Sam Dolgoff
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Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990) was an American anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist.[1]
Dolgoff was born in the shtetl of Ostrovsky in Vitebsk, Russia,[2] moving as a child to New York City in 1905 or 1906,[3] where he lived in the Bronx and in Manhattan's Lower East Side where he died. His father was a house painter, and Dolgoff began house painting at the age of 11, a profession he remained in his entire life.[4]
Sam joined the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1922[5] and remained an active member his entire life, playing an active role in the anarchist movement for much of the century. He was a co-founder of the Libertarian Labor Review magazine, which was later re-named Anarcho-Syndicalist Review to avoid confusion with America's Libertarian Party.
Dolgoff was a member of the Chicago Free Society Group in the 1920s, Vanguard Group member and editor of its publication Vanquard: A Journal of Libertarian Communism[6] in the 1930s, and co-founded the Libertarian League in New York in 1954.[7] He wrote articles for anarchist magazines as well as books as the editor of highly-acclaimed anthologies, some of which are listed below. He was active in many causes, and attended groups like New York's Libertarian Book Club regularly.[8]
Dolgoff, and his wife Esther, served as a link to anarchism's past to young anarchists of the 1960s and 1970s living in New York. He focused upon anarchism's (specifically anarcho-syndicalism's) roots in workers' movements and served as a moderating counterbalance to the punk-era anarchists who tended towards 'monkeywrenching' and confrontations with the police. Although Dolgoff was friends with Murray Bookchin, a notable anarchist theorist of the period, he was opposed to Bookchin's theory of Social Ecology, rooted as he was in the classical anarchist traditions of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.
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[edit] References
[edit] Sources
- Sam Dolgoff, 88, Dies; Organizer for I.W.W., New York Times, October 26, 1990. [1]
- Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, AK Press,
- Greeman, Richard. Dangerous Shortcuts and Vegetarian Sharks, ISBN 1430323078.
- Kayton, Bruce. Radical Walking Tours of New York City, Seven Stories Press, 2003, ISBN 1583225544.
- Porton, Richard. Film and the Anarchist Imagination, Verso, 1999, ISBN 1859847021.
[edit] Selected publications
- Ethics and American Unionism (1958)
- The Labor Party Illusion (1961)
- Bakunin on Anarchy (1971; revised 1980)
- The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (1974)
- The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (1974)
- A Critique of Marxism (1983)
- Fragments: A Memoir (1986, ISBN 0-946222-04-5).
[edit] External Links
An obituary and short biography of Sam Dolgoff on libcom.org
