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.
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
In 1892, Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate Henry Clay Frick for his role in violently suppressing the Homestead Steel Strike. Berkman was unsuccessful. He spent the next fourteen years in prison, thirteen of them in Pennsylvania's notorious Western Penitentiary. Upon his release, he wrote what was to become a classic of prison literature, and a profound testament to human courage in the face of oppression.
This new edition of his account of his years behind bars is introduced and fully annotated by Jessica Moran and Barry Pateman, both former associate editors of the Emma Goldman Papers at the University of California, Berkeley. Their efforts make this the definitive version of Berkman’s tale of his transformation within prison, his growing sympathy for those he’d considered social parasites, and the intimate relationships he developed with them. This edition includes a full, never-before-published transcription of the diary Berkman kept while he wrote his memoir, conveying the difficulties he had reliving his experiences, as well as the anarchist milieu he returned to after his incarceration.