Rudolf Rocker
Rudolf Rocker | |
|---|---|
 Rocker c. 1930 | |
| Born | Johann Rudolf Rocker March 25, 1873 |
| Died | September 19, 1958 (aged 85) Mohegan Colony, New York, U.S. |
| Notable work | |
Political party | Social Democratic Party[a] |
| Spouse | Milly Witkop |
| Children | Fermin Rocker |
| Parent(s) | Georg Philipp Rocker Ann Naumann |
| This article is part of a series on |
| Anarchism in Germany |
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Johann Rudolf Rocker (German: [ˈʁɔkɐ]; March 25, 1873 – September 19, 1958) was a German anarchist writer and activist. He was born in Mainz to an artisan family.
His father died when he was a child, and his mother when he was in his teens, so he spent some time in an orphanage. As a youth he worked as a cabin boy on river boats and was then apprenticed as a typographer. He became involved in trade unionism and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) before coming under the influence of anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. With other libertarian socialist youth, he was expelled from the SPD, and his anarchist activism led to him fleeing Germany for Paris, where he came into contact with syndicalist and anarchist ideas and practices. In 1895, he moved to London. Apart from brief spells in Liverpool and elsewhere, he remained in East London for most of the next two decades, acting a key figure in the Yiddish-language anarchist scene there, including editing the Arbeter Fraynd periodical, publishing the key thinkers of anarchism, and organising strikes in the garment industry. In London, he formed a life partnership with Milly Witkop, a Ukraine-born anarchist from a Jewish background. During World War I, he was interned as an enemy alien and at the end of the war he was deported to the Netherlands.
In the 1920s, he was mainly based in Germany, where he was one of the architects of the syndicalist Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD) and its organ Der Syndikalist and a founder of the International Workers' Association (IWA). He became increasingly concerned with the rise of nationalism and fascism (he began work on his magnum opus Nationalism and Culture in this period) and left Germany in 1933 for the United States. In the US, he was active with the Yiddish Freie Arbeiter Stimme group, and was particularly involved in libertarian education and in solidarity with the Spanish Revolution against its fascist and Stalinist enemies. His classics Nationalism and Culture and Anarcho-Syndicalism were published in the 1930s. Having opposed both sides in First World War, as an anti-fascist he supported the Allies in the Second World War. After the war, he published Pioneers of American Freedom, a series of essays detailing the history of liberal and anarchist thought in the United States, seeking to debunk the idea that radical thought was foreign to American history and culture and had merely been imported by immigrants.[1]
Early life
[edit]Rudolf Rocker was born to the lithographer Georg Philipp Rocker (1845–1877) and his wife Anna Margaretha née Naumann (1849–1887, daughter of Heinrich Naumann) as one of their four children, in Mainz, Hesse (now Rhineland-Palatinate), Germany, on March 25, 1873. (His siblings were Philipp, 1870–1873; Catharina Barbara, 20 March 1870 – 3 April 1870; and Friedrich, b. 1877). This Catholic, yet not particularly devout, family had a democratic and anti-Prussian tradition dating back to Rocker's grandfather, who participated in the March Revolution of 1848. When Georg Philipp died in 1877, just four years after Rocker's birth, the family managed to evade poverty primarily through the massive support by his mother's family.[2]
In October 1884, the Rocker household was joined by his mother's new husband Ludwig Baumgartner. This marriage presented Rudolf with a half-brother, Ernest Ludwig Heinrich Baumgartner, with whom Rocker did not maintain close contact. [3] Rocker's mother died in February 1887. After his stepfather remarried soon thereafter, Rocker was put into an orphanage.[4]
Rudolf Rocker, disgusted by the unconditional obedience demanded by the Catholic orphanage and drawn by the prospect of adventure, ran away from the orphanage twice. The first time he just wandered around in the woods around Mainz with occasional visits to the city to forage for food and was retrieved after three nights. The second time, which was at the age of fourteen and a reaction to the orphanage wanting him to be apprenticed as a tinsmith,[5] he worked as a cabin-boy for Köln-Düsseldorfer Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft. He enjoyed leaving his hometown and traveling to places like Rotterdam. After he returned, he started an apprenticeship to become a typographer like his uncle Carl.[6]
Early politics
[edit]Rocker's uncle, Carl Rudolf Naumann, had a substantial library consisting of socialist literature of all colors. Rocker was particularly impressed by the writings of Constantin Frantz, a federalist and opponent of Bismarck's centralized German Empire; Eugen Dühring, an anti-Marxist socialist, whose theories had some anarchist aspects; novels like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; as well as the traditional socialist literature such as Karl Marx's Capital and Ferdinand Lasalle and August Bebel's writings.[7] Rocker became a socialist and regularly discussed his ideas with others. His employer became the first person he converted to socialism.[8]
Under the influence of his uncle, he joined the SPD and became active in the typographers' labor union in Mainz. He volunteered in the 1890 electoral campaign, which had to be organized in semi-clandestinity because of continuing government repression, helping the SPD candidate Franz Jöst retake the seat for the district Mainz-Oppenheim in the Reichstag. Because the seat was heavily contested, important SPD figures like August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Georg von Vollmar, and Paul Singer visited the town to help Jöst and Rocker had a chance to see them speak.[9]
In 1890, there was a major debate in the SPD about the tactics it would choose after the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws. A radical oppositional wing known as Die Jungen (The Young Ones) developed. While the party leaders viewed the parliament as a means of social change, Die Jungen thought it could at best be used to spread the socialist message. Unwilling to wait for the collapse of capitalist society which Marxism predicted, they wanted to start a revolution as soon as possible. Although this wing was strongest in Berlin, Magdeburg, and Dresden, it also had a few adherents in Mainz, among them Rudolf Rocker.
In May 1890, he started a reading circle, named Freiheit (Freedom), to study theoretical topics more intensively. After Rocker criticized Jöst and refused to retract his statements, he was expelled from the party. Nonetheless, he remained active and even gained influence in the socialist labor movement in Mainz. Although he had already encountered anarchist ideas as a result of his contacts to Die Jungen in Berlin, his conversion to anarchism did not take place until the International Socialist Congress in Brussels in August 1891. He was heavily disappointed by the discussions at the congress, as it, especially the German delegates, refused to explicitly denounce militarism. He was rather impressed by the Dutch socialist and later anarchist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, who attacked Liebknecht for his lack of militancy. Rocker got to know Karl Höfer, a German active in smuggling anarchist literature from Belgium to Germany. Höfer gave him Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State and Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Morality, two of the most influential anarchist works, as well as the newspaper Autonomie.[10]
Rocker maintained that political rights originated towards the individual, rather than government as the collective that maintained personal freedoms. This view would later influence him into becoming an anarchist. Rudolf wrote on political rights:
Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labor as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance. Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like have long existed, governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by juridical hair-splitting. 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. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution.
— Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory & Practice, 1947[11]
Rocker became convinced that the source of political institutions is an irrational belief in a higher authority, as Bakunin claimed in God and the State. However, Rocker rejected the Russian's rejection of theoretical propaganda and his claim that only revolutions can bring about change. Nevertheless, he was very much attracted by Bakunin's style, marked by pathos, emotion, and enthusiasm, designed to give the reader an impression of the heat of revolutionary moments. Rocker even attempted to emulate this style in his speeches, but was not very convincing. Kropotkin's anarcho-communist writings, on the other hand, were structured logically and contained an elaborate description of the future anarchist society. The work's basic premise, that an individual is entitled to receive the basic means of living from the community independently of his or her personal contributions, impressed Rocker.[12]
In October 1891, all Die Jungen were either expelled from the SPD or left voluntarily. They then founded the Union of Independent Socialists (VUS). Rocker became a member and founded a local section in Mainz, mostly active in distributing anarchist literature smuggled in from Belgium or the Netherlands in the city. He was a regular speaker at labor union meetings. On December 18, 1892, he spoke at a meeting of unemployed workers. Impressed by Rocker's speech, the speaker that followed Rocker, who was not from Mainz and therefore did not know at what point the police would intervene, advised the unemployed to take from the rich, rather to starve. The meeting was then dissolved by the police. The speaker was arrested, while Rocker barely escaped. He decided to flee Germany to Paris via Frankfurt. He had, however, already been toying with the idea of leaving the country, in order to learn new languages, get to know anarchist groups abroad, and, above all, to escape conscription.[13]
Paris
[edit]In Paris, Rocker first came into contact with Jewish anarchism. In Spring 1893, he accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of Jewish anarchists, and was profoundly impressed by their ideas. Though neither a Jew by birth nor by belief, he subsequently frequented the group's meetings, eventually holding lectures himself. Solomon Rappaport, later known as S. Ansky, allowed Rocker to live with him, as they were both typographers and could share Rappaport's tools. During this period, Rocker also first came into contact with the blending of anarchist and syndicalist ideas represented by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), which would influence him in the long term. In 1895, as a result of the anti-anarchist sentiment in France, Rocker traveled to London to visit the German consulate and examine the possibility of his returning to Germany but was told he would be imprisoned upon return.[14]
London
[edit]First years in London
[edit]Rocker decided to stay in London. He was employed as the librarian of the Communist Workers' Educational Union, where he met Louise Michel and Errico Malatesta, two influential anarchists. Inspired to visit the quarter after reading about "Darkest London" in the works of John Henry Mackay, he was appalled by the poverty he witnessed in the predominantly Jewish East End. He joined the Jewish anarchist Arbeter Fraint group he had obtained information about from his French comrades, quickly becoming a regular lecturer at its meetings. There, he met his lifelong companion Milly Witkop, a Ukrainian-born Jew who had fled to London in 1894. In May 1897, having lost his job and with little chance of re-employment, Rocker was persuaded by a friend to move to New York. Witkop agreed to accompany him and they arrived on the 29th. They were, however, not admitted into the country, because they were not legally married. They refused to formalize their relationship. Rocker explained that their "bond is one of free agreement between my wife and myself. It is a purely private matter that only concerns ourselves, and it needs no confirmation from the law." Witkop added: "Love is always free. When love ceases to be free it is prostitution." The matter received front-page coverage in the national press. The Commissioner-General of Immigration, the former Knights of Labor President Terence V. Powderly, advised the couple to marry to settle the matter, but they refused and were deported back to England on the same ship they had arrived on.[15]
Unable to find employment upon return, Rocker decided to move to Liverpool. A former Whitechapel comrade of his persuaded him to become the editor of a recently founded Yiddish weekly newspaper called Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word), even though he did not speak the language at the time. The newspaper only appeared for eight issues, but it led the Arbeter Fraint group to re-launch its eponymous newspaper and invite Rocker to return to the capital and take over as its editor.[16]
Although it received some funds from Jews in New York, the journal's financial survival was precarious from the start. Many volunteers helped by selling the paper on street corners and in workshops. During this time, Rocker was especially concerned with combating the influence of Marxism and historical materialism in London's Jewish labor movement. In all, the Arbeter Fraint published twenty-five essays by Rocker on the topic, the first ever critical examination of Marxism in Yiddish, according to William J. Fishman. Arbeter Fraint's unsound financial footing also meant Rocker rarely received the small salary promised to him when he took over the journal and he depended financially on Witkop. Despite Rocker's sacrifices, the paper was forced to cease publication due to lack of funds. In November 1899, the prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman visited London and Rocker met her for the first time. After hearing of the Arbeter Fraint's situation she held three lectures to raise funds, but that was not enough.[17]
Not wanting to be left without any means of propaganda, Rocker founded the Germinal in March 1900. Compared to Arbeter Fraint, it was more theoretical, applying anarchist thought to the analysis of literature and philosophy. It represented a maturation of Rocker's thinking towards Kropotkin-ite anarchism and would survive until March 1903. 1902 saw the London Jews being targeted by a wave of anti-alien sentiment, while Rocker was away for a year in Leeds. Upon return in September, he was happy to see the Jewish anarchists had kept the Arbeter Fraint organization alive. A conference of all Jewish anarchists of the city on December 26 decided for a re-launch of the Arbeter Fraint newspaper as the organ of all Jewish anarchists in Great Britain and Paris and made Rocker the editor. The first issue appeared on March 20, 1903. Following the Kishinev pogrom in the Russian Empire, Rocker led a demonstration in solidarity with the victims, the largest ever gathering of Jews in London. Afterwards he traveled to Leeds,