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.
Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays , 1993-1998
Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays , 1993-1998
Murray Bookchin was a dynamic revolutionary propagandist since the 1930s when, as a teenager, he orated before socialist crowds in New York City and engaged in support work for those fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Now, for the first time in book form, this volume presents a series of exciting and engaged interviews with, and essays from, the founder of social ecology.
This expansive collection ranges over, amongst others, Bookchin's account of his teenage years as a young Communist during the Great Depression, his experiences of the 1960s and reflections on that decade's lessons, his vision of a libertarian communist society, libertarian politics, the future of anarchism, and the unity of theory and practice. He goes on to assess the crisis of radicalism today and defends the need for a revolutionary Left. Finally, he states what is to be valued in both anarchism and Marxism in building such a Left and offers guidelines for forming a new revolutionary social movement.