Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman

To the newspapers she was Red Emma, the most dangerous woman in America, an agitator to be jailed and surveilled and at last deported. The caricature was useful to the people who drew it and almost entirely false. Emma Goldman was a political philosopher of liberty as serious and as humane as any the American tradition produced, who held that every coercive authority, the state, capital, the church, and the conventions that bound women in particular, was an enemy of the free individual, and who would go on, after the government that feared her shipped her to revolutionary Russia, to become one of the earliest and most prophetic critics of Bolshevik tyranny from the left. The danger she posed was that she meant what she said about freedom, all the way down.

Anarchism. Goldman's definition is exact: "Anarchism: the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary." Anarchism for her is not chaos but its opposite, an order grown from voluntary cooperation rather than imposed by force, and its enemy is not law as such but the coercion that stands behind every state. She held to no narrow sect, practicing what was called anarchism without adjectives, because the point was never the doctrine but the liberation of the living individual.

Against every master. What sets Goldman apart from the merely political radical is the reach of her target. The state is only one of the authorities she would abolish; capitalism enslaves through economic necessity, the church through fear and the policing of the mind, and social convention through shame, and especially so for women. All of them are the same thing wearing different costumes, an external authority pressing down on the free person. From Nietzsche she took the critique of herd morality and the worth of the self-creating individual, though she turned it toward liberation rather than mastery; from Thoreau and the native American grain she took the sovereignty of the individual conscience standing against the state.

Marriage and love. Goldman's feminism cut to the institutions. Marriage, she argued, is at bottom an economic arrangement, an insurance contract that makes a wife into property and too often into a parasite, and it has remarkably little to do with love. Love is free or it is not love at all, and it cannot be ordered by the law, the property deed, or the priest. She was attacking the institution, not the bond; her quarrel was with everything that turned the deepest of human attachments into a transaction enforced by the state.

The deeper emancipation. Against the mainstream women's movement of her day, Goldman argued that the vote and formal legal equality were not enough and could even become a trap, a way of feeling free while remaining bound. Real emancipation is internal and economic: freedom from the inner tyranny of convention and moral prejudice, and freedom from the economic dependence that makes a woman sell herself, in marriage or in the street, to live. The ballot could not reach those chains. She demanded a liberation far more thorough than suffrage, one that would remake the person and not only the law.

Direct action. Because the state rests on force and electoral politics only legitimizes it, Goldman put her faith in direct action, the strike, the refusal, the organized deed, and above all the free spoken and printed word. She founded and edited the journal Mother Earth, she was jailed again and again for her speech, and she made the defense of free expression, even for those she despised, a principle rather than a convenience. Freedom for her was something a person took and exercised directly, not a power handed up to representatives.

The disillusionment. Deported to Soviet Russia in 1919 for opposing the draft, Goldman arrived a sympathizer of the revolution and left it shaken and clear-eyed. She had watched the Bolshevik state crush the very liberty the revolution had been made to win, becoming a new and more efficient tyranny, with its secret police, its silenced press, and the drowning of the Kronstadt sailors who asked for the freedom they had been promised. Her book on the experience was among the first and most far-seeing critiques of Soviet authoritarianism written from the left, and its argument is her enduring vindication: that freedom cannot be built by the centralized coercive state, because the means devour the end.

What this room reads. The corpus is Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), from Project Gutenberg, her major collection, which gathers her statements on anarchism, on minorities against majorities, on the psychology of political violence, on prisons and patriotism, on marriage and love, on the traffic in women, and on woman suffrage. Citations run by essay title. Her My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914) are further sources addressed partly from training knowledge, and the chat says when it reaches past the corpus.

The government that deported Emma Goldman as too dangerous could not deport her ideas, which have outlived it. Read now, she is a major philosopher of freedom, who refused to exchange one master for another, neither the capitalist nor the commissar, and who insisted that liberty is indivisible: that you cannot free the worker while binding the woman, or free the nation while caging the individual. She took the self-overcoming individual from Nietzsche and the conscience against the state from Thoreau; she carried the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft into the bedroom and the wage; she stands with Max Stirner among the anarchists who begin from the individual; and her long quarrel with Marx, over whether freedom can be built by a state acting in the name of the workers, was decided in her favor in the prisons of the country that exiled her. Whether or not she ever quite said she would not join a revolution she could not dance in, the line is true to her, because a freedom with no room for joy was never, to Emma Goldman, freedom at all.