Outfitted in a gray suit and white tie purchased at Kaufmann Brothers department store and with a calling card featuring the pseudonym “Simon Bachman,” ostensibly a New York employment agent, the twenty-five-year-old Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman stood outside of Pittsburgh’s Chronicle-Telegraph Building on a warm summer day in 1892. He was waiting for industrialist Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the recently consolidated Carnegie Steel Corporation, to return from his daily card game at the Duquesne Club.
In Berkman’s pocket was a 38-caliber, short-barreled revolver. In the other a twelve-inch dagger. “The history of the world is on my side,” muttered Fyodor Dostoevsky’s anarchist Kirilov in Demons, and no doubt Berkman shared similar sentiments.
An attempt by me and couple of other lonely souls to place more of the old reviews and articles from the pre-internet Socialist Standard online. Yep, I know it's the same old repetitive bollocks from the SPGB whether it's from 1908 or from 1975 but more often or not it's usually in reply to the same old reformist cant from those self same years. Before Corbyn there was Foot . . . before Foot there was Bevan . . . before Bevan there was Cripps etc, etc until you arrive back to everyone going weak at the knees over Victor Grayson.
