Left History (E-Journal - York University)
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The General Strike and the Specter of Anarchism in the German “Mass Strike Debate”
Full text linkIn the quarter century before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, German Social Democrats engaged in strenuous disputes about the most effective forms of political action. Central to this debate was the question of the utility of the “political mass strike,” a widespread work stoppage intended to achieve a political rather than an economic end, and potentially also to heighten workers’ consciousness of their political power. An aspect of the mass strike debate that has received less systematic attention is the role of anti-anarchist rhetoric, in particular regarding the “general strike,” in shaping the development of this intra-party conflict. Throughout the mass strike debate, German Social Democrats frequently came to explain their own ideology through the prism of their antipathy to anarchism. In associating the political mass strike with the anarchist general strike, Social Democratic reformists stigmatized the radicals in their own ranks who advocated the cultivation of workers’ revolutionary sentiments. On the other side, proponents of the political mass strike, such as Rosa Luxemburg, accused party moderates of succumbing, like anarchists, to a bourgeois mindset. Thus, throughout the Social Democrats’ mass strike debate, the accusation that one’s opponents adhered to an anarchist deviation from correct Marxist thought served as a tool to delegitimize their perspective. Insisting on the complete irrationality and folly of anarchists, and attributing to Socialist opponents those same failures, made the conflict sharper and more acrimonious, and less amenable to resolution, as it went to core issues of socialist identity
Emma Goldman and the United States: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship
Full text linkEmma Goldman had a love-hate relationship with the United States. While she was radicalized there after her arrival as an immigrant who had left Czarist Russia in her teens, the female anarchist spent years fighting the state and its government for more freedom and equality. The First World War witnessed the climax of this struggle, and Goldman’s support for the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution turned her into a prominent target of new laws that would be used to expel her from the US. Afterward, she experienced the “Soviet utopia” and lived in many European countries. Goldman lectured there about the American anarchist movement, US capitalism, and the failure of the workers to challenge capitalism. The present article follows the history and the development of this special love-hate relationship and thereby not only provides a detailed evaluation of Goldman’s genesis as a radical anarchist in its American context, but also highlights the overlap between biographical history, the history of anarchism in the United States, and global migration experiences in the first third of the 20th century, as they were brought together and influenced by transnational events, i.e. the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and its consequences
Radical Americas: A Hemispheric History of the Left
Full text linkThis article argues that a transnational methodological approach is crucial to understanding the development of the radical Left across the hemisphere throughout the twentieth century. Historical accounts of the Left in the Americas typically divide their subject according to temporal, geographic, and ideological boundaries. This approach accentuates ruptures and ideological divisions while underemphasizing underlying continuities and broader historical trends. By synthesizing a hemispheric history of the Left in a new periodization that stretches from early regional anarchist networks through the rise and fall of the Pink Tide, this article demonstrates how a transnational approach enables a richer understanding of the historical developments underlying recent social movements and political upheavals. An emphasis on transnational networks encourages readers to identify not with our imperialist government but rather with alternative histories of grassroots solidarity and cooperation across borders. This framework provides a mode of engagement that decenters the importance of nation-states and focuses instead on the actions of ordinary people struggling to build a new world
How to Remake the World: The Radical Life of Francis Jennings
Full text linkThis article places the historian Francis Jennings’ life in political history. Before becoming a professional historian, Jennings was a high school history teacher and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. The connective tissue that bound Jennings’ high school teaching career to his career as a professional historian was not the history, but a politics of anti-racism. This article argues that Jennings’ experiences with Communism and anti-Communism yielded a distinct orientation to historical craft as a politics of truth. A crucial consequence of Jennings’ experiences as a Party member, a high school teacher, a teachers' union president, and a HUAC casualty was a coming-around to a belief widely held by anti-communists: that one could not be a Communist and a professional intellectual at the same time. Being a historian meant repudiating something that Communism and anti-Communism had in common: the insistence by authorities—governmental and revolutionary—that politics could not be meaningfully separated from any other facet of life. Jennings’ willingness to toe the Party line and his subsequent HUAC testimony led him to see politics as a realm of lies and deceit. He projected this viewpoint into his academic work, through his accusations of deceitfulness and racism in the historians whose work he criticized and the historical figures on whom he cast judgment. In making this case, this article complicates standard narratives about both American Communists and the “radical” American historians of the twentieth century who broke with consensus history
Rachel Emma Rothschild, Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019)
Full text linkBook Review of Rachel Emma Rothschild, Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019
Fenians Over the Niagara: Irish Nationalism and Rebellion in Nineteenth Century Buffalo, NY
Full text linkAfter the American Civil War, the United States faced yet another political crisis. Rather than being caused by slavery, this crisis was brought about by an international radical political group: the Fenians. Famous in the annals of Irish history, the Fenians were the embodiment of pro-independence radical Irish politics during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Moreover, the Fenians found popularity among America’s newly arrived Irish inhabitants. In 1866, years of fund raising, meeting, and planning culminated when a group of roughly two-thousand Irish-Americans crossed the Niagara River from Buffalo, NY to Fort Erie, Canada with the goal of seizing the Welland Battery, and Fort Erie itself. This invasion, which was meant to help bring about Irish independence by capturing British-controlled Canada, failed. While some escaped, those captured in Canada were tried for their crimes and sentenced to either imprisonment to execution. American Fenians who escaped into American territory continued their efforts into the 1880s.
These little-known events represent the degree to which Irish political culture crossed the Atlantic and thrived among the American-Irish. This study examines radical Irish political activity in Buffalo, NY in the decades before the Fenian Raids, and analyses their aftermath. While studies of American immigrant political culture are most often concerned with organized labor and political graft, Irish immigrants saw themselves as a part of a larger international “Irish Nation,” and saw little conflict between their dual identities, and used their geographic proximity to a major British territory to their advantage