Review by Ian Rocksborough-Smith [1]

Much has been written about Emma Goldman, the justly-revered and romanticized American radical and pioneering feminist. One does not need to venture far to hear her oft-quoted-radical-chic slogan: "If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution." She’s been the subject of documentaries (see PBS’s 2003 American Experience: Emma Goldman) and was even depicted as a character in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981). An important footnote to her life, however, can be found through any cursory perusal of her biographies which repeatedly turn up the name of Alexander Berkman, Goldman’s life-long comrade and confidant. Goldman’s importance as both source of inspiration and subject of study should in no way be diminished.
But of the two, Berkman remains a much lesser known figure, and deserves to be more fully considered in appraisals of past figures of American radicalism, particularly for his lucid expressions of anarchist thought and practice. Moreover, New York artist Gene Fellner, who in 1992 took it upon himself to compile Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, suggested Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life (1970 [1931]), should be read "side by side" with Berkman’s writing to fully understand the effect they had on each other as revolutionaries and to better understand the times in which they lived.
It is not an exaggeration to label Berkman a "hero" of American radicalism, as did Howard Zinn in the forward to the latest edition of Life of an Anarchist (Seven Stories Press, 2005). Straddling the labor strife of the late 19th Century and the drive to World Wars in the early 20th Century, Berkman’s life was as both a witness and active participant in some of the most important revolutionary struggles and upheavals of this tumultuous and incredibly repressive period of world history.
At the age of 20, Berkman became enraged with Henry Clay Frick, the proxy of the Carnegie Company’s steel division during the Homestead steelworkers strike and rebellion of 1892. After Frick sought the services of Pinkerton strikebreakers, Berkman unsuccessfully attempted an Attentat(assassination) of him in the company office. Berkman spent 14 years in prison as a result, where under extreme duress, torture, and near death from starvation, he managed to write what would become Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). After his release from prison, Berkman edited Goldman’s New York-based, Mother Earth, and his own anarchist magazine, The Blast. The latter he published after his move to San Francisco in 1916 to continue organizing the No-Conscription League he and Goldman had helped start in New York. Goldman and Berkman’s anti-war agitation, while high in profile, eventually led to their arrests and exile along with numerous other American dissidents to Russia before the war’s end. From Russia, both Goldman and Berkman witnessed the events following October 1917 firsthand. They closely watched the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure of power, the ensuing Civil War against the Allied Powers and White Armies, and the crushing of the Kronstadt sailors rebellion of 1921 which led both Berkman and Goldman to turn their backs on a revolution they felt had been led astray.
Fellner’s abridgment of Berkman’s writing provides a comprehensive account of a passionate movement organizer and social thinker who struggled through profound political and personal transformations, but managed to remain unshakably idealistic until his death in 1936 when he died from an attempted suicide after a long battle with prostate cancer. Berkman’s prison memoirs vividly depict the barbarism of human captivity and could be read alongside any of the great prison literatures (Solzhenitsyn, Gramsci, Gandhi . . . etc . . . ). His memoirs begin to trace his own struggle to come to terms with the murder he attempted as well as larger questions of political, class, and sexual identity that are evident throughout the reader, notably in Berkman’s correspondence with Emma Goldman.

Such discussions frequently centered around a fundamental disagreement they held about political violence and its role in revolutions as was evident in their dialogue about the 1901 murder of President William McKinley by another fellow anarchist, Leon Czolgosz — a murder for which Goldman had been unjustly implicated and that Berkman could not bring himself to condemn. "I cannot agree with you about the social value of Leon’s act," Berkman wrote in a letter to Goldman from prison. He further noted that political assassinations were "at once the greatest tragedy of martyrdom, and the most terrible indictment of society, that it forces the noblest of men and women to shed human blood."
Though he principally favored "acts" of violence in a revolutionary cause, as the years wore on, the failures of the Russian Revolution weighed heavily on his mind and produced a significant change in his thinking. He even suggested in a letter to Goldman in 1928 that

"if the revolution cannot solve the need for violence and terror, then . . . I am against revolution . . . If we can undergo changes in every other method of dealing with social issues, we can also learn to change the methods of revolution."

Fellner’s inclusion of Berkman’s writings on Russia (1919-1921) alongside the ABCs of Anarchism (1929) is particularly useful for it juxtaposes Berkman’s critical thoughts on the Russian Revolution (which are expressed through a mixture of journalistic prose and political analysis) with his refined meditations on anarchism (creatively constructed in a Socratic pupil and mentor/question and answer format).
More than anything, Berkman’s writings dispel the myth that anarchism is an inherently violent and irrational political philosophy. Underlining all of his work was Berkman’s steadfast idealism and complete confidence that the toiling classes would achieve "freedom and liberty" and overcome oppression in all of its forms, best described as a form of revolutionary humanism. "In short," he wrote, "anarchism means a condition of society where all men and women are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and sensible life." This sentiment echoed an appeal to humanity, freedom of thought, and social justice that reverberated in his early writings from prison, while he organized and agitated against war, through to his reflective years as an exiled writer. If only it were a sentiment more widely shared today, then perhaps we could dance (or not dance) during the revolution. In any event, we (who dance with two left feet) are free to choose