ABOUT THE AUTHOR
by Rob Ray
Born into a left-wing family in Mainz, Germany on March 25 1873, Johann Rudolf Rocker lost his father Georg Philipp at the age of four and was initially raised by his mother, Anna Margaretha.
Having initially relied on the support of her extended family to provide for Rocker and his two siblings, Margaretha married bookbinder Ludwig Baumgartner in 1884, but the marriage was to last only three years and she died of cancer in 1887.
Rocker, then aged 14, was moved into an orphanage after Baumgartner found a new partner but despised his surroundings and repeatedly escaped, managing to hide for six months working on a trawler before finally being returned.
He would later credit the institution’s efficient but uncaring approach as the inspiration for his political journey towards anarchism.
Heavily influenced by his uncle Carl Naumann, a Social Democratic Party (SDP) member and bookbinder with a passion for learning, Rocker himself apprenticed in the trade and joined the SDP while devouring Naumann’s extensive library.
However his politics shifted far to the left of his mentor’s and he joined an anarchist-inspired internal faction of SDP, The Youth, which was quickly expelled.
Now 17, Rocker began to travel widely following his trade and political interests, visiting Brussels for the Second International in 1891 and beginning to write for anarchist publications in 1892 – an activity which coincided with police harassment which forced him to move to Paris for two years.
In 1895 Rocker was stranded in London as he fought to avoid military service, taking lodgings in the German exile enclave on Carburton Street and immersing himself in the anarchist-leaning sphere.
He quickly grew disillusioned with the infighting of the German scene however as he was accused first of theft and then of spying and cleared in both cases – it seems likely he was the victim of attempts to dislodge him from influential roles.
In 1897 he moved to Hanbury Street as he grew closer to the Jewish socialist community, and met his lifelong partner Milly Witkop (1877-1953), a Ukranian immigrant and radical whose earnest intensity was said to be a perfect match for his ebullient personality.
A prolific writer and agitator, Witkop would co-edit a number of publications with Rocker while also independently acting as a key figure in the founding of women’s unions in Germany through the 1920s in response to a failure to tackle sexism in industry by the anarcho-syndicalist FAUD union.
Rocker, a gifted linguist, learned Yiddish and along with Witkop co-edited what were to become two of the biggest anarchist papers in London, Arbeter Fraint and Germinal.
Most notably he and Witkop agitated to improve the Jewish trade unions and were leading organisers in the pivotal tailors’ strike during the Great Unrest of 1912, helping to dismantle sweatshop labour in London’s East End.
During this time he also began to lecture and briefly helped to run an anarchist bureau to try and co-ordinate the then rapidly expanding syndicalist unions of Europe.
However their publications were shut down and the Jewish anarchist movement broken as World War I began. Rocker’s anti-war agitation saw him jailed as a German POW before his deportation in 1918.
Returning to Germany, he immediately helped found FAUD and become a key agitator against anarchist involvement with the newly-minted USSR, warning that Russia’s Communist Party would be even worse than the monarchy it had overthrown. Instead he argued for the founding of an anarchist international and in 1922 helped set up the International Working Men’s Association as its general secretary.
That year would mark the high point of anarchism in his lifetime. The next decade would be characterised by bitterness and failure as FAUD, outflanked by the better-organised social democrats, collapsed from 150,000 to 4,000 members before being wiped out by the Nazi government in the run-up to World War II.
Forced to flee in 1933, Rocker and Witkop settled in New York where they became well-known figures, and Rocker tried to document and explain his experiences through 40 years at the heart of European anarchism.
In 1937, Rocker wrote Anarcho-syndicalism, which remains one of the best sources of information about that period available today. This abridged version, aimed at offering a more accessible introduction and history, was written in 1948.
Rudolf Rocker died on September 19th, 1958.