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.
Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture 1848-2011
Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture 1848-2011
“There is, quite literally, nothing like this book available. Various studies of anarchist culture do exist, some quite good, but none approach the breadth or depth of Jesse Cohn’s study. He is able to do something different: explore what forms of anarchist resistance culture in different places and times have had in common, and therefore what made them specifically anarchist. —Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America
“Readers [of Underground Passages] will appreciate how anarchist culture (poetry, songs, fiction, plays, illustrations, and films) was by no means monolithic in approach or rationale, since different anarchist creators at different times saw the importance of making anarchist resistance culture relevant to particular settings or ‘deterritorializing’ it to give it a more global feel that fit with the transnational and internationalist dimensions of global anarchism.” —Kirwin Shaffer, author of Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921
What anarchists demanded from art was what they demanded from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the principle in the practice, the end in the means. While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists simultaneously created a richly textured "resistance culture" to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday lives defined by capital and the state, allowing an escape from domination even while enmeshed in it. Underground Passages investigates and interrogates these creations across the history of the movement. Whether discussing famous artists like John Cage or Diane DiPrima or unknown and anonymous anarchist writers, Cohn shows how aesthetic shifts both reflected and influenced political and economic ones. This is cultural criticism at its best—and most useful.
Jesse Cohn is the author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics, and an associate professor of English at Purdue University North Central in Indiana.