Talk:Dorothy Day

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Áthe phrase "initially Marxist, became Catholic in 1927" is problematic. She was a member of IWW- more anarchistic than Marxist. "Initially" seems to indicate she had to leave this position to become Catholic- a problematic position.

Dorothy Day wa a member of the Communist Party; she was a staff writer for The Masses, The Call and The Liberator, all CPUSA press organs. Also, she did leave many of the positions both the IWW and the CPUSA held, primarily their stances on religion and the role of the state. The IWW in the early 1930's wasn't nearly the anarchistic union it is today and it fell very deeply in with the communists; being the largest radical union movement in the United States at the time. Dorothy Day's positions of Distributionism and Personalism, both based in the Rerum Novarum, reject the communist ideals out of hand as another version of worker suppression, and rejected the IWW for its support of the Communist Party. So, no, this is not problematic so much as it is true. --TheGrza 11:12, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

I was under the impression that, for most of her life, Day was an anarcho-pacifist. My source for this is "Demanding the Impossible" by Peter Marshall, a book on the history of anarchism. There are various bios on the net which describe her as an anarchist -- she is cited in Wikipedia's article on Christian anarchism. -- james

I'm not sure what that means. --TheGrza 22:39, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

She was a communist in fact, for most of her life, and only converted to Christianity in end of her life.

This is patently, absolutely, utterly false. Why on earth would anyone even suggest such a thing? 38.2.108.125 20:45, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Shut up and leave, troll. Few pages actually offend me in their vandalism, this being one of them. Piss off somewhere else if you insist on failing to contribute something useful to life.--TheGrza 13:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

I'll offer that some of the comments by TheGrza above seem accurate to me. However, one comment is, in my view, simply wrong. Since their annual convention in 1908 — the one at which Socialist Labor Party head Daniel DeLeon was apprised of how unwelcome were his feuds with the Socialist Party, and his attempts to dominate the IWW as a recruiting ground for the SLP — the IWW has constitutionally prohibited any support in the name of the union, or using any union funds, for any political party. This remains true to the present. The notion that the IWW supported the Communist Party is simply incorrect, it has never happened. (Support for rank and file unionized workers who happened to be organized by communists was a different matter-- the IWW has always tried to support all workers.)

Within a few months after the October Revolution, the IWW began editorializing in its newspapers that the Bolsheviks were a new group of bosses, taking power in the name of the workers. Why, you might ask? One possible reason is because the Bolsheviks "ordered" the IWW to dissolve itself, and to disperse its membership into the American Federation of Labor. Not a suggestion that is conducive to generating support, i can assure you.

In 1925, IWW organizers were killed in the Leningrad shipyards while trying to organize workers. Why would that have happened, if the IWW supported the Communist Party that by then controlled Leningrad?

In 1921, Bill Haywood Fled to Russia. And in 1924, there was a split in the IWW. Two parallel organizations were formed. As a result of the chaos caused by the split, a significant number of the IWW membership left to join the communists. That's a lot different than saying that the IWW supported the Communist Party. Richard Myers 09:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Describing her journey

To say Day was seeking more "reverence" in her life strikes me as awkward, perhaps it would be more correct to say she was looking for more spirituality in her life. Comments? - Mark Dixon 02:52, 9 September 2006 (UTC)