The Left-Libertarians — the last of an ancient breed
Last year, I was approached by Peter Lamborn Wilson — the elusive underground intellectual who is a refugee from the Lower East Side — who beseeched me to revive the Libertarian Book Club. Revolution was shaking the Arab world, although the wave had not yet come to Europe, Wall St. and Oakland. At this propitious time, New York City’s oldest anarchist institution could not be allowed to die, I was implored.
The Left-Libertarians — the last of an ancient breed
BY BILL WEINBERG
The Villager
January 19, 2012
Last year, I was approached by Peter Lamborn Wilson — the elusive underground intellectual who is a refugee from the Lower East Side — who beseeched me to revive the Libertarian Book Club.
Revolution was shaking the Arab world, although the wave had not yet come to Europe, Wall St. and Oakland. At this propitious time, New York City’s oldest anarchist institution could not be allowed to die, I was implored.
We had worked together in the L.B.C. for years, before Peter left the city and the Book Club became moribund. Old members were getting older, and we lost our longtime office at 339 Lafayette St., the notorious “Peace Pentagon” run by the pacifist AJ Muste Institute. But more significant, ultimately, was our identity crisis.
The L.B.C. was founded (to the best of anyone’s reckoning) in 1946, by anarchist exiles from fascist Europe, mostly Jews and Italians. At that time, the word “libertarian” was basically synonymous with “anarchist” or “anti-authoritarian” — although with a more intellectual and perhaps slightly euphemistic ring. One of the founders, Jack Frager, had actually known Emma Goldman, so we could claim an unbroken lineage back to the “classical” era of revolutionary anarchism.
Jack was gone before my time, but I did know Valerio Isca — the last of the old-timers. Walking with a cane, in his trademark black beret, he rarely said a word. But I was privileged once to hear him boast in broken English, his face beaming, about how he had fought followers of Mussolini’s Black Shirts in the streets of Brooklyn in the ’30s. He died in 1996. (The words of these heroes can be read in the classic of oral history, “Anarchist Voices,” by the late Paul Avrich of Queens College, himself a longtime friend of the Book Club.)
