Sam Dolgoff
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Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990) was an American anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist.
Dolgoff was born in Russia, moving as a child to New York City, 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.
Sam joined the IWW in the 1920s remaining an active member his entire life, as he played a role in the anarchist movement since the early 1920s. He also was a co-founder of the magazine the Libertarian Labor Review (later re-named Anarcho-Syndicalist Review to avoid confusion with America's Libertarian party).
He was also a member of the Chicago Free Society Group in the 1920's, 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 the highly-acclaimed anthologies:Bakunin on Anarchy (1971; revised 1980); Ethics and American Unionism (1958); The Labor Party Illusion (1961); The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (1974); A Critique of Marxism (1983), and the Autobiographical Fragments (1986). The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (1974), and Fragments: A Memoir (ISBN 0-946222-04-5). He was also 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 sixties and the seventies living in New York City. He focused upon anarchism's (specifically anarcho-syndaclism) 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 he was friends with Murray Bookchin, a notable anarchist theorist of the period, he was opposed to his theory of Social Ecology and the liberatory possibilities of technology, rooted as he was in the classical anarchist traditions of Bakunin and Kropotkin.
