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.
Reform or Revolution and Other Writings
Reform or Revolution and Other Writings
A polemic writing by the famous "Red Rosa" Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1899) explains why capitalism can never overcome its internal contradictions. An effective refutation of revisionist interpretations of Marxist doctrine, it defines the position of scientific socialism on the issues of social reforms, the state, democracy, and the character of the proletarian revolution.
Reform or Revolution opposes Edward Bernstein's revisionist theories, which rejected Marxism in favor of trade unionism and parliamentary procedures. Luxemburg offers articulate and reasoned objections to all of Bernstein's arguments. She defends the necessity for socialism, which provides an answer to the contradictions and inevitable crisis of the capitalist economy, along with a means for a transformation in working class consciousness. This essay remains a key explanation of why there can be no parliamentary road to socialism. It appears here together with Luxemburg's writings on "Leninism or Marxism," "The Mass Strike," and "The Russian Revolution."
Reprint of the Three Arrows Press, New York, 1937 edition.