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.
My Eighty-one Years of Anarchy: A Memoir
My Eighty-one Years of Anarchy: A Memoir
May Picqueray (1898–1983) was a French anarchist-feminist labor organizer and newspaper editor who missed none of the major historical events of her lifetime. In 1921, she sent a parcel bomb to the US ambassador in Paris to protest the death sentence of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1922, she attended the Red Trade Union International in Moscow, where she stood on a table and denounced the congress for feasting while workers starved. Years later, she joined the May 1968 movement and the 1975 Fight for Larzac. Picqueray’s autobiography is available in English for the first time, translated by Paul Sharkey.