Party, Communist, Party

This morning we were reminiscing about Michael's ex-girlfriend the Trotskyist. He was saying that the difference between all the good communists he grew up with and the bad communists like his ex were that the old school communists knew how to have fun--hence Eugene V. Debs Memorial Kazoo Night. That led to a discussion of who really said "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution." Was it Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg? Well, it turns out it was neither. That's a link to a 1991 piece by Alix Shulman, a scholar and biographer of Emma Goldman, titled "Dances with Feminists," in which she explains the origin of the aphorism and how it came to be misattributed. It was an anarchist T-shirt salesman from Noho.