Anarchism and Other Essays

Goldman was imprisoned multiple times, surveilled by the FBI for decades, and ultimately deported from the United States for the crime of thinking clearly about power. These essays — on anarchism, the state, patriotism, prisons, marriage, free love, and the theater — were written between 1906 and 1911 and have not aged because the systems they name have not changed. She understood before almost anyone else that the personal and the political are the same question: that the state's control of women's bodies and the state's control of workers' labor are expressions of the same logic. The most accessible introduction to anarchist thought ever written and the direct line between Rimbaud's refusal and the punk movement's politics. Goldman lived every argument she made at enormous personal cost — deported, imprisoned, impoverished, never recanting, never softening. The most punk biography on this entire shelf attached to the most essential political essays. If you want to understand what P&P is arguing for, start here.