Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader

The emergence of an articulated attempt to create an alternative form of social organization, an alternative to capitalist statism at the turn of the twentieth century basically broke down into three camps: 1) state socialism (what eventually manifested as Bolsheivism in Russia and Maoism in China; 2) what I would call communalism - that is living by Marxist and/or Neo-Marxist progressive principles within capitalist society and awaiting its collapse (the type of ideal realized by such figures as Trotsky and some flower children of the sixties - the "alternative lifestyle" its been called); 3) a life of active struggle against both capitalism and the state ("activism", of non-violent (Gandhi) and violent (Rosa Luxembourg) variations). Berkman was of the latter - and valuably shares his struggles, both with the external demons and his internal ones, in his writings. I have not read this anthology, but read his noted "Prison Memoirs" included in it (which I would assume comprises the greater part of its 352 pages) some years ago - and they are worth the read. Berkman was a man "ahead of his time", deeply feeling. His experiences and reactions prefigure many of our own, in the circumstances we confront today. He takes a clear and accurate measure of the injustices of American statist capitalism - and casts a view into a number of disturbing trends (such as why the U.S. at present with less than 6% of the world's population confines more than 25% of the world's prison population) at their incipience.