Michael Joseph Francisconi

Debate over Lunch: History, Theory and Political Economy Michael Joseph Francisconi

I was born March 8, 1947 into a railroad family. I had two major passions in my early teens: the Democratic Party and John F. Kennedy. With his assassination and then the failure to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the summer of 1964, I lost all mooring with Party politics. The following May 1965, I graduated from Pocatello High School; I was eighteen, registered for the draft, and the nation was at war. Mr. Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam, along with the sending of troops into the Dominican Republic, completed my crisis of faith; I was no longer a Democrat. My history is an intellectually personal one of the awakening and growth of a radical in love with the wonderment of the radical life-style. This is a story of an insurrection and rebellion on the limits placed upon essential human quality in a consumer-based society. This rebellion is, at its core, anti-capitalist, anti-state, anti-bureaucratic, anti-clerical, anti-patriarchal and anti-positivist. This rebellion has continually evolved as age brought more insight and wisdom. One tradition replaces another, not that they are outgrown or abandoned, but that they lead naturally by life experiences to new ways of dealing with life. This is a rebellion born in experience and not an abstraction of an isolated rebel. Particularly because of the rebellion that was the 1960's, I soon discovered the philosophy of the Russian Anarchists of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and Berkman. With the collapse of the movement in the early 1970s, the veterans and history of the old left became beautiful beacons in the night. The Industrial Workers of the World, Socialist party USA, Communist Party USA, and the Socialist Workers Party became my foundation.