Better than most others I’ve seen in England. You remember a couple of years back they would all just slouch along anyhow and with only the haziest idea of how to sing or shout slogans. Well today they are much better. And besides, one sees a much better representation of normal working class people in Left-Wing demonstrations, where before they would be a combination of intellectuals, and as often as not, lumpenproletariat. That what mass-basis can mean.
London May Day march 1937 to Hyde Park in solidarity with the Spanish Republicans. Organised by the Labour Party.
Extract from Richard Evans biography of Eric Hobsbawm.
The picture is of Emma Goldman at the Hyde Park demonstration on May Day 1937. She was a well known anarchist, who Hobsbawm at this point seems to have regarded as an annoying distraction at best in the Spanish Civil War. He wrote ‘apparently these anarchists are starting troubles in Catalonia’
George Orwell had other ideas on that.
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