ASR 88 features a short biographical sketch of Rudolf Rocker (marking the 150th anniversary of his birth) and excerpts from his writings. Here is an excerpt from his Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938):

Participation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought the labor movement a hairs’ breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance. The ancient proverb: “Who eats of the pope, dies of him,” has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labor movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above. Continue reading →