In 1869, Sergey Nechayev published Catechism of a Revolutionist, a program for "merciless destruction" of society and the state. One hundred years after the book was published, The Black Panther Party republished the book in 1969. Brought back into print again with an edition in 2020 to star off the Radical Reprints series, we are bringing in a second edition with better formatting to start off the Radical Reprints imprint.

Examining the political theory of anarchism from a philosophical and historical perspective, Paul McLaughlin relates anarchism to the fundamental ethical and political problem of authority. The book pays particular attention to the authority of the state and the anarchist rejection of all traditional claims made for the legitimacy of state authority, the author both explaining and defending the central tenets of the anarchist critique of the state. The founding works of anarchist thought, by Godwin, Proudhon and Stirner, are explored and anarchism is examined in its historical context, including the influence of such events as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution on anarchist thought. Finally, the major theoretical developments of anarchism from the late-nineteenth century to the present are summarized and evaluated. This book is both a highly readable account of the development of anarchist thinking and a lucid and well-reasoned defence of the anarchist philosophy.

The Revolutionary Catechism is primarily concerned with the immediate practical problems of the revolution. It was meant to sketch out for new and prospective members of the International Fraternity both the fundamental libertarian principles and a program of action. The Revolutionary Catechism does not attempt to picture the perfect anarchist society - the anarchist heaven. Bakunin had in mind a society in transition toward anarchism. The building of a full-fledged anarchist society is the work of future generations.

Literary history meets economic policy in this entertaining polemic on the ethical and potentially destructive power of terrible literature.

This book, first published in 1979, examines the little-studied forerunners of the Russian revolutionary movement – the Russian section of the First International. It looks at the social democratic and Marxist Russians in the International, as well as examining the complex relations between the terrorist Sergei Nechaev and Marx’s friends, as well as tracing the activities of Michael Bakunin. It also analyses, for the first time in English, the activities of the Russian revolutionaries in the Paris Commune. It integrates early Russian social democracy into the larger context of European socialist and working-class movements.

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost—and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy—Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.

The Solution of the Fist: Dostoevsky and the Roots of Modern Terrorism addresses the political and psychological aspects of terrorism as seen through the eyes of a first-generation observer of terrorism, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Through an in-depth analysis of the first novel ever w...

Part one of a two-part history of the non-Marxist, libertarian form of socialism, aka anarchism. From its origins in the 18th century and the conflicts with Marx in the First International to insurrections, trade unions and specific anarchist organisations, the hidden history of an alternative tradition is revealed. The ideas about socialism so prevalent today, that it equates with state ownership, that is the perogative of the Party, that it has somehow failed, are all dismantled in this scholarly engagement with a complex ideology.