Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980)
Mon Nov 08, 1897
Dorothy Day, born on this day in 1897, was an anarchist activist who founded the Catholic Worker movement. "The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"
The Catholic Worker movement, founded by Day and her partner Peter Maurin, started with the publication of the first issue of the Catholic Worker on May 1st, 1933.
The paper was priced at one cent, and published continuously since then. It was aimed at those suffering the most in the depths of the Great Depression, "those who think there is no hope for the future", and announced to them that "the Catholic Church has a social program...there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual but for their material welfare." It accepted no advertising and did not pay its staff.
Like many newspapers of the day, including those for which Day had already been writing, the Catholic Worker was an unapologetic example of advocacy journalism. It provided coverage of strikes, explored working conditions, especially of women and black workers, and explicated papal teaching on social issues.
Its viewpoint was partisan and stories were designed to move its readers to take action locally, for example, by patronizing laundries recommended by the Laundry Workers' Union. Its advocacy of federal child labor laws put it at odds with the American Church hierarchy from its first issue.
Day's activism continued throughout the rest of her life, resulting in multiple arrests. In the summer of 1973, she joined César Chávez in his campaign for farm laborers in the fields of California. She was also arrested at the age of 75 for defying a ban on picketing, spending ten days in jail.
"The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor."
- Dorothy Day
- Date: 1897-11-08
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, sojo.net, www.newyorker.com.
- Tags: #Labor, #Birthdays.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org
It might help if you explain why you might think it is not pro working class.
My understanding is that anarchism is not necessarily pro working or pro ruling class, but more pro equality. Many revolutionaries would argue that raising the working classes conditions is a goal and morally good. They would also argue that freeing the ruling classes from their hierarchy and ruling relations is freeing, humanizing and also morally good.
That just seems to be general leftist ideas though and not necessarily related to anarchism vs communism or any specific ideologies within larger leftism.
If you’re asking about theory there are a lot of online discussion spaces for discussions like that.
Agreed!
My perception is anarchism is basically Libertarianism turned up to 11 with no regulation or oversight over those with outsized access to resources who are then able leverage those resources over folks who are less fortunate.
No, that's not anarchism! Anarchism wants a society without any hierarchies or authorities. Exclusive access to resources (e.g. private property of factories etc) needs hierarchy/authority to keep that access exclusive. If there is someone calling themselves boss/king/whatever and wants you to do their bidding, he won't have any power if neither you nor anyone else accepts their claim. If they resort to violence, then the community should come together in solidarity to defend against that.
There are people calling themselves anarchocapitalists and what they argue for would indeed lead to the problems you envisioned. But they're not accepted among "real" anarchists who are definitely and absolutely against capitalism (which is where we are aligned with others on the far left) but also against any other form of oppression, including the supposed "workers' states" like the soviet union.
Then is the idea of Anarchism purely theoretical? Because this seems unachievable in reality to me.
Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong? To even consider the idea, I can’t imagine the complexities of overlaying something like this on society as it exists today. So just as a thought experiment, to consider it I have to start with a clean slate, and I can’t imagine a scenario where humans don’t, almost immediately, start hoarding resources for themselves and protecting those resources. So you immediately run into the problem of enforcing a lack of hierarchy, which…¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the experiment has already failed.
I wouldn't say purely theoretical. Of course it's incredibly far away from what our society looks like today in the grand scheme of things but as the other answer points out, anarchism is always there in the little things. A really great text pointing that out is David Graeber's "Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you!": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you
Another point I'd like to make concerning the "purely theoretical" aspect is one that comes from my background as an engineer. In electricity distribution planning and probably many similar problems, "green field" planning plays a significant role. Engineers look at where the electricity sources and consumers are and, in a first step, disregard the current state of the grid. Instead, they try to find an ideal distribution system layout. THEN they look at the current state of things and start planning what changes can be made in what order. That can take decades but if the ideal vision is constantly kept as a goal to move closer to, the system will resemble that ideal state more and more.
Anarchists often take a similar approach. We know that humans are well capable of both, competing for resources AND of cooperating for the common good (actually, a great early anarchist was also an academic whose general ideas in opposition to narrow-minded social darwinism are close to what evolutionary biology knows today: see Petr Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" if you're interested in that story). Capitalist society has ingrained the ideology in us that everything is about competition. The society we envision is all about cooperation. Society is always changing and that change comes from how humans operate in this society. So what anarchists do is very many diverse things, smaller and greater deeds, but all either about unlearning competition and hierarchy or learning, practicing, showing and teaching cooperation. A great video essay diving deeper into these ideas would be Zoe Baker's "The unity of means and ends": https://youtu.be/syR0P-2uwp4
If you enjoy science fiction, I think Ursula le guins Dispossessed is a great tool to help imagine what something like this could be like on a larger societal scale.
In many ways anarchism is the default way of living for humans. Unless you are religiously conservative, that’s how husbands and wives operate, and in many ways the global order is also anarchistic (that’s debatable of course and there is definitely asymmetric power strictures but at the core there is no ruling country and instead joint resolutions are reached).
The devil is always in the details and that’s why leftist infighting exists. The ultimate shared vision and the morality though are there.
The flip side is that capitalism is inherent with inconsistencies and cannot function on paper. (How can basing a society on infinite growth operate?) But we live in this system and it does work. (For some at least. Perhaps it’s better to say that even though on paper the system does not make sense in practice it is able to function.)
Would idealized anarchism work? I don’t know. However, is it a dream with aspiring towards? I’d say yes.