Tag: biography

Rudolf Rocker in Liverpool

Featured in Issue XXIII – June 2022

Milly Witkop and Rudolf Rocker

Rudolf Rocker was born in Germany in 1873. As a teenager he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party, and turned to anarchism. He fled repression and military conscription by moving to Paris, and then to London. In both cities he was welcomed into the Yiddish-speaking Jewish anarchist movement. In London he also met his lifelong partner and accomplice the seamstress Milly Witkop. Unlike Witkop, Rocker was not Jewish, and was also an atheist, which makes it all the more surprising that he later came to be known as the “anarchist rabbi”, and in a sense this journey began in Liverpool.

In 1898 the couple moved to Liverpool. A Jewish worker who had listened to Rocker speak in London stopped him in a street near the train station and took him to a local anarchist printer, Moritz Jeger. Rocker then moved into Jegers’ home. The Jewish anarchists in Liverpool were inactive. Unknown to Rocker, this was because 6 months earlier they had produced a newsheet called “Der Rebel”, and Jeger had fallen out with another editor, which dominated the group and led to low attendance. Nonetheless, a meeting of 12 of the old members decided to revive the group; Rocker described them as “plain, straightforward, active and thinking working class men and women.”

It’s worth noting, there was a separate english-speaking anarchist group in Liverpool (which some of the Jews had gotten involved with), which “was really active.” They had three speakers who spoke every Sunday in the city centre, where their papers and pamphlets sold well.

The new Yiddish group met in a rented hall in Brownlow Hill, and Rocker gave talks most Sunday evenings. In the absence of any other Yiddish anarchist papers in England, Jeger proposed they start their own, with Rocker as their editor. Rocker was alarmed, he couldn’t read or write Yiddish beyond the alphabet, and had no long-term plans to stay in Liverpool, but he agreed to act as an editor for three months.

The paper was four pages long and was called “Dos Fraye Vort” (“The Free Word”). Rocker found Jeger, who agreed to translate his writings, unbearable. Apparently, alongside being a poor translator and “adding a lot of inflated phraseology”, he also added “stupid reports … which made us look silly.” For example, when he covered sailors being eaten by sharks, he concluded that this was a result of capitalism. Finding this dependence on Jeger problematic, Rocker taught himself Yiddish. He thought that The Free Word was a poor paper, being too short to address theoretical questions, but it did receive a warm reception with congratulations and subscriptions coming from similar Jewish anarchist groups in Glasgow, Leeds, London and Manchester. Initially the members of the group self-funded the paper, but after a few issues it paid for itself (nobody was paid wages, all the work being done voluntarily). The paper only ran for 8 issues, from July 29th to September 17th, and it had a circulation of just a few hundred per issue. Almost by chance Rocker had started his career as a yiddish editor, which continued in London, where Jewish anarchists were impressed enough by his paper to invite him to revive an eight page newspaper called “Der Arbeiter Fraint”, or “The Worker’s Friend.”

Der Arbeiter Fraint had originally started in 1885 and espoused atheism and anarchist communism. Before Rocker, it had dismissed unions as reformist, and focused on organising against rabbinical authorities. However, under his direction, it focused on workplace struggles, which proved “attractive to Jewish refugees, as the ruling elite within this ethnic community championed social peace by claiming that Jewish interests were the same, whether worker or owner, whereas unionism recognised the vital differences in circumstances between employee and employer.” This popular and long running paper helped Jewish-anarchism flourish. They were highly influential within Yiddish-speaking trade unions and had their own working class club which became a centre for entertainment, popular lectures and had a library. This radical community was not united by race or even religion. Instead it was held together by a shared language and culture. At the time there were many separate Yiddish speaking workplaces and historically the mainstream trade union movement had been hostile to Jewish workers. While the Jewish anarchist movement saw a decline after WWI, a New York Yiddish anarchist paper, “The Free Voice of Labour”, managed to continue publication until 1977.

Rocker opposed WWI on internationalist grounds, and along with Witkop he ran a soup kitchen. In late 1914 he was interned as an “enemy alien,” and their paper was suppressed in 1915, but Witkop continued her anti-war activity until she was also arrested in 1916. In 1918 Rocker was sent to the Netherlands in an exchange of prisoners, and Witkop soon followed. In Germany they participated in the anarcho-syndicalist and womens’ movements, as well as helping to establish the International Workers’ Association. Rudolf Rocker’s books on anarchism and nationalism are
widely read to this day, due to his clear and straightforward writing style.

The Life of May Picqueray

Featured in Issue XX – March 2022

Art by Helen Delmar
instagram.com/dantde_lion

May Picqueray was born in Brittany, France, in 1898 to a seamstress and a postman. In 1918 she became active in the anarchist and syndicalist youth movements. Over the course of her life she raised three children as a single mother. While she settled into proofreading, she also worked as a bank teller, delivery woman, drafter, fish seller, grocer, interpreter, mushroom picker, receptionist, typist and carer. This makes it all the more impressive that she dedicated her life to the struggle for freedom.

In 1921, the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were falsely tried for murder, amidst a wave of repression against revolutionaries in the USA, sparking solidarity protests across the world. May was disappointed that the French papers were silent on the issue, so she sent a stun grenade to the US ambassador in France, leading to the case being covered regularly (unfortunately Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927, though “redeemed” by the US legal system in 1977).

From there, May went on to do administrative work for the Metalworkers’ Union, part of the revolutionary CGTU union. While attending meetings, demonstrations and picket lines, she was involved in scuffles with nationalists, police and even communists. She joined the CGTU’s delegation to Soviet Russia in 1922. She found a “communist” society where strikes and political dissidence were banned, where starvation and child homelessness were rife. While the delegation feasted with the ruling members of the Communist Party, she showed her disgust by standing on the table and denouncing their gluttony amidst famine. In a private meeting with Leon Trotsky, then head of Russia’s military, she somehow convinced him to release two anarchist prisoners, despite the fact that she refused to shake his hand because their politics were “divided by Makhno and Krontstadt”. Nonetheless, her rebelliousness was punished on her journey home: she believed the Soviet authorities poisoned her in Germany and set her up to be imprisoned in Belgium. She was a supporter of the anarcho-syndicalist wing of the CGTU, so when the communists came to dominate the union in 1924, she left. After WWII she became active in the Proofreaders’ Union.

The main focus of May’s activism was the anti-war movement, and she edited the libertarian anti-militarist paper Le Réfractaire, from 1974 until her death in 1983. When the Nazis had occupied France during WWII she helped people in the resistance or on the run, providing shelter and forging papers so they could avoid conscription or cross borders. When the Nazis withdrew from France, she also forged documents for some collaborators, not indulging those who sought revenge. On one occasion she also took the opportunity to seize and redistribute provisions which were being taken back to Germany. After the war, she assisted the anarcho-pacifist Louis Lecoin in his successful campaign to secure legal rights for conscientious objectors. In the seventies she supported the Larzac struggle, where plans for the mass eviction of farmers to expand a military base were successfully resisted. While turning to pacifism, she never denounced, and often supported, those who chose to fight. She took part in one mass-trespass against the building of a nuclear reactor in 1977, during which the police brutally attacked protesters, particularly youths that came armed with batons and hard hats, resulting in many injuries and one death. She stated that if non-violent activism “amounts to issuing watchwords and not carrying them out and exposing tens of thousands of people to a hail of grenades, and then heading back to camp, happy to have “done our duty” and leaving young people who had been accepted as “protection” to be slaughtered without affording them any assistance and treating them, or allowing them to be treated as mindless thugs … then count me out!”.

She also helped the anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman write their autobiographies, united child refugees of the 1936 Spanish Revolution with their families, and smuggled nine prisoners out of Le Vernet concentration camp (which had originally been setup by the allied government for those fleeing the Spanish Civil War, most of whom were anarchists). Her life was full of small acts of solidarity, too many to list here.

May Picqueray suffered for her bravery, she was imprisoned multiple times, and saw the horrors of war and fascism, the initially promising Russian Revolution turn into a tragedy, and the defeat and decline of the anarchist movements in Spain and France. Nonetheless she remained committed to revolutionary anarchism and the belief that, if people fought for it, they could live in a world free from capitalism, the state and war.