from Facebook
A joint book talk by:
Anatole Dolgoff, author of Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff (AK Press, 2016)
and
Andrew Cornell, author of Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century (University of California Press, 2016)
Sam Dolgoff, a house painter by trade, was at the center of American anarchism for seventy years. His political voyage began in the 1920s when he joined the Industrial Workers of the World. He rode the rails as an itinerant laborer, bedding down in hobo camps and mounting soapboxes in cities across the United States. Self-educated, he translated, edited, and wrote some of the most important books and journals of twentieth-century anti-authoritarian politics, including the most widely read collection of Mikhail Bakunin’s writings in English.
Yet the movement changed in important ways during Sam’s long tenure, as anarchists engaged with events and social forces such as the rise of the welfare state, atomic warfare, the black freedom struggle, and a succession of youth countercultures. Unruly Equality explains how anarchism evolved from the creed of poor immigrants militantly opposed to capitalism early in the twentieth century to one that today sees resurgent appeal among middle-class youth and foregrounds activism around ecology, feminism, and opposition to cultural alienation.
Bringing together first-hand recollections and archival research, Antaole Dolgoff and Andrew Cornell illuminate a crucial, but little known, chapter in the history of radical politics.
[October 15 from 7PM to 9PM at Wooden Shoe Books 704 South St]
