Читать книгу Left of the Left - Anatole Dolgoff - Страница 4

by Andrew Cornell

Until very recently, the history of anarchism in the middle part of the twentieth century has remained frustratingly opaque. Anatole Dolgoff’s memoir of his father, Sam, and the worlds of work and activism Sam inhabited, is a unique gift in that it sheds both light and warmth on this period. Readers learn not only who knew whom and how anarchists reacted to major historical events, but also gain real insight into the emotional and family lives, the motivations and coping strategies, of a network of stalwart radicals confronting the highs and lows of the American Century.

Sam Dolgoff was a house painter, a loving husband and father, a militant labor organizer, a powerful orator, and a self-taught public intellectual. He was not, perhaps, as daring and globetrotting a figure as Emma Goldman or the subjects of some other radical biographies. To hilarious and heart-breaking effect, Anatole describes the way Carlo Tresca and other mentors talked Sam out of joining street fights with Italian-American fascists or shipping out to fight in the Spanish Revolution, owing to his poor eyesight and family responsibilities. But Sam Dolgoff was heroic in a least one respect, and that was his tenacity.

Sam stuck to his bedrock beliefs that humans were capable of cooperating with one another, managing their own affairs, and sharing earth’s wealth equitably. For seven decades he continued to express these ideas in print and speech. And he continued to show up—to demonstrations, to lightly attended forums, and to tedious meetings—even when many of his former collaborators had given up. In doing so he served as a connecting thread that stitched together generations of people invested in the project of human liberation. His willingness and ability to play this bridging role is powerfully exemplified in the story Anatole tells of Sam taking members of the countercultural Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers group to beg financial assistance from octogenarian friends of Sacco and Vanzetti in the late 1960s.

It also becomes readily apparent that Sam and his wife Esther truly lived the communal ethos they espoused. Hardly a chapter of this memoir passes without an account of old Wobblies camped out on the Dolgoffs’ living room sofa, or Sam giving away prized possessions to a new acquaintance. This spirit of selflessness is mirrored in the structure of the book, for Anatole’s portrait of his father soon spins off to recount the stories of his mother (herself a dedicated anarchist organizer), other family members, and more than a dozen fascinating revolutionaries, such as Russell Blackwell, Ben Fletcher, Dorothy Day, and Federico Arcos, whose own stories and contributions are in danger of being lost to history. The book, then, serves as the collective biography of an entire milieu, echoing the fashion in which Goldman studded her own autobiography, Living My Life, with biographical sketches of comrades and lovers.

These stories are not always rousing. We meet aging seafarers and longshoremen grown cynical and lonely following the cascading catastrophes of the Red Scare, the repressive turn in world communism, and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution. But that is part of what makes this book so fascinating; where else can one glimpse the interior life of old Wobblies still devoted to class war as they watch fellow workers embrace middle-class identities and the anarchist movement become overrun with college students? As these sections unfurled, I recognized the double entendre tucked into the book’s title; this is not only the story of a man who was more radical than many other rabble-rousers, but also an account of what remained—what was left—of the Left during the years that Anatole was growing up. That the book is, at other turns, incredibly funny testifies to the author’s skills as a writer and raconteur—especially his ear for dialogue.

Since Anatole’s narrative jumps forward and backwards in order to emphasize points and personalities, it may be useful to briefly review some context and chronology. Social anarchism emerged as a distinct tendency within the labor and socialist movements of the United States in the early 1880s, appealing primarily to immigrant laborers from eastern and southern Europe. The movement reached a peak of influence in the first two decades of the twentieth century, during Sam’s childhood and adolescence. In these years, anarchist newspapers published in English, Yiddish, Russian, Italian, and Spanish reached tens of thousands of people each month. Socialists, anarchists, and other labor militants launched the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—the organization that would long serve as Sam’s political home—in 1905, three years after he was born. It grew in size and reputation over the next decade by leading a series of historic strikes in textile, mining, and other basic industries.

Anarchism was fertile enough during the Progressive Era to encompass competing strategic tendencies. Anarcho-syndicalists saw the IWW and other radical unions as vehicles to help workers win immediate improvements while preparing for a general strike that would usher in revolution. Another group, sometimes referred to as insurrectionary anarchists, believed that unions and anarchist federations would actually hinder the process of social conflict needed for change to occur. They promoted assassination and other forms of “propaganda of the deed” that they believed would spark off mass uprisings of the oppressed. Italian anarchists influenced by Luigi Galleani proved to be the most consistent advocates of the insurrectionary strategy in the United States between 1910 and the 1940s. (Though Anatole describes these anarchists as “individualists,” I consider the clunky term anti-organizationalist more precise, since adherents advocated for a communal future.) A third group of anarchists began attracting larger numbers of native born and middle-class supporters as they turned their attention to gender equality, free speech, progressive methods of education, and art—the “transient” issues Sam and Esther debate in Chapter 19.

Most U.S. anarchists and Wobblies opposed the First World War, and faced an avalanche of repression as a result. Government officials deported leaders, suppressed newspapers, and severely curtailed immigration, drying up an important pool of working people from which the movements had historically drawn recruits. A variety of foreign language anarchist journals survived this Red Scare (or quickly reconstituted themselves in its wake), but spoke to aging constituencies as assimilation and the use of English became increasingly common for the younger generation. Small groups that conducted meetings in English emerged in a few large cities by the mid-1920s. During these years, East Coast anarchists also developed the Stelton and Mohegan colonies—intentional communities of radicals centered on “modern schools”—in which the Dolgoffs lived for a few years. Residents of the Stelton Colony launched The Road to Freedom, the first English-language anarchist newspaper of national scope to appear in the United States since the war. Sam’s first contributions to the anarchist press appeared in The Road to Freedom later in the decade.

As the boom years of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, anarchists found themselves losing ground to the Communist Party-USA in struggles to win large numbers over to their social vision and strategy for change. When The Road to Freedom ceased publication in 1932, it was replaced by two new English-language periodicals. The first was Vanguard, the anarcho-syndicalist-­oriented journal that Sam cofounded and contributed to regularly. As Anatole explains, the Vanguard Group allied with Carlo Tresca and his circle of Italian-American anarchists. The other major English-language periodical of the decade, Man!, was published in Oakland, California, by Marcus Graham—the man Anatole reveals (in Chapter 13) to have competed with Sam for Esther’s affection. Man! aligned itself with the anti-organizational, insurrectionary anarchists who published the newspaper L’Adunata dei Refretarri (loosely, The Summoning of the Unruly).

Anatole describes Marcus Graham as belonging to the “individualist-vegetarian-anti-technology school” of anarchism. In the 1930s, this was a school of one; in refusing to eat meat and critiquing the dangers of “machine society” Graham’s ideas anticipated core themes of 1990s anarchism, but placed him at odds with nearly all of his contemporaries. Despite personal rivalries and strategic disagreements, both camps spent the decade battling American fascists and building support for the Spanish anarchists, who attempted to implement a social revolution in the midst of that country’s 1936–1939 civil war.

The Second World War proved to be another turning point for the anarchist movement in the United States. After Vanguard and Man! ran aground in 1939, the Dolgoffs helped to launch the journal Why? in 1942, but withdrew from the project when the editors—some of whom had been mentored by the Vanguard Group while still in high school—took an anti-war position. As the decade progressed, anarchists associated with Why? (the title was changed to Resistance in 1947) formed alliances with radical pacifists, poets, and playwrights, including Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker group and members of the avant-garde Living Theatre troop.

This younger cohort, which included Paul Goodman and David Wieck, attempted to adapt anarchism to the rapidly changing postwar world, shifting focus from class exploitation to authoritarian social conditioning, sexual repression, racism, consumerism, and the destruction of the natural environment. Sam saw their attempts to address psychological aspects of power and to “live differently” as a self-absorbed abandonment of mass struggle; they saw him as living in the past, clinging to failed strategies. Neither approach made immediate headway in a period marked by the incorporation of the mainstream unions into the power structure, rising living standards for white workers, and intense Cold War anti-radicalism.

The Libertarian League, which the Dolgoffs founded with Russell Blackwell in 1954, kept the shaky flame of class-struggle anarchism burning in the United States. With the IWW flagging, it functioned as something of an international clearinghouse, providing U.S. Americans with translated news about the struggles of workers in South America and other places where revolutionary union federations remained mass phenomena. And it was there, able to serve as a point of connection to past struggles, when a new generation of civil rights and anti-war activists started becoming radicalized in the early 1960s.

The artist Ben Morea attended Libertarian League meetings before going on to launch the journal Black Mask in 1964 and Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers, a “street gang with an analysis,” in 1967. Through their early connections with the Situationist International, the Dutch Provos, and other countercultural militants in the United States and abroad, Morea and company served as an essential point of reference for the vast anarcho-punk culture that took shape in the 1970s. League meetings also provided stepping-stones for Murray Bookchin as he crossed over from Trotskyism to anarchism. Later in the decade, Bookchin formed the Anarchos Group, which published a journal and organized small discussion groups, as the Libertarian League had, but threw its chips in with the burgeoning ecology movement and the youth counter culture, while the Dolgoffs served as mentors to 1960s radicals eager to reinvigorate the IWW. These three tendencies, along with a distinct anarcha-feminist current that emerged in the early 1970s, shaped the complex terrain of contemporary anarchism as it developed in the final decades of the twentieth century. It is not an overstatement to say that Sam and Esther Dolgoff were crucial, directly and indirectly, to the revival of anarchism as a major vector of egalitarian struggle in the world today.

The later chapters of Left of the Left discuss Sam’s contributions to anarchist scholarship, such as his important books on Bakunin’s thought and the Spanish and Cuban revolutions. Sam taught himself to read multiple foreign languages to better understand international events and keep abreast of anarchist and labor struggles throughout the world. He penned prescient analyses of postcolonial governments, technological change, and the shortcomings of centrist labor unions, while providing crucial information to the historian Paul Avrich, to whom we owe much of what is known about pre-WWI U.S. anarchism. This production and preservation of fugitive knowledge, outside the university and other official channels, should be seen as another important form of activism, from which we, as readers, can learn and take inspiration. I am grateful that Anatole Dolgoff chose to follow in his parents’ footsteps, in this regard—to collect and protect the stories and the hard-won knowledge of earlier generations of radicals, knowing there would be a time, like now, when many people would be ready and eager to hear them.