Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 117
He had later gone to Australia, where he "led two
syndicalist strikes and put a factory 'on the blink'" before
stowing away in a boat leaving Sydney to evade arrest. To
Mukerji's question about any "extraordinary experiences
in the course of his work;' Bonnington answered that he
had had his "skull broken in two places once and another
time I had to stand watch over a troup of women and
children, whose husbands had been arrested. The most
terrible part of it all was that the children cried for milk
and the women cried for food and I had nothing to give
them. The only thing that tided us over was the singing. We
sang the 'Marseillaise' so that in the delirium of it we forgot
everything about hunger." This sounded more like the
constructive goal that Mukerji himself was seeking.
Bonnington now stepped in to help Mukerji as breadwinner,
supporting all four of them on the monthly salary
of eighty dollars he drew for editing a socialist weeklylavish
compared to Mukerji's twenty-five cents per hour
doing inventory at a socialist bookstore, or the monthly
ten dollars plus room and board he had earned at his last
boardinghouse job. Bonnington even loaned Mukerji
money to continue his education and warned him against
aspiring to the hobo's life that Jerry so embraced.
"To he a hobo ... means that you lose your greatest asset-you
have no faith in anything, even in your own greatness;'
said Bonnington. But hadn't Bonnington himself
endured it? Mukerji challenged. How? "You put all of your
life out of yourself,' he answered. "You think and live in a
far future when man will be as the Titans. Since you live in
the far off, you don't mind the here and the now."