Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (79 page)

In the following decade, another Christian radical, John Humphrey Noyes, founded a community at Oneida, New York, believing like the Ranters that true Christians have thrown off the chains of Satan and become as innocent as Adam and Eve. Being in God’s grace, they cannot sin. Under his system of ‘Perfectionism’, churches and governments are considered harmful impositions. The Bible, he insists, has depicted the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven ‘God reigns over body, soul and estate, without interference from human governments.’
³⁵

Unlike the more repressive millenarian sects like the Shakers, Noyes’ disciples at Oneida pooled their property and practised free love, believing in the physical and spiritual union of all. Solidarity was achieved and disputes solved through the practice of ‘mutual criticism’ by rotating committees. It proved remarkably successful in Oneida. Ironically the very success of Oneida’s communism proved its undoing for the growing prosperity encouraged materialist and consumer values which eventually undermined its radical aims.

Towards the end of the century, European immigrants brought in a new kind of militant anarchist communism which rapidly overtook the indigenous variety. Nevertheless, middle-class society in New England could still produce fiery and rebellious youth. One such was Voltairine de Cleyre.

As a child de Cleyre attended a convent and wanted to become a nun. The Haymarket Massacre, a lecture on Paine, and a reading of Benjamin Tucker’s journal
Liberty
eventually convinced her that ‘Liberty is not the
Daughter but the Mother of Order.’ She lost her religious vocation and began to give lectures on free-thinking, and worked as a language teacher amongst working-class Jewish immigrants. Her religious upbringing however led her to see anarchism as ‘a sort of Protestantism, whose adherents are a unit in the great essential belief that all forms of external authority must disappear to be replaced by self-control only’.
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To begin with, De Cleyre was both a pacifist and non-resister, believing like Tolstoy that it was easier to conquer war by peace rather than force. Although she came to accept direct action as a form of public protest, she refused to advise anyone to do anything which involved a risk to herself. She thought that it was only from a peaceful strategy that a real solution to inequality and oppression would eventually emerge.

De Cleyre was fully aware that anarchists in the States at the time were divided in their conception of a future society between the individualists and the communists. Initially she favoured individual solutions to social problems, but increasingly stressed the importance of community. In her maturity, she envisaged a time when the great manufacturing plants of America would be broken up and society would consist of ‘thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing largely for its owns needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore independent’.
³⁷
She came to label herself simply ‘Anarchist’, and called like Malatesta for an ‘anarchism without adjectives’, since in the absence of government many different experiments would probably be tried in various localities in order to determine the most appropriate form.

After the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886 and the subsequent repression, anarchism remained principally a movement of immigrants among the Italian and Jewish populations, and the Russian refugees in the larger cities. From the latter community emerged the most influential anarcho-communists in America in the early part of this century: Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. They were not only tireless campaigners but also produced the best journals, especially
Mother Earth
which ran from 1906 to 1917.

Berkman was born into a respectable Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1870. Moving to St Petersburg he found the revolutionary movement inspirational, especially in the person of his uncle Mark Natanson, a revolutionary leader and founder of the Chaikovsky circle. After his parents’ deaths, Berkman left Russia at the age of sixteen, arriving in America in 1882. On becoming the companion of Emma Goldman, and inspired by the martyrdom of the Haymarket anarchists, he tried to put his revolutionary
beliefs into action by attempting unsuccessfully to shoot in 1892 the financier Henry Clay Frick, an employee of Andrew Carnegie who had ordered gunmen to kill strikers at a steel strike in Homestead. The action earned Berkman a twenty-two year sentence in prison, but it did not dampen his spirit. Unrepentant, he wrote in the
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
that ‘Human life is indeed sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered the taking of a life.’ Despite the effect of prison on his nerves, Berkman wrote to Goldman after ten years inside: ‘My youthful ideal of a free humanity in the vague future has become clarified and crystallized into the living truth of anarchy, as the sustaining elemental force of my every-day existence.’
³⁸

After serving fourteen years, he was released and immediately took up the revolutionary struggle once again. He helped organize the free Ferrer school in New York and edited with Goldman
Mother Earth.
They became the leading figures in the American anarchist movement, and both threw themselves into the anti-militarist campaign. Berkman went on to edit his own journal
Blast
which from 1915 to 1917 called stridently for direct action.

After being arrested and imprisoned for two years for opposing conscription on the US entry into the War, in 1919 Berkman was deported, with Emma Goldman, to Russia. At first, he worked with Bolsheviks and was even asked to translate Lenin’s
‘Left-Wing’ Communism, An Infantile Disorder
(1920). But Berkman rapidly became disillusioned and witnessed at first hand the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of the revolution and their persecution of the anarchists. The crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion was the final blow. In July 1921, he wrote in his diary: ‘Grey are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are forsworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people … Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot … The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.’
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The disillusioned Berkman decided to leave Russia once and for all. He lived at first in Germany for a couple of years, then settled in Paris, and finally ended up in the south of France.

In his last years, Berkman remained faithful to the anarchist cause, which he still considered the Very first thing humanity has ever thought of.’
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But he became less certain about the efficacy of violence and wrote to Goldman in November 1928: ‘I am in general now not in favour of terroristic tactics, except in very exceptional circumstances.’ Whilst working on his pamphlet
What is Communism?
in the following year, he even wrote to his lifelong companion: ‘There are moments when I feel that the revolution cannot work on anarchist principles. But once the old methods are followed, they never lead to anarchism.’
⁴¹
Rather than die slowly after an operation,
he shot himself in 1936, only a few weeks before the Spanish anarchists decided to take up arms against Franco.

Berkman’s
What is Communism?
was first published in 1929 in New York as
Now and After: the ABC of Anarchism.
The pamphlet proved one of the best introductions to anarcho-communism and has become an anarchist classic. Its value lies not so much in the originality of its ideas (mainly culled from Kropotkin) but in its plain and clear style and readiness to answer the traditional objections to anarchism.

Berkman defines anarchism as the ideal of ‘a society without force and compulsion, where all men shall be equals; and live in freedom, peace and harmony’. It does not mean, as its enemies would allege, bombs or chaos, but that ‘you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you’. For Berkman anarchist communism implies ‘voluntary communism, communism from free choice’.
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His most interesting arguments are in the chapter ‘Will Communist Anarchism Work?’ where he insists that laziness implies the ‘right man in the wrong place’ and asserts that freedom in practice implies diversification. As far as means are concerned, he points out that anarchists do not have a monopoly on violence any more than other social activists. Individual acts of violence are more an expression of temperament than theory and are the ‘method of ignorance, the weapon of the weak’.
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Indeed, in his chapter on the ‘Defence of the Revolution’, Berkman specifically condemns the suppression and terrorization of counter-revolutionaries and argues that the practice of liberty and equality is the best possible defence.

E
MMA
G
OLDMAN
WAS
MORE
of an activist than a thinker. Nevertheless, she made a lasting contribution to anarchist theory by giving it a feminist dimension which had only been hinted at in the work of Godwin and Bakunin. She not only stressed the psychological aspects of women’s subordination but made a creative synthesis of personal individualism and economic communism. As a lecturer on anarchism, agitator for free speech, pioneer of birth control, critic of Bolshevism, and defender of the Spanish Revolution, she was considered to be one of the most dangerous women of her time. Ever since her death her star has been rising in the firmament of reputation.

Goldman was born in 1869 in a Jewish ghetto in Russia, the unwanted child of her father’s second marriage. She grew up in the remote village of Popelan, where her parents had a small inn. She later recalled that she had always felt a rebel. As a girl, she was instinctively repelled by the knouting of a servant and shocked that love between a Jew and Gentile should be regarded a sin. When she was thirteen, the family moved in 1882 to the Jewish quarter in St Petersburg. Coming just after the assassination of Alexander II, it was a time of intense political repression and the Jewish community in Russia suffered a wave of pogroms. It was also a time of severe economic hardship. Due to her family’s poverty Goldman was obliged to leave school in St Petersburg only after six months and find work in a factory.

Mixing with radical students, she was introduced to Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
(1862) and was impressed by the definition of a nihilist as ‘a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in’. More important to her subsequent development, she secured a copy of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s
What is to be Done?
(1863) in which the heroine Vera is converted to nihilism and lives in a world of easy friendship between the sexes and enjoys free enquiry and co-operative work. The book not only
offered an embryonic sketch of her later anarchism, but strengthened her determination to live her life in her own way.
¹

Unfortunately her father would have none of it. The archetypal patriarch, he became the ‘nightmare’ of her childhood.
²
He not only whipped her in an attempt to break her spirit, but tried to marry her off at fifteen. When she refused and begged to continue her studies, he replied: ‘Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare
gefüllte
fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.’
³
It was eventually agreed in the family that such an impossible child should go to America with a half-sister to join her other half-sister who had already settled in Rochester.

As a Russian Jew without connections, Emma quickly realized that the paradise of America was, for the poor at least, hell on earth. She gained her real education in the slums and sweatshops, earning her living as a seamstress. The difficulties of her early years undoubtedly strengthened her sense of injustice and inspired her impassioned love of freedom.

What drew Goldman initially to anarchism in America was the outcry which followed the Haymarket Square tragedy in 1886 in Chicago. After a bomb had been thrown in a crowd of police during a workers’ rally for an eight-hour day, four anarchists were eventually hanged. Convicted on the flimsiest evidence, the judge at the trial had openly declared: ‘Not because you have caused the Haymarket bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on trial.’
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These events not only shaped the radical conscience of a generation but made Goldman undergo a profound conversion. On the day of the hanging, she decided to become a revolutionary and to find out what exactly had inspired the ideals of the martyrs.