The Totalitarian Nightmare

A scarce self-published anarchist novel. The author could only afford to print 150 copies, which he distributed gratis. Enrico Arrigoni (1894-1986) was an individualist anarchist influenced by the German philosopher Max Stirner. Arrigoni was born in Italy and began working in a factory and taking part in anarchist actions as a teenager. He fled to Switzerland during the First World War to escape the draft, then spent the next few years moving from country to country to escape police attention. Arrigoni moved to the United States in the 1920s, and apart from a stint in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War remained there for the rest of his life. He wrote in the afterword to this novel:

"This book is written especially for the working class, the masses which the totalitarians are so eager to claim for their own, to show them communism doesn't mean emancipation, but total exploitation and slavery for them, under the tyrannical rule of the commissars.