book reviews

Review of a book about Skinhead culture, taken from issue 2 of Anti-Fascist Action's Fighting Talk magazine.

Anthony Masters, a British novelist and biographer, has produced the first full- length life of Bakunin in English since E. H. Carr’s Michael Bakunin (published in 1937). Carr’s work, though scholarly, readable, and indispensable to anyone inter¬ested in Bakunin, nevertheless placed undue emphasis on the more eccentric aspects of Bakunin’s personality and career, while paying insufficient attention to his major writings and their impact on the revolutionary and working-class movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A 2009 critique of the sensational anarchist best-seller, The Coming Insurrection, in which the author claims that it is not its “ideas” or “worldview” that are what is most important about the book, but rather the fact that it is essentially an appeal for an identity-based politics, a “permanent drunkenness of the Ego” that postulates an abstract, socially undifferentiated “being” that is supposed to find itself at home in a paradise worshiping its “fetish”, “identity”, and the author concludes that the total elimination of this harmful tendency is “one of the goals of a communist revolution”.