You hardly hear anything from the American workers, let alone the American labor movement. Because they no longer exist? Or because the media are silent about them? Half and half, one might think. The offensive of neoliberalism and the shameful defeat of real socialism has brought the working people to their knees not only in the United States of America. It is all the more important, at least for those who are not satisfied with this, to question historical experiences, successes and disappointments, mistakes and errors, to remember and review former heroic struggles. Also to draw strength and confidence for new, undoubtedly imminent struggles.
The book by Anatole Dolgoff, born in 1937, son of the well-known US anarchists Sam and Esther Dolgoff, grew up under and with the Wobblies, as the members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in Chicago in 1905, make a contribution to this. call. “The old wobblies I knew as a child told of those battles that raged across the US countryside – in the mines, logging camps, factories, wheatfields and docks of a bitterly divided nation.” Anatole Dolgoff is proud being born into a revolutionary family and raised in a revolutionary tradition. And he is proud that his father gave him the middle name »Durruti« after the leader of an anarchist column in the Spanish War, who fell during the Battle of Madrid in November 1936.
It goes without saying that the tragic Spanish chapter is not missing in this book. The author’s father had already packed his suitcase in 1936 to fight on the Iberian Peninsula against the Franco putschists supported by Hitler and Mussolini and was ready to meet the first-born three-year-old son Abe and the second offspring, Anatole, who was just seeing the light of day. to leave behind. But the comrades said his battleground was in the USA: “You can do more good here.” Sam Dolgoff complied, but of course from afar, when the like-minded comrades in Spain tackled the idea of the libertarian, despite the civil war To make communism real. An offensive that was fiercely controversial then and now. According to Anatole Dolgoff, the ringing of the death knell for the anarchist revolution in Spain was initiated by the anarchists’ alliance with the republican government. The bloody fratricidal struggles in Barcelona in May 1937 – a warning sign. Anatole Dolgoff accuses the western democracies of not having intervened to save the Spanish Republic, but also notes: “The real betrayal of the Spanish Revolution was committed by Stalin and his followers.” The interbrigadists, including the US The Lincoln Brigade, and the Communists in general, have been severely criticized. Anatole Dolgoff writes about the author Ernest Hemingway: “He hid in the best hotel in Madrid, was surrounded by Stalinist functionaries – and they requisitioned the best wine.” Nevertheless, the author ultimately pays tribute to all those who died in Spain in the defensive fight against the advancing fascism.
This book is partly an autobiography with frank confessions and expressions, partly a biography of the turbulent, stormy life of a legend among the Wobblies and also an exciting history book, a panorama of the political, ideological, social and armed struggles in the 20th century, with a focus, of course on the USA, with the whole world in view.
The account of his father Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990) begins with a childhood memory stroll through the Lower East Side, the immigrant district of New York, melting pot of cultures and religions. His father, who was born in Ostrowski’s “shtetl” in Vitebsk, Russia, came to America with his parents in 1905 and had to contribute to the family income at the age of eight. “From an early age Sam rebelled against the life that was destined for him,” writes the son. Sam Dolgoff ran away at the age of 13. After months of uncertainty, his parents received a postcard from China, where he was employed as a migrant worker. Anatole Dolgoff quotes an old wobbly song: “My Wandering Boy” (My Wandering Boy – Lamentation of a Mother). The aim of the Wobblies was “to stir up the flames of discontent”, to organize the poor, the oppressed, people who had no voice in society, into an effective fighting force, emphasizes Anatole Dolgoff.
In 1922, his father, a painter by trade, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, of which he remained a member for his entire life. He was a co-founder of the journal Libertarian Labor Review, which was later renamed the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review. In the 1920s he was also a member of the Chicago Free Society and the Vanguard group, whose magazine »Vanquard. A Journal of Libertarian Communism «he published. In 1954 Sam Dolgoff was one of the founders of the Libertarian League in New York. The self-taught working-class intellectual was a passionate, rousing speaker, organizer and publicist. His memoirs »Fragments. A Memoir “(2011 in German under the title” Anarchist Fragments. Memoirs of an American Anarcho-Syndicalist “) were criticized even by former comrades-in-arms. The son doesn’t seem too happy about these memoirs either. And so in 2016 the book “Left of the Left” was published from his pen as an enrichment and in part also a correction, brought to the market in German this year by the Graswurzel publishing house. It is an homage to the parents, their friends and comrades-in-arms, the wobblies – which, however, does not omit contradictions, rifts, divisions and weaknesses. The son suffered from the absence of his father, who was involved in political work, and from his sometimes violent excesses of alcohol. However, in old age he learned to understand him and to forgive him.
The book ends with an encounter with Welsh miners, whose strike in May 1984 brought British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher down with brutal police violence and whom “Old Sam” spontaneously, right fist clenched, offered a “serenade” of encouragement. He sang an old English strike song: “Hold on, because we’re coming, union men, be strong!” – “The room exploded,” recalls Anatole Dolgoff.
Anatole Dolgoff: Left of the Left. Sam Dolgoff and the radical US labor movement. Verlag Graswurzelrevolution, 414 pp., Br., € 24.90.
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