Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

138 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Ben Tillet, was prevailed upon to become one of the vice-presidents. The inaugural meeting of the League was held on August 14th 1936 when its purpose was announced: “to implement the logical purpose of the Trade Unions: namely, the total abolition of the wage system, and the ensuing change in status . . . of all those engaged in industrial production.”®* This was to be achieved by vesting formal ownership of the means of production “in the Crown and the People through the House of Commons, with actual control of the production processes residing in the industrial guilds which would be represented in a new Economic Chamber to be known as the House of Industry.”8>

During the Autumn of 1936 and the Spring of 1937 the League established itself as an active pressure group oriented particularly towards influencing trade unionists. Weekend conferences were organised, weekly lecturediscussion meetings were held in London, provincial groups were established, and articles placed in the trade union press. Office accommodation was obtained in the National Trade Union Club in New Oxford Street where the secretary, Arthur Peacock, was later to become secretary of the League.

Although Peacock had read Mitrinovi¢’s articles in the pages of New Britain it was at the Trade Union Congress in 1936 that he was first approached by “this far-seeing, yet rather perplexing man,” as he was later to describe Mitrinovic. “I want to know Arthur Peacock. Not the journalist who is secretary of the National Trade Union Club, but Arthur Peacock, who wears the big black sombrero and red tie.’ Once again, Mitrinovi¢ was fishing for a new ally, someone with access to circles not normally open to Serbian exiles or to the young people who had been attracted to him and his ideas through the New Britain movement and who did most of the mundane administrative work of the League. As with most people upon whom he turned his charm, Mitrinovi¢ made.a lasting impression upon Peacock who, like so many others before him, could not help but notice the strange uses to which he adapted the English language and the speed with which he rushed from one subject to another in his discourse. “Until all of us,’ Mitrinovié informed Peacock, “working for the new order of man understand each other completely, until we know each other in every relationship, are prepared to accept one another whole-heartedly and to share all we have, pooling our resources for the common good, we shall achieve just nothing . . . In politics everyone lives to cut the other fellow’s throat. The new order of man demands new ways, new standards, new ideas. You must bring the new spirit of personal alliance into your unions, your General Council, otherwise your leaders will be like the old leaders, your party like the old parties, and all of you will be no better than the people you condemn.”*’