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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💡 Support the show:
https://www.patreon.com/c/cyberdandy

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