Introduction
Emma Goldman and her Mother Earth circle subvert the generalizations many historians make about anarchists just as readily as they undermined conventional society. James Joll views anarchism as fundamentally an anti-modernist movement "based on a romantic, backward-looking vision of an idealized past of artisans and peasants, and on a total rejection of the realities of twentieth century social and economic organization." Historians have also claimed that the anarchists had no realistic strategy for achieving their goals, no practical program for the future, and even fewer immediate proposals for the present. George Woodcock speaks of "the failure of the anarchists as revolutionary actionists" and "the weakness of their practical proposals for the society that would follow their hypothetical revolution." The anarchist vision, he claims, "was indefinitely postponed until the millennial day of reckoning; it was a kind of revolutionary pie-in-the-sky." The anarchists "displayed an infinite and consistent contempt for piecemeal reform" which doomed them to sterility. Many historians assert that the Socialist movement was more modern in its acceptance of technology, economic and political centralization, and the use of electoral politics to achieve immediate reforms benefiting the working class. Scholars have labelled the anarchists "puritans" who extolled "extreme simplicity and frugality" and eschewed "the technological achievements of the industrial age."[i]
Other writers have criticized anarchism for opposite reasons. Leslie Fishbein considers Goldman and her circle as bourgeois and reformist, and views their philosophy as an incoherent hodge-podge of reforms rather than a systematic social analysis and revolutionary program. Margaret Marsh similarly claims that Goldman did not integrate her feminism into her overall philosophy, especially her economic views. Christopher Lasch deems Goldman hardly worthy of mention in his two books on American radicalism, and condemns cultural radicals who apply their revolutionary vision in the present as allegedly believing that individuals can foment basic social change by individually changing their personal lifestyles. According to Lasch, they "confuse culture with politics."[ii]
None of these generalizations apply to Emma Goldman. Her philosophy reflected modern changes in social and economic organization and built upon the most recent trends in thought. Indeed, the anarchists clustered around Mother Earth were more intransigently modern than most members of the Socialist party, who recast traditional values and institutions to protect workers against the onslaught of industrial capitalism. While many Socialists were strongly progressive in all spheres of life, the anarchists were far more consistently secularist, pluralist, and individualist. They exulted in the destruction of traditional values and cultures, including the family, religion, the nation-state, and conventional moralities. Goldman championed literary realism, recreational sex, homosexuality, and experimental living. Fomenting a revolution that anticipated a totally new world rather than idealizing an old one, she favored Nietzsche over Marx.
Goldman and her circle appear so modern to us today--so much more topical than many of the Socialists--precisely because they were cultural anarchists as well as political and economic revolutionaries. Taking the liberation of human personality as her fundamental axiom, Goldman criticized all of existing society. She emphasized, however, those areas of life where an individual had some choice and where her values, personality, and decisions could change her life in the present. Although Goldman castigated the capitalist economy and state, she offered no concrete blueprints for the future communistic economy or borderless world; its residents, she believed, would create their own diverse forms of economic and social organization. Instead, Goldman emphasized urgent and practical issues--direct action, libertarian education, free speech, industrial unionism, birth control, women's liberation, and modern literature. She was the opposite of theoretical and irrelevant; her life and writings comprise a vibrant commentary on and example of how her readers and auditors could respond, individually and personally, to the challenges of the modern world.
Goldman's practical program was more relevant and achievable than that of the Socialists because her immediate demand was that each individual live a full, authentic life right now. Each person, she believed, should construct a full, free life in the present, and, in so doing, help foment the "transvaluation of values" that comprised her revolution. Her anarchism was an active, lived experience, defined more by lifestyle than by professed belief, more by deeds than by words. Her circle refused to defer the revolution until they convinced a majority or attained political power; revolution consisted of both individual self-transformation and collective, social change. A person could be a passive Socialist voter or even a relatively inactive IWW member, but anarchists embodied their ideas and lived the revolution. Goldman's revolution entailed not asceticism, puritanism, or a rejection of the fruits of modern industry, but rather self-expression in every area of life--in sexuality, fun and frivolity, work, dancing, education, music, and the arts. She demanded "freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."[iii]
Goldman's philosophical radicalism was more encompassing than that of conventional Marxists precisely because it was more cultural. Most Socialists conceived of exploitation as a purely economic process--the capitalist extraction of surplus value from the workers--and therefore downplayed other forms of oppression, such as those based on race or gender. The socialist focus on work and unions necessarily slighted women in an age when most working-class men were male supremacists, wage-earning women were usually excluded from unions, and most married women remained imprisoned in the home. The Marxist stress on political action similarly neglected women in an era when few women could vote or run for office. The Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism relegated the cultural issues that consumed the anarchists to a relatively insignificant "superstructure" that could have little real effect on the lives of workers, and which would automatically change along with the economic "base" following the revolution. Marxism also encouraged passivity and fatalism--the belief that the workers' victory was assured by the automatic, impersonal operation of economic forces. Although Goldman and her friends did not consider themselves Marxists, they foreshadowed our contemporary varieties of cultural Marxism which locate exploitation and oppression throughout society, view culture as a fundamental arena of struggle, and consider racial and gender issues as distinct from class oppression and important in their own right.
Ironically, however, the anarchists' cultural revolutionism was self-defeating even if prescient. The very practicality of their proposals meant that, despite themselves, the anarchists furthered specific, individual reforms detached from any revolutionary context. Their cultural radicalism appealed to a segment of the middle class while alienating most workers. Emma Goldman's general ethos--her stress on intensity of experience and on self-fulfillment, her call for authenticity, individual achievement and autonomy, her version of the strenuous life and its anchor in a transcendental moral code--appealed to some members of a middle class beset by cultural anxiety and yet enjoying unprecedented opportunities for personal growth and cultural experimentation. The anarchists' concrete activities and proposals in the areas of feminism, sexuality, education, birth control, literature, and free speech, also appealed more to relatively privileged Americans than to "the grand army of starvation." The anarchist insistence that any individual could, by a mere act of the will, liberate herself from the constraints of custom, law, and public opinion, licensed middle-class individuals to experiment with and adopt pieces of the anarchist vision while detaching them from any overall theories of social transformation or practice of collective struggle. Against all their own wishes, the anarchists exemplified Christopher Lasch's "new intellectuals--iconoclasts who emphasized self-expression over collective good and helped liberate the individual even while inadvertently ensuring that such liberation would occur within the framework of a brutal and oppressive social system, and hence remain largely illusionary. This baleful effort stemmed not from any deficiencies in Goldman's own outlook, however, but from implacable social realities. Goldman recognized that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the state was necessary for her concrete proposals to prove truly liberating; however, she could not persuade the social groups she targeted of this. (Those who were persuaded were destroyed by capitalist and governmental terrorism and violence.) Leslie Fishbein errs in her assertion that Goldman propounded an ill-assorted grab-bag of discrete reforms. Goldman united all her endeavors in a wide-ranging and consistent philosophy that encompassed all of life while avoiding dogmatism, inflexibility, or the totalizing impulse. The social structure of the United States, rather than alleged shortcomings in her own worldview, ensured that the causes she championed would be adopted, if at all, only as isolated and ultimately futile reforms.
Many of Goldman's academic sympathizers have downplayed the sincerity and extent of Goldman's advocacy of various forms of political violence such as assassination, riot, and insurrection. Such historians either claim that Goldman abandoned her early endorsement of violence or explain such advocacy as indicating sympathy with the victims of oppression rather than their violent acts of resistance.[iv] Goldman and her Mother Earth circle, however, discussed the issue of political violence in a complex and nuanced fashion. Although Mother Earth presented more dissenting views on attentats than on any other topic, the Socialist and mainstream presses were not deluded in their frequent association of Anarchism with violence. Goldman's stance on terrorism, in fact, symbolizes both her courage and clear-sightedness and her neglect of structural forces, her excessive reliance on individual will, and her occasional equation of self-expression and social revolution. Any discussion of Goldman's anarchism must confront her philosophy of violence because it was central to her weltanschauung--both a consequence and contributor to her overall philosophy of anarchist revolution.
Notes:
[i]Joll, 258-259; Woodcock, 442-448; Hobsbawn, 260-61, 218. Although Woodcock hardly mentions Goldman, he realizes her distinctiveness. He says that she "really belongs in a frame larger than the anarchist movement alone can give her, for, Russian though she was by birth, she represented in a very broad sense the best traditions of American radicalism."
[ii]Leslie Fishbein's Rebels in Bohemia is about The Masses group, but frequently quotes Goldman, even though Goldman had her own circle and publication. Goldman, in fact, avoided Greenwich Village, and although she and Eastman had much in common, they severely criticized each other. I am assuming that Fishbein's general conclusions about "rebels in bohemia"(PP. 3-7, 111, passim) apply to Goldman. Christopher Lasch's comments are in The New Radicalism in America, pp. xiv, 310, 347.
Margaret Marsh Anarchist Women, 1870-1920, (Philadelphia ----), pp. 101-2, 104, 106-107, 168. Typical of the treatment that Goldman (and other cultural radicals) have received is Marsh's statement (106) that "Although she did not compromise her own political views and still preached to her admirers a philosophy of revolution against capitalism by and on behalf of the working class, she nevertheless seemed too fond of her new position as darling of the intellectuals to alienate them." How Goldman could preach working-class revolution without alienating the intellectuals is never explained.
[iii] LML, 56.
[iv] Historians on EG and violence, quote Falk, Drinnon, Wexler. THIS NOTE NEEDS WORK
Other writers have criticized anarchism for opposite reasons. Leslie Fishbein considers Goldman and her circle as bourgeois and reformist, and views their philosophy as an incoherent hodge-podge of reforms rather than a systematic social analysis and revolutionary program. Margaret Marsh similarly claims that Goldman did not integrate her feminism into her overall philosophy, especially her economic views. Christopher Lasch deems Goldman hardly worthy of mention in his two books on American radicalism, and condemns cultural radicals who apply their revolutionary vision in the present as allegedly believing that individuals can foment basic social change by individually changing their personal lifestyles. According to Lasch, they "confuse culture with politics."[ii]
None of these generalizations apply to Emma Goldman. Her philosophy reflected modern changes in social and economic organization and built upon the most recent trends in thought. Indeed, the anarchists clustered around Mother Earth were more intransigently modern than most members of the Socialist party, who recast traditional values and institutions to protect workers against the onslaught of industrial capitalism. While many Socialists were strongly progressive in all spheres of life, the anarchists were far more consistently secularist, pluralist, and individualist. They exulted in the destruction of traditional values and cultures, including the family, religion, the nation-state, and conventional moralities. Goldman championed literary realism, recreational sex, homosexuality, and experimental living. Fomenting a revolution that anticipated a totally new world rather than idealizing an old one, she favored Nietzsche over Marx.
Goldman and her circle appear so modern to us today--so much more topical than many of the Socialists--precisely because they were cultural anarchists as well as political and economic revolutionaries. Taking the liberation of human personality as her fundamental axiom, Goldman criticized all of existing society. She emphasized, however, those areas of life where an individual had some choice and where her values, personality, and decisions could change her life in the present. Although Goldman castigated the capitalist economy and state, she offered no concrete blueprints for the future communistic economy or borderless world; its residents, she believed, would create their own diverse forms of economic and social organization. Instead, Goldman emphasized urgent and practical issues--direct action, libertarian education, free speech, industrial unionism, birth control, women's liberation, and modern literature. She was the opposite of theoretical and irrelevant; her life and writings comprise a vibrant commentary on and example of how her readers and auditors could respond, individually and personally, to the challenges of the modern world.
Goldman's practical program was more relevant and achievable than that of the Socialists because her immediate demand was that each individual live a full, authentic life right now. Each person, she believed, should construct a full, free life in the present, and, in so doing, help foment the "transvaluation of values" that comprised her revolution. Her anarchism was an active, lived experience, defined more by lifestyle than by professed belief, more by deeds than by words. Her circle refused to defer the revolution until they convinced a majority or attained political power; revolution consisted of both individual self-transformation and collective, social change. A person could be a passive Socialist voter or even a relatively inactive IWW member, but anarchists embodied their ideas and lived the revolution. Goldman's revolution entailed not asceticism, puritanism, or a rejection of the fruits of modern industry, but rather self-expression in every area of life--in sexuality, fun and frivolity, work, dancing, education, music, and the arts. She demanded "freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."[iii]
Goldman's philosophical radicalism was more encompassing than that of conventional Marxists precisely because it was more cultural. Most Socialists conceived of exploitation as a purely economic process--the capitalist extraction of surplus value from the workers--and therefore downplayed other forms of oppression, such as those based on race or gender. The socialist focus on work and unions necessarily slighted women in an age when most working-class men were male supremacists, wage-earning women were usually excluded from unions, and most married women remained imprisoned in the home. The Marxist stress on political action similarly neglected women in an era when few women could vote or run for office. The Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism relegated the cultural issues that consumed the anarchists to a relatively insignificant "superstructure" that could have little real effect on the lives of workers, and which would automatically change along with the economic "base" following the revolution. Marxism also encouraged passivity and fatalism--the belief that the workers' victory was assured by the automatic, impersonal operation of economic forces. Although Goldman and her friends did not consider themselves Marxists, they foreshadowed our contemporary varieties of cultural Marxism which locate exploitation and oppression throughout society, view culture as a fundamental arena of struggle, and consider racial and gender issues as distinct from class oppression and important in their own right.
Ironically, however, the anarchists' cultural revolutionism was self-defeating even if prescient. The very practicality of their proposals meant that, despite themselves, the anarchists furthered specific, individual reforms detached from any revolutionary context. Their cultural radicalism appealed to a segment of the middle class while alienating most workers. Emma Goldman's general ethos--her stress on intensity of experience and on self-fulfillment, her call for authenticity, individual achievement and autonomy, her version of the strenuous life and its anchor in a transcendental moral code--appealed to some members of a middle class beset by cultural anxiety and yet enjoying unprecedented opportunities for personal growth and cultural experimentation. The anarchists' concrete activities and proposals in the areas of feminism, sexuality, education, birth control, literature, and free speech, also appealed more to relatively privileged Americans than to "the grand army of starvation." The anarchist insistence that any individual could, by a mere act of the will, liberate herself from the constraints of custom, law, and public opinion, licensed middle-class individuals to experiment with and adopt pieces of the anarchist vision while detaching them from any overall theories of social transformation or practice of collective struggle. Against all their own wishes, the anarchists exemplified Christopher Lasch's "new intellectuals--iconoclasts who emphasized self-expression over collective good and helped liberate the individual even while inadvertently ensuring that such liberation would occur within the framework of a brutal and oppressive social system, and hence remain largely illusionary. This baleful effort stemmed not from any deficiencies in Goldman's own outlook, however, but from implacable social realities. Goldman recognized that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the state was necessary for her concrete proposals to prove truly liberating; however, she could not persuade the social groups she targeted of this. (Those who were persuaded were destroyed by capitalist and governmental terrorism and violence.) Leslie Fishbein errs in her assertion that Goldman propounded an ill-assorted grab-bag of discrete reforms. Goldman united all her endeavors in a wide-ranging and consistent philosophy that encompassed all of life while avoiding dogmatism, inflexibility, or the totalizing impulse. The social structure of the United States, rather than alleged shortcomings in her own worldview, ensured that the causes she championed would be adopted, if at all, only as isolated and ultimately futile reforms.
Many of Goldman's academic sympathizers have downplayed the sincerity and extent of Goldman's advocacy of various forms of political violence such as assassination, riot, and insurrection. Such historians either claim that Goldman abandoned her early endorsement of violence or explain such advocacy as indicating sympathy with the victims of oppression rather than their violent acts of resistance.[iv] Goldman and her Mother Earth circle, however, discussed the issue of political violence in a complex and nuanced fashion. Although Mother Earth presented more dissenting views on attentats than on any other topic, the Socialist and mainstream presses were not deluded in their frequent association of Anarchism with violence. Goldman's stance on terrorism, in fact, symbolizes both her courage and clear-sightedness and her neglect of structural forces, her excessive reliance on individual will, and her occasional equation of self-expression and social revolution. Any discussion of Goldman's anarchism must confront her philosophy of violence because it was central to her weltanschauung--both a consequence and contributor to her overall philosophy of anarchist revolution.
Notes:
[i]Joll, 258-259; Woodcock, 442-448; Hobsbawn, 260-61, 218. Although Woodcock hardly mentions Goldman, he realizes her distinctiveness. He says that she "really belongs in a frame larger than the anarchist movement alone can give her, for, Russian though she was by birth, she represented in a very broad sense the best traditions of American radicalism."
[ii]Leslie Fishbein's Rebels in Bohemia is about The Masses group, but frequently quotes Goldman, even though Goldman had her own circle and publication. Goldman, in fact, avoided Greenwich Village, and although she and Eastman had much in common, they severely criticized each other. I am assuming that Fishbein's general conclusions about "rebels in bohemia"(PP. 3-7, 111, passim) apply to Goldman. Christopher Lasch's comments are in The New Radicalism in America, pp. xiv, 310, 347.
Margaret Marsh Anarchist Women, 1870-1920, (Philadelphia ----), pp. 101-2, 104, 106-107, 168. Typical of the treatment that Goldman (and other cultural radicals) have received is Marsh's statement (106) that "Although she did not compromise her own political views and still preached to her admirers a philosophy of revolution against capitalism by and on behalf of the working class, she nevertheless seemed too fond of her new position as darling of the intellectuals to alienate them." How Goldman could preach working-class revolution without alienating the intellectuals is never explained.
[iii] LML, 56.
[iv] Historians on EG and violence, quote Falk, Drinnon, Wexler. THIS NOTE NEEDS WORK