Rudolf Rocker

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Rudolf Rocker
Born March 25, 1873
Mainz, Germany
Died September 19, 1958
Mohegan, USA

Rudolf Rocker (March 25, 1873 - September 19, 1958) was an anarcho-syndicalist writer, historian and prominent activist.

Contents

[edit] Life and work

Rudolf Rocker was born in Mainz, Germany in 1873. Under the influence of his uncle, he became a socialist in his youth and joined the Social Democratic Party. He found it to be too dogmatic and was expelled from the party in 1890 for his support for a leftwing opposition group Die Jungen. In 1891, he first came in contact with anarchist ideas.

[edit] Whitechapel

He started engaging in political work in 1892, but then had to leave Germany in 1893. He emigrated to Paris, where he remained until 1895 when he moved to Whitechapel, London. He lived in the Jewish community, even though he was not himself Jewish by birth, and met his lifelong companion Milly Witcop (1877-1953). He was deeply involved in the anarchist movement in Whitechapel and even got to know Peter Kropotkin, the famous Russian anarchist theorist. He dedicated himself to the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers in London's East End. He was known as "the anarchist rabbi".

Rocker began to write for the Yiddish newspaper Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word), even though he did not speak the language at the time. He wrote in German and others translated his texts. While working for this newspaper, he learned the Yiddish language.

Later he was the editor of the newspaper Arbayter Fraynd (Workers' Friend) and briefly the theoretical magazine Germinal. Arbayter Fraynd would become the organ of a federation of Jewish anarchists, which was founded in Whitechapel in 1902. Rocker represented the federation at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907. He led the 1912 London garment workers strike.[1]

[edit] Return to Germany

Rocker opposed both sides in the First World War, he was interned as an enemy alien in 1914, and Arbeiter Fraynd was suppressed. The Jewish anarchist movement in Britain never fully recovered from these blows.

In 1918 Rocker was deported from Britain to the Netherlands and eventually returned to Germany. He became a major figure in the German and international anarcho-syndicalist movement, helping to organize the International Congress in Berlin in 1922 that lead to the formation of the International Workers Association (IWA). Rocker was opposed to anarchist support for the Bolshevik Revolution after 1917 and led the libertarian socialist opposition to the growing Nazi movement in Germany.

[edit] New York

In 1933, Rocker left Germany again to escape persecution by the new Nazi regime. Settling in the United States, he continued to work as a speaker and writer, directing his efforts against "the twin evils of Fascism and Communism". He spent the last 20 years of his life as a leading figure in the Mohegan community at Crompond, New York, and was the best-known anarchist in the country until his death. He supported the Allies in the Second World War, which caused a breach with some old comrades, but he continued to receive more admiration and affection than any veteran of the movement since Kropotkin or Malatesta.

[edit] Writing

Rocker was a very prolific speaker and writer in both Yiddish and German, and he produced a great many articles and pamphlets and several books. Many of his writings were translated into Spanish and widely circulated in Latin America, but not many appeared in English. Apart from a few pamphlets, three books were published in the United States - Nationalism and Culture (1937), an essay in literary criticism called The Six (1938) and a popular survey of Pioneers of American Freedom (1949).

Two more were published in Britain, Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), and the section of his autobiography entitled The London Years (1956). In 2004 and 2005, both books were re-published by AK Press. Some others were translated into English, but not published, like Behind Barbed Wire and Bars, an account of his internment during the First World War.

[edit] Quotes

  • "I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal." - The London Years
  • "Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal". - Anarchism: Its aims and purposes
  • "Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace". - Anarcho-Syndicalism

[edit] References

  1. ^ Fermin Rocker eastlondonhistory.com retrieved 8 September 2006

[edit] Further reading

  • East End Jewish Radicals, 1875-1914 - William J Fishman (2004)

[edit] External links

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