ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS Emma Goldman
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
Emma Goldman
Known by the press as the most dangerous woman in America during her lifetime, Emma Goldman was anti-state, anti-military and anti-imperialist. Her anarchism is both of its day and timeless, and was influenced by a collectivist and voluntary view of socialism. One of the most important figures in American anarchism, some of her ideas are still controversial today, often for their insurrectionary undertones.
This collection of essays is perhaps the most famous of Emma Goldman's written works and discusses among other topics marriage, patriotism, women's suffrage, and political violence — all with anarchism as a foundational idea. Emma Goldman argues persuasively against the state machinery and states that social affinity cannot exist in a society driven by a profit and based on hierarchical structures that ignore common and personal social interests.
Still relevant and fascinating are Emma Goldman's thoughts on women and women's emancipation. Goldman was unpopular with the first-wave feminists of her time because she felt that their ideas embodied class differences and ignored issues faced by working women, and that they failed to push against hierarchies embodied by Church and State which usually hurt women, rather than help them.
Many of the issues raised in Emma Goldman's essays are almost exactly the same as they are today — an unjust and injurious prison system — and the way patriotism is used to deny the value of people rather than to help them actually improve the places that they live.
The final essay in the volume on how dramatic works can educate and disseminate radical thought has a distinct relevance in an age of constantly streaming media.
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From the essay Minorities Versus Majorities:
"If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life—production, politics, and education—rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden."
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The most violent element in society is ignorance.
― Emma Goldman
“The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
“Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
“Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only 'order' that governments have ever maintained.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
This newly edited volume includes the biographic sketch of Emma Goldman by Hippolyte Havel, edited by Viye Raines.