Anarchism
Anarchism and anarchists and anything associated with the thinking, the people, or the history generally get a raw deal from the media and even mainstream historians. It is true that anarchism is profoundly anti-authoritarian, but its popular association with violence (wild-eyed bearded men throwing bombs) is exaggerated, even fictionalized by the very forces threatened by it, namely governments and the media with vested interests in things as they are.
As with any subversive political and economic movement, some proponents became impatient and felt justified in striking out in vengeance or justice. Thus you have Alexander Berkman and his attempted assassination of Pennsylvanian Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and Leon Czolgosz and his successful assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Berkman, however, served his time in jail, wrote a deep and insightful account of his experience and went on to write more worthwhile books on the subject which possessed his life. (Czolgosz did not have that opportunity, being executed forty-five days after the death of his victim.)
Anarchism survived its dramatic beginnings in the 19th Century, however, and interested readers can find its articulate concern with agricultural reform, labor rights, and prophetic worries about the growth of the surveillance state in many excellent books. Here you will find books and a superb documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti (as well as Woody Guthrie's cd of his investigation into the miscarriage of justice). Here you will find histories, biographies, anthologies, memoirs, and fiction. It is a rich tradition, relevant to this day and to the future.
For Workers' Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton
For Workers' Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton
“An eloquent testimony to Maurice Brinton’s life and works ... The work he started and the vision he held are as valid now as they were fifty years ago. The struggle, as they say, continues, and there is much here that can inform that struggle.” —Richard Alexander, author of Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War
“For Workers’ Power is a rousing collection of dozens of essays ... [that] permeate with an intensely critical eye toward how everyday working people have and can liberate themselves from the oppression, drudgery, and weight of capitalism, while avoiding what Brinton saw as pseudo- or counterrevolutionary methods of many leftists.” —Dana Williams, International Labor and Working-Class History
Since the 1960s, many radicals have had their eyes opened by the writing of Maurice Brinton. The most prolific writer of the British Solidarity group, which existed from 1961 to 1992, his work toppled countless dusty towers of standard leftist thinking. For Brinton, “actually existing socialism” did not, in fact, exist. It had to be created.
Brinton wrote with passion, clarity, and consistency on behalf of worker self-activity and self-management, and he decried those who reinforced passivity, apathy, cynicism, pecking orders, and alienation among workers. To him, this oppressive behavior was as prevalent among state socialists and communist parties as it was among capitalists, because it enabled rulers and would-be rulers of every political stripe to deceive and manipulate those in whose name they claimed to act. Today, when a new crop of so-called democratic socialists are seeking state power, allegedly on behalf of working people, Brinton’s work is as relevant as ever.
Maurice Brinton (1923–2005) lived most of his life in London. He was a founding member of the Solidarity group and wrote some of the twentieth century’s most important critiques of authoritarian socialism.
David Goodway is a British historian. His books include Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward.