On November 23, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted historian Peter Cole for an expansive talk on Ben Fletcher, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the radical legacy of dockworkers’ internationalism—from Philadelphia’s segregated waterfronts to Durban, South Africa, and beyond.

Cole traced the rise of the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union Local 8 under Fletcher’s leadership—the most racially integrated union of its time—and examined how dockworkers used their strategic position in global trade to fight both exploitation and racism. From the 1913 Philadelphia strike that forced employers to integrate the docks, to later IWW-led efforts that spread through the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, Fletcher’s story becomes a lens on class power, solidarity, and the global movement of working people who turned the docks into engines of resistance.

The talk also moved across decades and continents, connecting the Wobblies’ militant syndicalism to later struggles: the ILWU’s desegregation on the U.S. West Coast, anti-apartheid solidarity actions in the 1980s, and the ongoing role of transport and logistics workers in opposing war and militarism today.

Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University, research associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, and author of Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly and Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also co-editor of Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, and a leading historian of labor internationalism, race, and radical unionism.

This event was part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, which brings together radical thinkers, historians, and organizers to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI):
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Peter Cole’s work:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/peter-cole

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On October 26, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted historian Mark Leier for a rich and provocative discussion on Mikhail Bakunin—philosopher, agitator, exile, and one of the most misunderstood revolutionaries of the nineteenth century.

Drawing on his biography Bakunin: The Creative Passion, Leier unraveled the myths that have long haunted Bakunin’s reputation—from the caricature of a “prophet of destruction” to the false dichotomy between anarchism and Marxism. Through careful historical reconstruction, he showed how Bakunin’s ideas on education, materialism, and the role of intellectuals anticipated later critiques of bureaucracy, vanguardism, and the professional-managerial class.

Leier traced Bakunin’s path from his Hegelian studies in Berlin to his clashes with Marx in the First International, revealing a thinker whose insistence on freedom, spontaneity, and working-class autonomy remains vital today. The talk also explored Bakunin’s warnings about the rise of a new class of intellectuals who, under the guise of science and reason, might reproduce domination in revolutionary movements—a lesson Leier connects to contemporary politics and the recurring tension between theory and action on the left.

Mark Leier is a professor of history at Simon Fraser University and the author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion (St. Martin’s Press / Palgrave Macmillan), Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, and Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia. His scholarship focuses on labor radicalism, anarchist thought, and the history of working-class resistance in North America.

This event is part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, bringing together radical historians, writers, and organizers to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute:
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Mark Leier’s work:

Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy - https://www.newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=155420058X

Works at The Anarchist Library - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/mark-leier

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On September 28, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted historian Jon Bekken for a far-reaching talk on the Marine Transport Workers Union (MTWU) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — one of the most militant and transnational labor formations of the early twentieth century.

Drawing on decades of archival research and his own publications on the IWW, Bekken reconstructed the MTWU’s rise from Spanish-immigrant firemen working the Atlantic coast’s coal-fired ships to a globe-spanning network of syndicalist seafarers linking Boston, Buenos Aires, Philadelphia, Hamburg, and Sydney. He challenged the familiar myth that the Wobblies were merely an itinerant “strike-and-disappear” movement, instead revealing how maritime workers built durable ship-board committees, job-branch autonomy, and international solidarity capable of enforcing better food, shorter hours, and direct control over conditions at sea.

Bekken also traced how the MTWU confronted racism within the mainstream seamen’s unions, created alternative hiring systems to bypass employer blacklists, and maintained cross-border communication through clandestine presses from Chile to Sweden. The result is a vivid portrait of working-class internationalism that redefines what industrial unionism could mean when the workplace itself was the ocean.

Jon Bekken is a labor historian, editor, and anarchist writer whose work explores the communication, organization, and radical culture of the working class. He is a co-editor of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, a contributor to Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, and author of numerous essays on IWW organizing, the press, and the struggle for workers’ self-management.

This event is part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, bringing together radical historians, writers, and organizers to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.

PDF for this episode:
https://cyberdandy.org/MTW%20International%20Revolutionary%20Industrial%20Unionism.pdf

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI):
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Jon Bekken’s work:
Faculty page – https://www.albright.edu/faculty-detail/jon-bekken/

The Anarchist Library texts –https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/jon-bekken

Anarcho-Syndicalist Review – https://syndicalist.us/

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In this SEDI session, anarchist writer and editor Iain McKay delivers a brisk, idea-dense tour of Peter Kropotkin’s science, ethics, and revolutionary politics—showing how the famed geographer’s fieldwork and evolutionary arguments undergird a living anarchist program.

McKay (lead author of An Anarchist FAQ and editor/translator of major Kropotkin editions) threads together mutual aid, syndicalism, and council organization with Kropotkin’s critiques of state socialism and “red-in-tooth-and-claw” misreadings of Darwin.

He contrasts T. H. Huxley’s dour view of nature with Kropotkin’s empirical case that cooperation is a force in evolution, then links that insight to the ethics and strategy of class struggle. Along the way he situates key works—Modern Science and Anarchy, Mutual Aid, Fields, Factories and Workshops, The State: Its Historic Role, and The Great French Revolution—as a coherent toolbox for building working-class power outside parliament and against bureaucratic socialism.

McKay also speaks from the editor’s desk: he assembled the comprehensive Direct Struggle Against Capital and produced new English editions of Modern Science and Anarchy and Words of a Rebel, restoring Kropotkin’s revolutionary edge against later hagiography.

This event is part of the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI)’s ongoing series, bringing radical thinkers, organizers, and historians to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI):
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Iain McKay’s work:
An Anarchist FAQ – https://www.anarchistfaq.org/

Author page – https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/iain-mckay

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On July 27th, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted labor historian and anarchist writer Mark Leier for a riveting talk on the life and contradictions of Robert Raglan Gosden—Wobbly, saboteur, free speech fighter, draft evader, police informant, and mystic.

Drawing from extensive archival research and his biography Rebel Life, Leier traced Gosden’s trajectory from militant IWW organizer in British Columbia and San Diego, to an advocate of sabotage and general strikes, to his eventual—and deeply controversial—role as a labor spy during Canada’s post-WWI strike wave. Gosden’s story raises profound questions about class betrayal, revolutionary alienation, and the capacity of labor institutions to hold space for rage, action, and unorthodox radicalism.

Leier also drew parallels between Gosden and broader political phenomena such as the Reagan Democrat, the professionalization of the left, and the mystification of radical disillusionment in mid-century Canada. What emerges is a cautionary tale and historical mystery wrapped into one—essential listening for anyone interested in the tensions between revolutionary sincerity and political marginalization.

Mark Leier is a professor at Simon Fraser University, author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion, and a longtime contributor to the history of labor radicalism in North America.

This event was part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, bringing together radical thinkers, organizers, and historians to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present. Most talks are not recorded, but SEDI is working to make more of these vital conversations accessible to wider audiences.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute:
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Mark Leier’s work:

Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy - https://www.newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=155420058X

Works at The Anarchist Library - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/mark-leier

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On June 29th, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted historian Tom Goyens for a compelling talk on the life and legacy of Johann Most, the infamous yet often misunderstood figure of early anarchism. Drawing on his forthcoming scholarly biography from the University of Illinois Press—the first of its kind in English—Goyens traced Most's evolution from a German social democrat to a pioneering anarchist agitator in the United States.

Far more than a caricature of anarchist bomb-throwing, Johann Most emerges in this discussion as a transnational figure shaped by exile, prison, and propaganda. Goyens highlights Most’s role in mentoring figures like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, editing the long-running Freiheit newspaper, and wrestling with questions of violence, aesthetics, and political strategy. The talk also explores Most’s ideological transformation, his theatrical flair, and his enduring influence on American and European radical movements—even as his image was vilified in the press and sidelined by history.

Tom Goyens is the author of Beer and Revolution and a contributor to the study of immigrant radicalism, anarchist print culture, and transatlantic political currents. His forthcoming anthology of Most’s writings will help reintroduce a neglected voice into contemporary debates on anarchism and political violence.

This event was part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, bringing together radical thinkers, organizers, and historians to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute:
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Tom Goyens’ work:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/tom-goyens

Pre-Order on Amazon - Johann Most: Life of a Radical:
https://a.co/d/hIKBIB7

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On May 25th, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted philosopher, poet, and long-time New Orleans anarchist John Clark—also known by the pen name Max Cafard—for a wide-ranging discussion on his latest book, Anarchy in the Big Easy. Drawing from decades of experience in radical theory and grassroots activism, Clark offered a deeply personal and politically provocative portrait of New Orleans as a site of ecological struggle, cultural resistance, and libertarian possibility.

John Clark is the author of numerous works including The Impossible Community, The Tragedy of Common Sense, and Between Earth and Empire. His writings under the name Max Cafard have appeared widely in anarchist and ecological publications, and he is a founding figure in the New Orleans-based Institute for the Radical Imagination.

This event was part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, bringing together radical thinkers, organizers, and historians to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present. Most talks are not recorded, but SEDI is working to make more of these vital conversations accessible to wider audiences.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute:
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Read Anarchy in the Big Easy:
http://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1766

Explore John Clark / Max Cafard’s writings:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/john-clark

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On April 27th, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted journalist and antifascist theorist Shane Burley for a talk titled “The Trump Drive to Fascism.” Drawing from his extensive work on far-right movements, Shane explored the evolving landscape of American authoritarianism, the ideological currents that fuel Trumpism, and the historical stakes for anti-fascist and anarchist resistance. With an eye toward both theory and strategy, Shane examined how contemporary fascist movements operate, the convergence between state power and street-level reaction, and the role that anarchists and other radicals can play in resisting the next phase of far-right resurgence.

Shane Burley is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It, a frequent contributor to Truthout, Jewish Currents, and The Baffler, and a leading voice on fascism, white nationalism, and antifascist organizing.

This was part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, where they bring together radical thinkers, organizers, and historians to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present. Most talks are not recorded, but they are now working to make more of these critical conversations publicly available.

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute:
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Shane Burley's Work:
Website: https://www.shaneburley.org/
Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/shane-burley

Sam and Esther Dolgoff Archive:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/sam-dolgoff

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