Vorsicht Anarchist!: Ein Leben für die Freiheit

by Augustin Souchy

The incredible autobiography of an incredible man. Souchy fought in the Spanish Revolution;was a serious and knowledgeable student of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer; a consistent war-resister; a prolific pamphleteer; a major figure in the International Workers' Association (IWA); an anarchosyndicalist determined to put theory into practice; one of the best informed specialists on the varieties of workers' control and self-management. These are memoirs par excellence, with a forward by Theo Waldinger, and an afterward by Sam Dolgoff.

Genres: History, Biography

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Matthew Antosh]

This was an alright book, but I do think that there where a few problems with it. One is the very odd structure of it; despite being an autobiography, it does not follow a linear time-line. Instead, each chapter is organized by nations visited. Although he does generally follow it from first places visited to last, there are allot of bouncing back or forward if he had visited them at multiple occasions.

Another problem is that the book doesn't touch on his life as much as it would have liked. It feels less like an autobiography and more like a travelogue of visits to social experimentation. While this may be interesting to those resurrecting how libertarian socialist communes have been organized in the past, it's not as interesting if you where looking for a book about the life of Augustin Souchy, his feelings, his roles in the debates and discussions and movements during his life time, etc.

Souchy is enthusiastic about the Israeli Kibbutz movement. Now a days, most Kibbutz have been privatized and integrated into Israeli capitalist economy. Even in Souchy's era, Kibbutzism was being used to advance colonial and expansionist policies on Arab Palestinian land, so called "Tower and Stockade" kibbutzim. Souchy doesn't even discuss colonialism and Israel, and dismisses the concerns of Palestinians in one paragraph by lecturing them on how they need to live peaceably in libertarian communes.

Overall, this book feels old. Politics have changed from Souchys time, even anarcho-syndicalist politics, and the views expressed by Souchy seem antiquated and naive by today standards. I don't think I would suggest it to folks unless they where doing some serious research on the functioning of different kinds of libertarian socialist experiments and experiments in workers self-management.

[Jake]

I think this book might be an abridged or condensed version of the original language one, because it feels incomplete and disjointed. Initially it’s an autobiography but it becomes a sort of non-chronological travelogue of Souchy’s visits to different places experiencing social transformation. I think a straightforward autobiography of Souchy’s incredible life, including more personal details, would be more interesting. Furthermore at the end of the book, Souchy’s extremely positive appraisal of the Israeli kibbutzim and negative appraisal of almost every other post-war socialistic experiment is either naive or willfully blind to the kibbutzim’s basis in colonialism and essentially capitalistic orientation.