The Bolshevik Myth Dodo Press

Originally published: London: Hutchinson, 1925, New York by Boni & Livewright.

The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920-1922) is a book by Alexander Berkman describing his experiences in Bolshevist Russia from 1920 to 1922, where he saw the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Written in the form of a diary, The Bolshevik Myth describes how Berkman's initial enthusiasm for the revolution faded as he became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks and their suppression of all political dissent.

Alexander Berkman (1870-1936) was a leading member of the anarchist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the lover and close associate of Emma Goldman, a Lithuanianborn anarchist with whom he collaborated frequently and organized civil rights and anti-war campaigns. In 1892, he attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in retaliation for his involvement with the Homestead Strike: Berkman subsequently served a fourteen-year sentence. During World War I he was deported along with Goldman and other foreign-born American anarchists as a result of the Anarchist Exclusion Act. His works include: Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920-1922) (1925) and Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929).

Separated from her three young sons, stripped of possessions and fearing for her life, Countess Edith Sollohub was trapped in revolutionary Russia. This is her account of her escape, assuming new identities as a Polish refugee, a travelling musician and a Red Army nurse; enduring hunger, imprisonment and loneliness to be reunited with her family.

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

This book provides a re-assessment of Kropotkin's political thought and suggests that the 'classical' tradition which has provided a lens for the discussion of his work has had a distorting effect on the interpretation of his ideas. By setting the analysis of his thought in a number of key historical contexts, Ruth Kinna reveals the enduring significance of his political thought and questions the usefulness of those approaches to the history of ideas that map historical changes to philosophical and theoretical shifts. One of the key arguments of the book is that Kropotkin contributed to the elaboration of an anarchist ideology, which has been badly misunderstood and which today is too often dismissed as outdated. This sympathetic but critical analysis corrects some popular myths about Kropotkin's thought, highlights the important and unique contribution he made to the history of socialist ideas and sheds new light on the nature of anarchist ideology.