An early British anti-fascist, her working-class voice was powerful and unique
~ Megan Williams ~
An internationalist thread went through Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s entire life and career, establishing her as a significant force in early twentieth century British socialism. She was a working-class poet, author and radical socialist (with strong libertarian leanings) active between 1907 and the early 1930s. She used literature to inspire the masses, without relying on preachy, didactic rhetoric.
She believed writing — whether in the form of journalism, poetry, or novels — could incite change as a form of praxis. She published the anti-fascist journal The Clear Light between 1923 and 1925, when the threat of fascism became a real presence in Britain. Inspired by Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome and subsequent ascension of his fascist party in Italy, the British Fascisti were founded in 1923 by Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a war hero belonging to a family of high-ranking British army officers.
Carnie Holdsworth was one of the first people to recognise this new threat and actually do something about it. She mobilised immediately, working with E Burton Dancy and her husband Alfred Holdsworth to form an anti-fascist pressure group — the National Union for Combating Fascism (NUCF) in 1924. This was the only anti-fascist group that existed outside of London at the time, testament to the foresight and international political awareness of Yorkshire-based socialists (West Yorkshire was a stronghold of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the early twentieth century). In The Clear Light, Carnie called for the alliance of Labour, communists, socialists and anarchists to combat fascism by pointing out their individual merits in an effort to get her friends and colleagues to listen to each other.
Her belief in a unified leftist force against fascism and internationalism was linked. In her early poem ‘The Universal Life’, Carnie Holdsworth stated:
Wide open stands the door of my soul
and the world’s men and women troop through
some weeping, some laughing, some dumb with despair
wearing roses and fennel and rue …
She forged an aesthetics of community relations unburdened by capitalist atomism and state tyranny. Her internationalism was emotional, as well as pragmatic: she emphasised the importance of emotional engagement with “the world’s men and women” and was open to all people in all conditions.
1923-1925 was a busy period for Carnie Holdsworth; at the same time as her NUCF activity, she wrote a series of sonnets for Freedom advocating on behalf of the political dissidents languishing in Bolshevik prisons. The number of prisons was later expanded by Joseph Stalin, who came to power after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, to form the Gulag system: corrective labour camps containing 5 million prisoners by 1935. In 1924, the Solovki prison in the White Sea housed many anarchists, and in autumn of that year a large-scale hunger strike broke out, prompting Carnie Holsdsworth to respond.
Her poetic contribution showcased the possibility of poetry as a vehicle for the promotion of internationalism. These sonnets, which contain lofty emotional outpours condemning tyranny and promoting liberty, advocated for anarchists by evoking anarchistic ideas found in their nascent form within Romantic era poetry from a century prior, such as Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’:
Who was the great Ozymandias, “king of kings”?
The desert answers with its fiery breath.
Shelley’s original poem expressed the immateriality of the clamorous claims of empires: longevity, power, and — crucially — the illusion that no alternative could possibly exist. Through evoking Shelley’s poem, Carnie Holdsworth belittles the Soviets’ attempts to suppress dissent. The Romantic period was marked by a focus on subjective experience, emotional expression and nature worship, which made it a good tool from which to critique the autocratic approach adopted by the Bolsheviks; Lenin’s vanguard socialism degenerated into dictatorship in 1924.
Carnie Holdsworth’s first sonnet in the series is her most sympathetic to anarchism:
Laughing at times to muse how those who prate
Of Liberty can think to make a cell
Strong to extinguish thy immortal flame
Unflickering in the windy gusts of hate,
Still steadfast in the ramparts of Power’s hell
Holdsworth utilised Romantic notions of freedom and liberty to express anarchist perspectives — she recognised the enemy not as capital in this instance, but ‘Power’. In a letter accompanying the sonnets, Holdsworth asserted she belonged to no political group. Instead, she declared, “I belong to the folk — from the most undeveloped and illiterate, so confused that they are the bedrock of even reaction, to Whitman and Morris, and Marx, Kropotkin, and Bakunin.”.
It is notable that she identified with poets as well as more traditional economic theorists. She understood the necessity of seeing multiple things at once: affective engagement with the suffering of individuals and practical political analysis. This capacity for complex engagement contributed to her unique and powerful voice within the socialist movement.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal
