FRAGMENTS: A MEMOIR

by Sam Dolgoff

Personal recollections drawn from a lifetime of struggle in the cause of anarchism. SAM DOLGOFF, retired house painter, editor and translator of Bakunin on Anarchy, The Cuban A Critical Perspective, The Anarchist Workers’ Self-management in the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939), was 83 years old when he completed this Memoir. He started out in life, more than half a century earlier, as a working hobo on the railroads and waterfronts, in lumber camps, canneries, and steel mills of the United States. Caught up early in ideas of radical social change, he moved from reformist socialism to anarchism, publishing his first piece, a criticism of Gandhi, in the anarchist journal Road to Freedom. As a member of the IWW he became a strong propagandist for libertarian labor movements—incidentally teaching himself to read six different languages—lecturing across America in union halls, civic centers and colleges. Under the pen name Sam Weiner, he published innumerable articles in labor and anarchist periodicals, many of which he helped to found and edit.

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 14, 2012

About the author

Dolgoff was born in the shtetl of Ostrovno in Vitebsk, Russia, moving as a child to New York City in 1905 or 1906, 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.
After being expelled from the Young People's Socialist League, Sam joined the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1922 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 renamed 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 Vanguard: A Journal of Libertarian Communism in the 1930s, and co-founded the Libertarian League in New York in 1954. 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.
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.