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Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street ed. by Tom Goyens

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-7127443

1558-1454

Timothy Messer-Kruse,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

Most of the protesters who occupied Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 were unaware that just a few blocks away stood the building that once housed Johann Schwab’s saloon, arguably the historical epicenter of anarchism in America. Though the Occupy movement expressed a number of anarchist principles—a studied avoidance of leadership, a movement economy based on free sharing of resources, a radical critique of capitalism and the economic exclusion of the “99 percent,” and a levelling ethos that created “general assemblies” rather than formal organizations—few in the movement thought of themselves as following in the footsteps of anarchist forebears (222, 225). As Tom Goyens points out in his insightful and important collection of essays, Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, this was because there actually was no direct connection between the anarchists of a century earlier and the Occupy eruption. How such historical disjunction occurs and those tenuous strands that connect these eras is the arc that connects these eleven essays.Radical Gotham carries forward the field of anarchist studies’ continuing exploration of anarchism through a social and cultural lens. For most of the twentieth century, the study of anarchism was limited to the confines of intellectual history, and scholars were mostly interested in the genealogy of its ideological components. This began to change with Bruce C. Nelson’s study of the community life of Chicago’s Gilded Age anarchists and Paul Avrich’s many works that grounded the unfolding of anarchist ideas in the particulars of biography and social context. Along with many other historical topics, anarchist studies made its cultural turn after the millennium with Goyens himself contributing Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 in 2007.A cultural framing of anarchism does more than merely round out the story; it better explains the disjunctions and continuities from era to era. From the perspective of traditional intellectual history, anarchism is divided into two periods. First is the classical era extending from the 1870s to the 1930s, when intellectual giants such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin penned seminal works and fierce revolutionaries like Johann Most, August and Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, Sergey Nechayev, Luigi Galleani, and Errico Malatesta shook crowns and ministers throughout the world. Second is the period after the Nazis crushed the Spanish Republic, when anarchist newspapers and anarchist organizations died and their remnants folded into a sectarian tendency within the world communist movement. From the traditional perspective, anarchism is a relic of the late nineteenth century, but focusing on culture rather than institutions reveals the myriad ways the anarchist movement proved influential long after its classical period.In bringing together scholars of both the classic era and those uncovering hidden anarchist threads extending into the present, Goyens highlights not only the resilience of anarchist ideas, but the sharp contrast between the ethnocultural basis of early anarchism and its modern modes of expression. Four essays explore anarchist organizations rooted in New York City’s ethnic communities: Goyens on the Germans, Kenyon Zimmer on Yiddish anarchists, Marcella Bencivenni on the city’s Italian anarchists, and Christopher J. Castañeda on Brooklyn’s Spanish anarchists. As Goyens points out, anarchism was rooted in America’s immigrant communities and especially flourished in its most international city in a way that it cannot be viewed “detached from its environment.”These authors, especially Zimmer, document how anarchism grew not simply by the force of its ideas but because for many immigrants it served as a means of assimilation into American society. A steady stream of newcomers were received into ethnic enclaves where anarchist newspapers, unions, and social organizations were familiar and supportive. In addition to publishing a succession of Yiddish language newspapers, Yiddish anarchists were closely tied to garment workers unions and organized many community organizations and cooperatives. The same can be said of Italian anarchists whose union ties were famously on display during the Lawrence Strike of 1912 or the Spanish anarchists who sprung from the cigar factories of Brooklyn and Tampa. Such movements, ostensibly political and philosophical, were rooted in the integrated community life of their ethnic neighborhoods. In some cases, as Bencivenni points out, anarchist community life became so encompassing that anarchists can be viewed as a “colony within a colony.”The other essays in this volume chart how anarchism changed at mid-century, not so much as a result of ideological struggle as the traditional view holds, but as a result of the vast social changes that dismantled the urban ethnic enclaves amid the rise of America’s individualistic consumer culture. Anne Klejment examines Dorothy Day’s strong connections to earlier anarchist institutions and presents Day as a transitional figure between the old ethnic particularism and the new cultural anarchism of the Cold War. Likewise, Andrew Cornell finds in Audrey Goodfriend’s ephemeral 1940s anarchist magazine Why? and the war resistance movement swirling around it the “connective tissue” between prewar anarchism and the counterculture of the 1960s. Goodfriend and his circle illustrate well the nature of this shift, abandoning workplace and neighborhood organizing for a new emphasis on the transformative power of art and radical sexuality as does Allan Antliff’s profile of New York’s anarchist Living Theatre of the same period that steadily moved towards a “politics of ardor.”By the 1960s, this new anarchist cultural ethos became entirely unmoored from ethnicity. Anarchist movements in and after this period seemed tied to specific personalities rather than communities. The Lower East Side becomes the center of anarchist activity but not because of the immigrant communities that molded it. Rather, a succession of activists land there, from the creative troublemakers profiled by Caitlin Casey who called their collective Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, to Gordon Matta-Clark who Erin Wallace notes turned architecture on its head, and the many outcasts, rebels, and misfits described by Alan W. Moore who squatted, reclaimed, and eventually institutionalized the anarchist building dubbed “ABC NO Rio.”Summing up this kaleidoscope of movements, Heather Gautney identifies many aspects of Occupy Wall Street’s values and practices that are descended from classical anarchism, though the lines of connection are so dispersed and vaporous as to be nearly invisible. Several contributors gesture toward one powerful idea unifying the various anarchisms of both time periods, the idea of “prefiguration” that holds that radicals must live according to the values they dream of one day making universal by revolution. New York’s anarchists of each period attempted just that.