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Guest Editorial
In this extended editorial I want to pay homage to the memory and teachings of the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker. Rocker is very much a forgotten figure within anarchist circles. There is no mention of him, for instance, in Daniel Guérin's anthology of anarchism No Gods, No Masters, nor in George Woodcock's The Anarchist Reader - and he is singularly absent from Bookchin's magnum opus The Ecology of Freedom. And even in general accounts of the history of the anarchist movement, as his biographer, Mina Graur (1997) recounts, Rocker is mentioned only in passing. With the emergence of the so-called new anarchism, Rocker is in the process of being further marginalised. Indeed, the earlier generation libertarian socialists to which he belonged is now perceived to be old-fashioned and outdated, or as John Moore put it in the pages of the Green Anarchist, just plain obsolete. Old anarchism, we are informed, has become a 'historical baggage' that needs to be rejected, or at last given a 'major overhaul' (Purkis and Bowen 1997: 3); it is a historical relic of no relevance at all to contemporary radical activists (Holloway 2005: 21).
There is then a growing tendency among many radical scholars not only to forget the past but to repudiate it entirely, thus denying that an earlier generation of anarchists have anything to teach us with regard to contemporary struggles. This approach seems to me not only unwarranted and unfair but also short-sighted. As the notable Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah (1979) remarked: 'the present is where we get lost - if we forget our past and have no vision of the future'. So my aim here is to briefly oudine some of the teachings of Rudolf Rocker, thus indicating their contemporary relevance. For it seems to me that we should not look upon Rocker simply as a historical relic, of interest only to historians, but as someone who has a contemporary relevance and who remains a source of inspiration to all those today who strive for radical change. Anarchism is both a social movement and a political tradition. It did not simply wither away at the end of the 1930s, as Mina Graur contends (1997: 244) only to re-emerge phoenix-like as a new form...