In a clear yet thorough way Berkman assesses what went wrong with the Russian Revolution, while offering a compelling argument for a Communist Anarchist revolution. This is one of the seminal texts in anarchist thought.

What Is Communist Anarchism?

History

Berkman, Alexander

Americas

Dover Publications

A gifted writer for the anarchist movement, Alexander Berkman left Russia for the United States in 1888 when he was eighteen. Thirty-one years later, after serving a prison term for an attempted assassination, he was expelled to the Soviet Union, a country which he eventually renounced. But before his repudiation of the Soviet system, Berkman attempted to answer some of the charges made against anarchism and to present its case clearly and intelligently. This book, first published in 1929, is the result of those efforts. Thorough and well stated, The ABC of Anarchism is today widely regarded as a classic declaration of the movement's goals and methods. For those who have questions about anarchism, Berkman provides lucid answers. In conversational tones, he discusses society as it existed in the early twentieth century; why in his opinion, anarchy was necessary; the myths surrounding it; and necessary preparations for its successful implementation. Of the book, Emma Goldman said: "People need a primer of Anarchism—an ABC, as it were, that would teach them the rudimentary principles of Anarchism and whet their appetites for something more profound. [The book] was intended to serve this purpose. That it has fulfilled its purpose no one who has read [it] will deny."

The ABC of Anarchism

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called “Prison Blossoms.” This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism.
Most of the "Prison Blossoms" were smuggled out of the penitentiary to fellow comrades, including Emma Goldman, as the nucleus of an exposé of prison conditions in America’s Gilded Age. Those that survived relatively unrecognized for a century in an international archive are here transcribed, translated, edited, and published for the first time. Born at a unique historical moment, when European anarchism and American labor unrest converged, as each sought to repel the excesses of monopoly capitalism, these prison blossoms peer into the heart of political radicalism and its fervent hope of freedom from state and religious coercion.

Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past (The John Harvard Library)

Biographies & Memoirs

Bauër, Henry

Nold, Carl

Historical

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

I wish that everybody in the world would read this book. And my reasons are not due to any desire on my part that people should join any group of social philosophers or revolutionists. I desire that the book be widely read because the general and careful reading of it would definitely add to true civilization.

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

Memoirs

Frontier Pr California

The author wishes that everyone in the world would read his book. And his reasons are not due to any desire on his part that people should join any group of social philosophers or revolutionist. It must be read because the general and the careful reading of it would definitely add to true civilization

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.

Schocken Books

What went wrong in Russia? How did the successful attempt to overthrow the old dictatorship of the Tsarist system only lead to the new dictatorship of the Communists? Alexander Berkman's work The Russian Tragedy is key to understanding these questions, since Berkman supported the revolution that overthrew the Tsar. He arrived in Russia at the beginning of 1920, having been deported from the United States because of his opposition to the First World War. Less than two years later he left Russian, convinced that the Communists had destroyed the social revolution he had spent his life fighting for.

The Russian tragedy

Russia

Cienfuegos Press Ltd

Russian Trage

Business & Money

Economics

Black Rose Books

In 1892, Alexander Berkman, Russian émigré, anarchist, and lover of Emma Goldman, attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. The act was intended both as retribution for the massacre of workers in the Homestead strike and as an incitement to revolution. Captured and sentenced to serve a prison term of twenty-two years, Berkman struggled to make sense of the shadowy and brutalized world of the prison—one that hardly conformed to revolutionary expectation.

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York Review Books (Paperback))

NYRB Classics

Personal critique of the Russian revolution (based on his experience as an eyewitness), placed into historical context. A key text.

The Russian Tragedy

Phoenix Pr

The two thirds of the original work not included in the Freedom title above.

What Is Communist Anarchism

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