Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (81 page)

It would be misleading however to call Goldman an elitist. Despite her realistic assessment of the revolutionary potential of her contemporaries she was still convinced that all human beings are ultimately capable of throwing off their chains and of reaching their full stature. There was nothing in human nature to prevent it and ‘the love of freedom is a universal trait’.
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Again, while inspired by Stirner, Goldman is not an egoist. Anarchism
may be the philosophy of ‘the sovereignty of the individual’ but it is also the theory of ‘social harmony’.
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She tried to achieve the central anarchist ideal of communal individuality. In her most widely read essay ‘What I Believe’ (1908), she insisted that anarchism is a theory of ‘organic development’. Rejecting property as ‘dominion over things’, she argues moreover that liberated work is possible only ‘in a society based on voluntary cooperation of productive groups, communities and societies loosely federated together, eventually developing into free communism, actuated by a solidarity of interests’.
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Having met leading French syndicalists, she saw syndicalism at the time, with its wish to overthrow the wage system and to replace the centralized State by the ‘free, federated grouping of the workers’, as the ‘economic expression of Anarchism’.
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She also praised the educational work of the French Labour Chambers and approved of their methods of direct action, industrial sabotage, and the general strike.

She returned to the question of ‘The Place of the Individual in Society’ (1940) in her last published essay. She reasserted her belief that ‘The Individual is the true reality in life’ and criticized government precisely because it not only seeks to widen and perpetuate power but has an inherent distrust of the individual and fear of individuality. Fully aware of the crippling influence of public opinion, she further suggested that ‘even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.’ Like Oscar Wilde, whom she admired, she maintained that true civilization is to be measured by a person’s ‘individuality and the extent to which it is free to have its being, to grow and expand unhindered by invasive and coercive authority’. At the same time, she followed Kropotkin by asserting that mutual aid and voluntary co-operation have worked for the evolution of the species and can only create the basis of a ‘free individual and associational life’.
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Goldman’s individualism was not therefore a rugged individualism which operates at the expense of others.

Goldman was scathing about the American Left as well as the Right. She considered the radical movement before the First World War to be in a state of ‘sad chaos … a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character’. She swiped at those ‘intellectual proletarians’ who preferred comfort to the ideal, and external success to the vital issues of life.
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Though she frequently worked with individual socialists on particular issues, she attacked the American Socialist Party for treating every ‘spook prejudice’ with kid gloves and for following the ‘crooked path’ of politics as a means of capturing the State: ‘if once economic dictatorship were added to the already supreme political power of the State, its iron heel would cut deeper into the flesh of labor than that of capitalism today.’
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As for Marxists in general, she felt keenly the split in the First International
between Marx and Bakunin. She criticized moreover Marx’s historical materialism for overlooking the ‘human element’ and for failing to recognize that the rejuvenation of humanity needs ‘the inspiration and energising force of an ideal’. Class consciousness can never be expressed in the political arena but only through the ‘solidarity of interests’ forged in the determined effort to overthrow the present system.
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While she offered a telling critique of her own society and culture and rejected the programmes of other socialists, Goldman refused to impose ‘an iron-clad programme or method on the future … Anarchism, as I understand it, leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in harmony with its needs.’
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While some have seen this as a theoretical weakness, it is in fact in keeping with her view that the past or the present should not determine the future, and it is impossible to imagine how people in a free society would want to arrange their affairs.

When it came to the means of bringing about a free society and transformed humanity, Goldman was somewhat ambivalent. To begin with she accepted the need for individual acts of political violence and she not only supported Berkman in his assassination attempt but commiserated with Czolgosz after he was condemned to death for killing McKinley. The men who make violent protests are not cruel and heartless monsters, she argued, but rather it is their ‘supersensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them’ which compels them to pay ‘the toll of our social crimes’.
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Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. Indeed, it is the ‘terrible inequality and great political injustice that prompts such acts’.
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But towards the middle of he life, she came to see Berkman and Czolgosz as victims who had committed deeds of misplaced protest. While she refused to condone them, neither did she condemn them.

The State, according to Goldman, is the greatest source of violence in our society, particularly by being the focal point for the twin evils of patriotism and militarism. Patriotism is a menace to liberty, fuels militarism, and should be replaced by universal brotherhood and sisterhood. She was totally opposed to militarism and like Tolstoy saw the soldier merely as a professional man-killer – ‘a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors’.
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Whereas class war and war against false values and evil institutions are legitimate, to prepare for war between States is ‘The Road to Universal Slaughter’.
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As she said at her trial in July 1917 for conspiracy to avoid the draft: ‘It is organized violence at the top which creates individual violence at the bottom.’
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Whilst living in America, Goldman thus advocated the use of collective violence to overthrow the State and capitalism and endorsed class war, direct action and industrial sabotage. But after her experience in Russia
in 1920 and 1921, she had second thoughts. It is one thing to employ violence in combat as a means of defence, but to institutionalize terrorism as the Bolsheviks had done is altogether different: ‘Such terrorism begets counter-revolution and in turn becomes counter-revolutionary.’ In Russia, the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party had become: ‘THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS.’
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Indeed, after her stay in Russia, she began to insist that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.

In practice, this meant that all violent means to realize libertarian ends are suspect. Social revolution should not only recognize the sanctity of human life but aim at a fundamental transvaluation of values; it involves internal change in our moral values as well external social relations. As she wrote to a friend in 1923: ‘The one thing I am convinced of as I have never been in my life is that the gun decides nothing at all.’
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Five year later, she wrote to Berkman that it was time to reject revolution as a ‘violent eruption destroying everything’ and that the only choice was to accept terrorism and become Bolsheviks or to become Tolstoyans.
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But she never relinquished her belief in revolution. When the Spanish Revolution broke out she not only refused to condemn those anarchists who collaborated in the republican government with socialists and communists but even condoned the military training of soldiers in the exceptional circumstances of the civil war.

In general, Goldman thought the most important way of reconstructing society was through example and education. She defined example as ‘the actual living of a truth once recognized, not the mere theorizing of its life element’.
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It was to this end that she wrote the two volumes of her frank and intimate autobiography
Living My Life
(1931).

In the area of education, she involved herself in the Modern School Movement, helping to establish one in an anarchist community in Stelton, New Jersey and another in Manhattan. They were inspired by the schools of the Frenchman Sébastien Faure and those of the Spaniard Francisco Ferrer, whose execution in 1909 had caused an international outcry in liberal circles. Goldman saw existing schools as drilling the young into absolute uniformity by compulsory mental feeding. The social purpose of the libertarian Modern School on the other hand was ‘to develop the individual through knowledge and the free play of characteristic traits, so that he may become a social being’.
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To bring this about, there should be no rules and regulation. The educators should encourage the free expression of the child and to bring about his or her understanding and sympathy. Since ‘man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature’, sex education should be given to recognize the central and beautiful part it plays in life.
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But while Goldman insisted on the ‘free growth’ of the innate tendencies of a child, she did not foresee a time like Godwin and Ferrer when education would become an
entirely spontaneous affair. She continued to believe in the creative power of the good teacher: ‘The child is to the teacher what clay is to the sculptor.’
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Goldman’s arguments on government, revolution and education were invariably clear and perceptive, but her most important contribution to anarchist theory was in giving it a feminist dimension. She was particularly incensed about the status and conditions of women in her day and her outspoken views caused much of her notoriety. She detested the double standard which prevailed in the relations between the sexes. She attacked the ‘The Hypocrisy of Puritanism’ which demeans natural impulses and depresses culture. She railed against the existing system which treated women as sex objects, breeders and cheap labour. Prostitution was the prime example of the exploitation of woman, but all women in different ways were obliged to sell their bodies. By stressing the personal as the political in this way, Goldman was isolated from feminists in her own day but it made her particularly appealing to the American feminists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Unlike the suffragettes, who saw the vote as the principal means of female emancipation and who wanted to bring men under the same restrictions as women, Goldman rejected completely the ‘modern fetish’ of universal suffrage. She criticized the existing suffrage movement in America for being ‘altogether a parlor affair’, detached from the economic needs of the people.
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While the true aim of emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the fullest sense, ‘The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation’ in America had been to turn her into an isolated and artificial being. Paradoxically, Goldman thought it necessary to emancipate her American sisters from ‘emancipation’ as it was then understood. The so-called ‘free American citizen’ had by the right of universal suffrage merely ‘forged chains about his limbs’; she saw no reason why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man but felt it an absurd notion to believe that ‘woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed’.
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No political solution is possible for the unequal and repressive relations between the sexes. Goldman therefore called for a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all accepted values’ coupled with the abolition of economic slavery. She invited her contemporaries to go ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ and assert ‘the right to oneself, to one’s personality’.
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True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts; it begins in a ‘woman’s soul’. Above all, woman’s emancipation must come from and through herself:

Goldman felt no compunction in tackling head on the most tabooed subjects and called for a frank and open discussion of sex, love and marriage. Far from being synonymous, Goldman believed that marriage and love are often mutually antagonistic. Whereas love has been the most powerful factor in breaking the bars of convention, marriage furnishes the State and Church with an opportunity to pry into our most intimate affairs. It is often purely an economic arrangement, furnishing the woman with an insurance policy and the man with a pretty toy and a means of perpetuating his kind. As such it ‘prepares the woman for a life of a parasite, a dependent helpless servant, while it furnishes the man the right to a chattel mortgage over a human life’.
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A woman therefore emancipates herself when she admires a man only for the qualities of his heart and mind, asserts the right to follow that love without hindrance, and declares the absolute right to free motherhood. No anarchist thinker other than Godwin has compiled such a trenchant critique of the ‘market place of marriage’.