when speaking in generalizations about populations, the existence of exceptions is not much of an argument against the generalization. any generalization about "the poor" — or "the rich" or "MAGA" — will have counterexamples except to the degree they're excluded by definition of the category.
Poor French people turned out for anarchy during the Paris Commune, poor Ukrainians were anarchists fighting the Red army during the Russian revolution, and poor Spaniards fought against Franco during their civil war. Chesterton is misusing the word "anarchy" when what he means is chaos.
It's not an exception; anarcho-syndicalism was a workers' movement in Chesterton's lifetime. People project Trump-era demographic crosstabs into an era when to a good approximation the working class was socialist, communist, or anarchist, and the middle class was liberal or fascist.
note that Chesterton's generalization is explicitly not about socialist or communist, only anarchist. his claim is that the poor want government, not anarchy. socialism and communism are both mostly strongly archic tendencies.
it may have been (i don't know enough to say), but that doesn't get at the question. if it was a small movement, if a sliver of the working class constituted the whole of the movement, the generalization may hold. 1/
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