Emma Goldman, class warrior

An article debunking a Leninist article on Emma Goldman. It shows the dishonesty of the original article and indicates Goldman’s class struggle anarchist-communist politics and life. It first appeared in Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 4 No. 2 (Summer 2024).

Emma Goldman, class warrior

Marxist distortions of anarchism are as old as Marxism itself. Indeed, the first published Marxist book – Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy – was a work riddled with inventions, distortions, cherry-picking, the very occasional valid point and, ironically, plagiarism.[1] Which raises an obvious question: if anarchism is so terrible then why are these necessary? Perhaps because an honest account of anarchism would undermine and expose Marxism itself and so Marxists “refrain from criticising anarchism as such – unless driven to doing so, when it exposes [Marxism’s] own authoritarianism” and so Marxism “concentrates its attacks not on Anarchism, but on Anarchists.”[2]

One in a long series of distortion dressed up as factual analysis is Lance Selfa’s “Emma Goldman: A life of controversy”.[3] This article is a good example of the distortion, cherry-picking and inventions used by Marxists to combat the anarchist menace – if the time is taken to check the claims made, all too often it will be discovered that the references provided rarely support the claims made (and, on occasion, say the opposite). Likewise, when the primary sources are looked at, a radically different picture of the person or organisation involved soon emerges (the paucity of references to Goldman’s works or Mother Earth is noticeable in Selfa’s article).

Yet it is not only Leninists who downplay Goldman’s importance. Murray Bookchin, when he still considered himself an anarchist, proclaimed that “[d]espite their avowals of an anarchocommunist ideology, Nietzscheans like Emma Goldman remained cheek to jowl in spirit with individualists” and she “was by no means the ablest thinker in the libertarian pantheon.”[4] She has also suffered from historians who often fail to understand anarchist theory or the movement she was part of, focus on her personality at the expense of her ideas[5], or stress the aspects of her life and ideas which interest them and so, inadvertently, skew perspectives on their relative importance.

Debunking Selfa’s nonsense, then, has a wider importance for it allows the challenging of wider claims and the reasserting of the importance of anarchist ideas and activism for modern radicals. It allows a richer understanding of Goldman’s ideas which stresses their class struggle nature, which shows that she was a communist-anarchist and, as a consequence, an advocate of syndicalism. It also allows us to better understand her views on the Russian Revolution and her critique of Bolshevism for these were rooted in her working-class orientation which Selfa is so keen to deny.

Lessons from the past

The point of Selfa’s article is to evaluate anarchism: “what interests us here is whether her politics, as reflected in her actions and her writings, should guide a new generation of radicals today. By looking at her ideas, we want to determine if the ideology she spent her whole life promoting – anarchism – provides a guide to action for people who want to change the world.” Sadly, he fails to do this, for he does not present an honest account of her ideas.

For example, he states that many “consider her a pioneer in the fight to legalize birth control, but ignore that she argued that the poor shouldn’t have children”, which is a very misleading way of saying that Goldman argued that working-class women should be in control of their own bodies and so fertility (not to mention showing an unawareness that bringing up a large number of children on low wages is difficult).[6] This, in addition, shows a feature of his so-called critique, namely an unwillingness or inability to refute Goldman’s arguments (particularly if he sees fit to actually quote her.)

This is to be expected for if he did present an honest account of Goldman’s ideas, his readers would soon realise that she was right not only about anarchism about also about Selfa’s own brand of authoritarian politics. Ironically, he claims that “socialists” (as if Goldman were not a libertarian socialist!) have “a strong critique of anarchism.” If they did, then Selfa would have no need to distort the truth as he does and he would be more willing to engage with her actual ideas and arguments.

The aim of Selfa’s article is clear enough when he states that “one group of anarchists whose libertarian ideas were most connected to workers’ struggles – people like Victor Serge, Alfred Rosmer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Lucy Parsons, and Big Bill Haywood – actually left the ranks of anarchists and joined the Communist Parties.” They “came to the conclusion that only collective mass struggle could attain socialism and that only a revolutionary party could organize that struggle.” He considers these, the anarcho-syndicalists, as “the best of the anarchists”.

He wants his readers to conclude that Goldman – and anarchism – is not “connected to workers’ struggles” and rejected the idea that “only collective mass struggle could attain socialism.” This, as will be shown, is as untrue as the notion that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood were anarchists (they were not[7]), that Lucy Parsons joined the Communist Party (while working with it, she never joined it although, to her shame, she defended the Bolshevik regime against Goldman[8]) or that individualist Victor Serge did anything other than look down upon workers and their struggles.[9] This will be done, in the main, by drawing upon the very works Selfa himself quotes from.

A lifetime of (class) struggle

Selfa divides Goldman’s life into “three parts”, the first being “’Red Emma,’ the firebrand whom the press labeled as a crazed bomb thrower, which lasts until about 1906”.

His discussion of this period provides a good example of his technique. For Selfa, it “was telling that the first speeches she gave, under Most’s influence, were ‘about the waste of energy and time the eight-hour struggle involved, scoffing at the stupidity of the workers who fought for such trifles.’” Based on this quote from chapter five of Goldman’s Living My Life, he proclaims that she had “a purist, ultraleft position on a number of the questions of the day” throughout her political career.

Yet, as Goldman recounted on the very next page of Living My Life, an old man questioned her position on this, stressing the importance of the “small achievement” of fewer hours at “the hated work” and for “a little more time for reading and being out in the open.” She concluded that “his clear analysis of the principle invoked in the eight-hour struggle, brought home to me the falsity of Most’s position.”[10] Thus her “first public experience”, after discussion with the masses he claims she disdained, broke her allegiance to what Selfa’s uses as an example of a “trademark of her politics throughout her life.” In reality, she held this position for three public meetings at the start of a career which lasted fifty years.

What Goldman did next is also significant. As she recounted in the very same chapter, “a new call came to me, of workers on strike, and I followed it eagerly.”[11] This involved her taking an active part in a cloak-makers strike:

“I threw myself into the work with all the ardour of my being and I became absorbed in it to the exclusion of everything else. My task was to get the girls in the trade to join the strike. For that purpose meetings, concerts, socials, and dances were organized. At these affairs it was not difficult to press upon the girls the need of making common cause with their striking brothers. I had to speak often and I became less and less disturbed when on the platform. My faith in the justice of the strike helped me to dramatize my talks and to carry conviction. Within a few weeks my work brought scores of girls into the ranks of the strikers.” [12]

She then took part in organising the unemployed:

“The industrial crisis of that year had thrown thousands out of employment, and their condition now reached an appalling state . . . I had returned to [New York to] devote myself to the unemployed . . .

“Committee sessions, public  meetings, collection of food-stuffs, supervising the feeding of the homeless and their numerous children, and, finally, the organization of a mass meeting on Union Square entirely filled my time.

“The meeting at Union Square was preceded by a demonstration, the marching columns counting many thousands. The girls and women were in front, I at their head carrying a red banner. Its crimson waved proudly in the air and could be seen for blocks . . .

“’Men and women’, I began amidst sudden silence, ‘do you not realize that the State is the worst enemy you have? It is a machine that crushes you in order to sustain the ruling class, your masters. Like naïve children you put your trust in your political leaders . . . even where there is no direct betrayal, the labour politicians make common cause with your enemies to keep you in leash, to prevent your direct action. The State is the pillar of capitalism, and it is ridiculous to expect any redress from it . . .  They will go on robbing you, your children, and your children’s children, unless you wake up, unless you become daring enough to demand your rights. Well, then, demonstrate before the palaces of the rich; demand work. If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right!’”[13]

As well as organising strikes, protests and marches, Goldman also showed solidarity with strikes by her fellow-workers:

“The coal-miners were on strike . . . we were able to canvass unions, hold picnics, and arrange other affairs to raise money . . . I was asked to undertake a lecture tour for the purpose of raising funds for the miners . . . We had reckoned, however, without the authorities in the strike districts. Our people there could secure no halls; on the rare occasions when a landlord was brave enough to rent us his place, the police broke up our gatherings. In several towns, among them Wilkesbarre and McKeesport, I was met by the guardians of the law at the station and turned back. It was finally decided that I should concentrate my efforts in the larger cities of the strike regions . . . Fortunately my work for the miners was almost exclusively in the unions, and the police could do nothing there.”[14]

It is this involvement in the labour movement and its struggles during and after Selfa’s “Red Emma” phase which was the real “trademark” of her politics.

Emma Goldman, syndicalist

Rather than ignore the masses or dismiss its struggles, Goldman was a worker (initially, a seamstress) and took an active part in workers’ struggles. Unsurprisingly, in 1894, she told the press on her release from prison for inciting a riot that she was “determined to use every means in my power to spread my doctrine among the people.”[15] The masses played a key role in her politics as can be seen from her advocacy of syndicalism.

This will come as a surprise to Selfa’s readers. For all his claim to be “looking at her ideas,” he does not once mention her consistent and vocal support for syndicalism – in spite of it being mentioned in the books he quotes from. Thus, when consulting Red Emma Speaks, he somehow completely managed to overlook her 1913 article “Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice”:

“Syndicalism, like the old trade unions, fights for immediate gains, but it is not stupid enough to pretend that labor can expect humane conditions from inhumane economic arrangements in society. Thus it merely wrests from the enemy what it can force him to yield; on the whole, however, Syndicalism aims at, and concentrates its energies upon, the complete overthrow of the wage system . . .  Syndicalism is, in essence, the economic expression of Anarchism . . . Like Anarchism, Syndicalism prepares the workers along direct economic lines, as conscious factors in the great struggles of to-day, as well as conscious factors in the task of reconstructing society along autonomous industrial lines . . . One of the most vital efforts of Syndicalism is to prepare the workers, now, for their role in a free society . . .  so that when labor finally takes over production and distribution, the people will be fully prepared to manage successfully their own affairs.”[16]

As an anarchist-communist, inspired by the Haymarket Martyrs[17], her politics was already based on the necessity of working class economic struggle and organisation to achieve a social revolution – an anarchist position since Bakunin and the First International[18]. A visit to France in 1900 for an International Anarchist Congress introduced her to a new word to describe these ideas – syndicalism. As she recalled, it “represented a practical effort to teach the masses how to make the coming revolution and how to help the new social life to birth . . . Observation and study at the very source of syndicalism convinced me that it represented the economic arena where Labour could match its strength against the organized forces of its capitalist foe.”[19]

Mother Earth reflected this, with regular articles on labour struggles (both domestic and international) and the need to apply syndicalist ideas in terms of solidarity, direct action and the general strike. Indeed, its first issue welcomed the formation of the IWW as it “awakens the hope of a transformation of the present trade-union methods”. Working people “have to be their own liberators. They have the power to refuse their material support to a society that degrades them into a state of slavery . . . Capitalism has expropriated the human race, the General Strike aims to expropriate capitalism.”[20] As one (unsigned) article put it, the need was for “the emancipation of the working classes by means of direct economic action” and “to achieve [the workers] full economic stature by complete emancipation from wage slavery . . .  is the true mission of trades unions. They bear the germs of a potential social revolution; aye, more – they are the factors that will fashion the system of production and distribution in the coming free society.”[21] “Experience”, the paper indicated, “will teach American labor the absolute necessity of industrial organization, based on the motto: ‘An injury to one is the concern of all.’”[22]

Goldman was well aware of the limitations of reformist (“pure and simple”) unions such as the American Federation of Labor which “has not yet awakened to a proper realization of the true purpose of trade unionism” for it took “for granted the identity of interests of employer and employee” and “limit their activity to attempts to improve economic conditions within the present régime; they are seeking palliatives for evils conditioned in the very system of industrialism, never questioning the social right of existence of labor exploiters.” Worse, by “[p]reaching the identity of interests between the exploiters and exploited, the labor leaders are naturally on the most intimate terms with the plutocracy”. She noted the rank-and-file of the unions did revolt and apply direct action and solidarity but the “greatest obstacle to their success, however, proved the trade union hierocracy, which is determined to preserve its pleasant sinecures”. [23]

Goldman welcomed the creation of the IWW as an attempt “to put the labor movement of America upon a more rational, progressive and revolutionary basis” and a “great improvement upon the old method of trade organization. It was formed on the principle of uniting all the branches of an industry into one organization, along the lines of their common solidarity of interests.” However, she bemoaned its early acceptance of political and economic action because it was “not preserving its single-heartedness and concentrating all its energies in the struggle with capital.”[24] Anarchists involved in the IWW helped to remove from its preamble the commitment to political action while Goldman supported IWW strikes and free-speech campaigns. Mother Earth also opened its pages to those who organised to win over the reformist unions to syndicalism.[25]

Goldman also regularly spoke on syndicalism and the labour movement on her tours of North America – and beyond, giving a talk on “The Labour Struggle in America” in London during her visit in October 1907: “Once the real solidarity of Labour was understood, and the General Strike made a principle of economic warfare, the Labour Struggle in America would sweep everything before it.”[26] This was at the heart of her anarchism as can be seen from her classic essay “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For” which included her views on the labour movement:

“Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. . . direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor’s power. The General Strike [is] the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers . . . Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.” [27]

However, while advocating syndicalist tactics she was aware that “syndicalism . . . alone is not, as its exponents claim, sufficient unto itself.”[28] As with Kropotkin and Malatesta, she recognised that toachieve its full potential, anarchists had to work within the labour movement:

“We do say that the intricate machinery of production will run smoother if it is directed by the Syndicalist forces. On the other hand we insist that Anarchism must be the very basis upon which these forces will have to operate. For myself, I hold that Syndicalism is merely the clearing house for industrial planning, the distribution of the necessities of life should find their expression through the cooperatives, while the Anarchist group should act as the cultural force; these three factors federated together would safeguard society from any possibility of bureaucracy.”[29]

The role of anarchists was essential. For example, it was “a foolish notion that one can discuss the general strike for days and weeks in advance, thus giving the enemy a chance to array the entire force of the state. A general strike can only be successful if it is spontaneous and if it is the culminating result of preliminary educational and agitational work. This is true not only of the workers but of the public as well.”[30] Like Malatesta, she recognised that syndicalism could turn from a means into an ends and anarchists would lose their identity within it if they were not careful:

“Work in the unions, fine. Whoever objected to going into the unions. The trouble is that most of our comrades who went into them stopped being Anarchists and shouted with the Romans. Even in France where the Anarchists were the originators of revolutionary syndicalism, Pouget, Delasalle, Monatte and the others, what’s become of them, what has become of their influence? . . . You are right when you say that unions offer a great field. But they are not the only field, and unions are fertile soil only if they already have some red blood in them.”[31]

Goldman, then, clearly and repeatedly stressed the need for collective class struggle and organisation, urging workers to form militant unions to both combat and replace capitalism. That Selfa fails to mention this aspect of her ideas and life shows what a travesty his account is. However, the issue is wider than a tiny Leninist journal hiding the central place of syndicalism in Goldman’s politics, for many secondary sources about her ignore or downplay it.[32]

For example, Alice Wexler’s account of the debate on syndicalism at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress draws upon James Joll’s superficial account and parrots his uninformed conclusion that Monatte rather than Malatesta was right as regards syndicalism.[33] Drawing upon someone with a better grasp of anarchist-communist ideas would have allowed her to avoid the same mistakes as Joll made, namely that Malatesta was not opposing anarchist involvement in the labour movement but rather challenging the notion that syndicalism was sufficient in itself and that there was no need for anarchists to organise as anarchists to spread our ideas – as well as to combat the reformist tendencies inherent in trade unionism. As Goldman reported:

“The destructive, as well as the constructive, forces for a new life come from the working people. It, therefore, behooves us to keep in close contact with the latter. There was little diversity of opinion on this point. The various speakers merely considered whether syndicalism is to be looked upon as an aim or as a means.”[34]

The resolution which she and Malatesta supported “explained that revolutionary trade unionism and the General Strike are only means and can in no way replace the Social Revolution. It also expressed the conviction that the capitalistic régime can be abolished only through an insurrection and expropriation, and that our battle must be directed against all authoritarian forces.”[35] The resolution was as follows:

SYNDICALISM AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

The International Anarchist Congress considers the Syndicates as organisations fighting in the class war for the amelioration of the conditions of labour, and as unions of productive workers which can help in the transformation of capitalist society into Anarchist Communist society.

The Congress also, while admitting the eventual necessity of the formation of special revolutionary Syndicalist groups, recommends the comrades to support the general Syndicalist movement.

But the Congress considers it the duty of Anarchists to constitute the revolutionary element in these organisations, and to advocate and support only those forms of direct action which have in themselves a revolutionary character, and tend in that manner to alter the conditions of society.

The Anarchists consider the Syndicalist movement as a powerful means of revolution, but not as a substitute for revolution.

They recommend the comrades to take part in a General Strike even if proclaimed with the aim of capturing the political power, and to do all they possibly can to make their Syndicates put forward questions of economic rights.

The Anarchists further think that the destruction of capitalist and authoritarian society can only be realised through armed insurrection and expropriation by force, and that the use of the General Strike and Syndicalist tactics ought not to make us forget other means of direct action against the military power of governments.[36]

Wexler also provides a summary of the differences between Berkman and Goldman over tactics, with the former portrayed as orientated towards the workers and for collective action, the latter not – yet not a single reference is presented to support this summation.[37] Needless to say, this is at odds with a significant amount of evidence, some of which she herself presents.

This means that the notion of Jacqueline Jones that Goldman “expressed little faith in labor unions – indeed, one of her favorite themes was ‘the cancer of trade unionism and the corruption of its leaders’” simply misunderstands her and anarchist politics.[38] Being opposed to certain aspects of reformist trade unionism does not mean opposing unions as such – it would be like saying that the arguments against the American Federation of Labor made by the Industrial Workers of the World means that it is against unions!

At least the secondary sources generally mention Goldman’s syndicalism, even if it is often in passing and superficially: Selfa ignores it completely. Yet his lack of discussion of her syndicalism is understandable: for how could an “elitist” who thought the “enlightened few made social change” and who rejected “collective mass struggle” also subscribe to the ideas of “the best of the anarchists”?

Homestead

Selfa spends far more time on the events at Homestead than recounting Goldman’s views on labour struggles and organisation. Berkman’s attempted assassination of Frick is well-known and, for Selfa, expressed the “idea was that the heroic act of an individual would inspire the normally complacent masses to rise up and strike a blow against their oppressors. The anarchism that Goldman first subscribed to exalted this kind of individual act.” Yet Berkman’s act was primarily an act of revenge:

“the whole country was aroused, everybody was considering Frick the perpetrator of a coldblooded murder. A blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy’s ranks and make them realize that the prolet ariat of America had its avengers.”[39]

So Selfa’s summary of why the act happened is at odds with the rationale later given by Goldman. Moreover, he contradicts himself by quoting a leaflet which was “a flaming call to the men of Homestead to throw off the yoke of capitalism, to use their present struggle as a stepping-stone to the destruction of the wage system.”[40] This, he says, “was to be a means for Goldman to attract Homestead workers to lectures on anarchism that she would give in Homestead.” Clearly, then, she was hardly ignorant of the need for mass struggle and collective action.

As such, it suggests a distinct failure of Selfa to understand that support for Berkman’s act – and the act itself – did not mean opposition to the strike, to mass, collective action. His one-dimensional analysis — either for the “individual act” or for “collective action” — simply fails to do justice to Goldman’s ideas. Moreover, that she never again associated herself with any similar act suggests that she saw their futility even if she sought at times to explain them to the wider public.

Selfa fails to mention that most anarchists turned against the idea of “propaganda of the deed” decades before Trotsky wrote his pamphlet against the Russian Populists in 1907. Here is Kropotkin from 1891:

“Revolution, above all, is a popular movement . . . an edifice founded on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives . . . For the revolution not to be conjured away, it is necessary that the anarchist and communist idea should penetrate the masses . . . anarchists have the right to . . . make their voice heard, and distribute by the thousand their papers, pamphlets, manifestos everywhere where the working masses are . . . an imposing demonstration of the unity which is being forged between workers, with partial rebellions here and there against the exploiters . . . will make them reflect and will help to spread the anarchist idea a hundred times more than all our spoken and written propaganda. It will force new elements to become anarchists.”[41]

One of Kropotkin’s biographers summarised his position as being in favour of “mass resistance to the oppression of the state, collective action against tyranny, and the spontaneous violence of the people during a revolution. Masses, not individuals, make the social revolution.”[42] Unsurprisingly, during the (short) period of support for “propaganda of the deed” within some anarchist circles, Kropotkin always stressed the need for anarchists to be involved in mass workers organisation and struggle.[43] Goldman later echoed Kropotkin’s position when discussing individual acts of violence:

“I do not believe that these acts can, or ever have been intended to, bring about the social reconstruction. That can only be done, first, by a broad and wide education as to man’s place in society and his proper relation to his fellows; and, second, through example. By example I mean the actual living of a truth once recognized, not the mere theorizing of its life element. Lastly, and the most powerful weapon, is the conscious, intelligent, organized, economic protest of the masses through direct action and the general strike.”[44]

Again, her basic syndicalist ideas are reiterated and, again, this is an article Selfa references.

The Militant Minority

Given that Leninism is based on elitist principles and glorifies the role of the vanguard party[45], it seems strange that Selfa takes Goldman to task for “elitism.” He claims that “Goldman never turned away from the idea that heroic individuals, not masses, make history” and quotes from her 1910 essay “Minorities Versus Majorities” to prove this. Yet, he does not actually refute the arguments she expounds in that essay although he does misrepresent them.

The aim of that essay was to state the obvious — that the mass is not the source for new ideas. Rather, new, progressive, ideas are the product of minorities and which then spread to the majority by the actions of those minorities. Every social movement and revolution start when a minority takes action. Trade unionism, for example, was (and still is) a minority movement in most countries. Support for racial and sexual equality was long despised (or, at best, ignored) by the majority and it took resolute minorities to advance that cause and spread the idea in the majority. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 did not start with the majority, but rather when a minority of women workers (ignoring the advice of the local Bolsheviks) took to the streets and before growing into a movement of hund  reds of thousands (again, a minority of the total population).

The facts are clearly on the side of Goldman, not Selfa. Given that she is expounding such an obvious law of social evolution, it seems incredulous that he has a problem with it. This is particularly the case as Marxism (particularly its Leninist version) implicitly recognises this. As Marx said, the ruling ideas of any epoch are those of the ruling class. Likewise for Goldman: “Human thought has always been falsified by tradition and custom, and perverted false education in the interests of those who held power . . .  by the State and the ruling class.” Hence the “continuous struggle” against “the State and even against ‘society,’ that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotised by the State and State worship.”[46] If this were not the case, as Goldman notes, no State could save itself or private property from the masses.[47] Hence the need for people to break from their conditioning, to act for themselves. As Goldman argued, direct action was “the salvation of man” as it “necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage.”[48]

So was this position the elitism Selfa claims? No, far from it. What did Goldman mean? In a debate between her and a socialist she used the Lawrence strike “as an example of direct action.”[49] The workers in one of the mills started the strike by walking out. The next day five thousand at another mill struck and marched to another mill, doubled their numbers. The strike continued to spread and the strikers soon had to supply food and fuel for 50,000. It was the direct action of a minority which started the strike (a strike Goldman fund-raised for). Goldman wrote of the general strike being started by “one industry or by a small, conscious minority among the workers” which “is soon taken up by many other industries, spreading like wildfire.”[50] Is Selfa really arguing that this was “elitist”? If so, then every spontaneous revolt is “elitist.”

It seems obvious that Selfa takes Goldman to task for clearly stating what he, in his own way, agrees with. By joining a vanguard party, Selfa agrees with her. Every time he praises a struggle, strike or demonstration which involves only a minority of the population then he agrees with her. Every time he denounces a “backward” attitude within the masses, he agrees with her. Every time he attacks left-wingers for adjusting themselves to a reactionary “popular will” he agrees with her. And every time the “moral majority” call for the suppression of radicals, denounce “Reds”, attack unions, seek to put blacks, women, gays or whoever “in their place”, Goldman is vindicated and Selfa exposed as talking nonsense. That the UK has some of the harshest anti-union and anti-protest laws of any western democracy shows that the British ruling class knows that Goldman is right.

Goldman did not place a halo upon the masses and recognised its strengths and weaknesses. She was not dismissing the masses, just stressing the obvious: namely that socialism is a process of self-liberation and the task of the conscious minority (syndicalists called this “the militant minority”) is to encourage the direct action of the masses as those involved would transform themselves as they transformed their conditions by their own efforts. Goldman was well aware that “mere groups of Anarchists who never reach the masses have not in the past and will not in the future play a decisive part in the revolutionary period.”[51]

Political Action and Direct Action

Given anarchism’s critique of Marxism, it comes as no surprise that Selfa covers Goldman’s writings and speeches on this subject. He links her “attitude to the majority” to “the realm of working-class politics”, suggesting that two strains of her thought (“elitism and utopianism”) put her “at odds with the first attempts to form the socialist party.” Yet neither of these alleged “strains” are indicated in his examples.

He starts with “utopianism” and makes bizarre claims about Goldman’s role in the fate of the Social Democratic Party. At its 1898 convention, “the utopians and the politicals clashed. Supporters of the utopian vision [of creating a communist colony] invited Goldman to the conference. Although she was not a member of the party, she acted as a sort of informal adviser to the utopians, who managed to win over a majority of the conference”. “Having helped sink the efforts to create a serious party,” Selfa proclaims, “Goldman had little to do with the utopian-dominated SDP after the conference.”

Not a single reference is provided to support this account. In her biography, Goldman does recount how she had been invited to speak by some of the delegates (“non-political socialists”) but makes no claim to being an advisor. She did recount meeting Eugene V. Debs and how they “parted good friends” after having warned him “that we could not hope to achieve freedom by increasing the power of the State” and “stressed the fact that political action is the death-nell of the economic struggle.”[52] Goldman did not express any support for colony-building in her account (or, indeed, anywhere else) but did raise a basic syndicalist point as regards as “working class politics”.

He moves onto “elitism”, the irony of bemoaning the Congress’s majority and supporting “a breakaway group” within its minority for “launch[ing] another party” lost on him. He notes that, as in Europe “leading working-class organizers . . . were breaking from the capitalist parties and attempting to assemble a socialist party that would reach a mass audience.” Yet the end result of this was as anarchists, from Bakunin onwards, had warned would happen – the descent into reformism. In Goldman’s words:

“the Social Democratic wing – numerically the more important – has entered the swamp of opportunism, with all its attendant disasters to the ideal . . . ‘Get votes!’ is their slogan . . . On the whole, the American Social Democracy is aping its German sister, even to the extent of condemning direct action and the General Strike.”[53]

Selfa lamely admits that “[m]uch of what Goldman said about the Socialist Party was true” before contrasting her to the “left of the Socialist Party” which “criticized the large number of middle-class members in the party, its lack of coherence, and its character”. He suggests that while “the left made these points to win wider layers of workers within the Socialist Party to its positions – and later to the necessity for forming an explicitly revolutionary party – Goldman used them to attack socialism in general.” This ignores two things.

Firstly, the Socialist Party was meant to be “an explicitly revolutionary party.” Years of electioneering had eroded that position, as Goldman correctly argued. She recounted how in one debate with the Socialists her opponent “conveniently ignored” all the “historic data and current facts [she] advanced to prove the deterioration of socialism in Germany, the betrayal on the part of most socialists who had achieved power, the tendency in their ranks everywhere towards petty reforms.” He simply “repeated verbatim what he had said in his opening round.”[54]

Secondly, while “the left” may have attacked the rise of reformism within the party, they could not explain why it happened in the first place. Unlike Goldman, who could provide an analysis of the tactics which explained the shift towards reformism, “the left” only sought to purge the party, re-apply the same tactics and hope they had a different outcome – true “utopianism”.

Goldman’s correct critique of electioneering forcing the Socialist Party to water down its politics to win votes becomes: “In her attacks on socialism, she displayed the same elitist disdain for the masses she showed in other contexts”. A quote is, of course, provided and, again, no attempt is made to explain why it is wrong. Perhaps because it echoes Trotskyist James P. Cannon’s later argument that the “fight for industrial unionism . . . was abandoned and betrayed by the opportunists in the hope of . . . roping in the votes of conservative craft unionists. The doctrine of socialism was watered down to make it more acceptable to ‘respectable’ middle-class voters. The official Socialist Party turned more and more from the program of class struggle to the scramble for electoral success by a program of reform.” The party’s “electoral victories” added to “strengthening the reformist influence in the party” and produced a “middle-class invasion”.[55] And does Selfa need reminding that Lenin bemoaned those who practiced “tailism”? [56]

Given that he utilised a text by Goldman, Selfa failed to quote this passage from it (a mere turn of the page from the one he does provide):

“Class consciousness can never be demonstrated in the political arena, for the interests of the politician and the voter are not identical . . . Solidarity of interests develops class consciousness, as is demonstrated in the Syndicalist and every other revolutionary movement, in the determined effort to overthrow the present system, in the great war that is being waged against every institution of today in behalf of a new edifice.”[57]

Yet again, Goldman raises the necessity of economic struggle and organisation in the class war.

As can be seen, it was not the case that Goldman simply “argued that workers’ political action – that is, any participation in electoral activity – was a betrayal of ideals.” She indicated how it resulted in the betrayal of socialist ideals and proposed an alternative – direct action and syndicalism. Ironically, the Socialist Party executive in 1912, as Selfa notes, “expel[led] anyone who advocated ‘direct action’ to take on the bosses – a move aimed against supporters of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the party’s ranks.” Yet while he mentions that the left had “slammed” this decision he does not indicate how this expelled anyone advocating what Goldman advocated.

Selfa is in two minds about the Socialist Party – he acknowledges it became reformist but forgets this to use it to attack anarchism. He suggests that the “relative influence of socialism and anarchism in the first decade of the twentieth century spoke to the degree to which the two sets of politics addressed the real questions that faced ordinary people at the time.” Does it matter if “the Socialist Party grew to a membership of almost 120,000 in 1912” and its biggest paper has a “circulation of 600,000” when it was degenerating into reformism and expelling its best, most revolutionary, members? Likewise, if “anarchist political groupings probably represented a few thousand and Goldman’s magazine, Mother Earth, reached 10,000 readers at its height of circulation”, then it says simply that a genuinely revolutionary movement rooted in the daily economic struggle is harder to build and maintain than a reformist party turning the vote out every few years. These figures, in short, show the willingness of socialism to become reformist in order to attract votes — precisely what Goldman so correctly denounced. Moreover, given that Republican and Democratic politicians received significantly more votes than the Socialists at this time, does that mean, for Selfa, these capitalist parties better “addressed the real questions that faced ordinary people”?

For all his praising of the existence of a nation-wide Socialist Party, Selfa forgets that James P. Cannon had noted how “professional opportunists . . . wangled their way into control of the national party machinery, and used it unscrupulously in their unceasing factional manoeuvres and manipulations” and “also to drive out the revolutionary workers who consciously opposed them.”[58] This, of course, also happened in the Communist Party, neither developments causing Cannon (or Selfa) to question support for centralised political parties. It is clear, though, that Selfa cannot conceive of an alternative:

“While individual anarchists participated fully in trade union life and issue-oriented campaigns for free speech and the like, their philosophy impeded their ability to connect the immediate day-to-day issues with the struggle for an anarchist future. No national anarchist organization existed. As a result, anarchists tended to operate within a self-contained world that wanted to ‘live anarchism’ by example . . . these organizations dwindled as their immigrant founders aged. This was the world that Goldman inhabited.”

It is hard to know where to start with this jumble of assertions. Why the lack of a national federation produced “a self-contained world” is not explained for local groups did look outwards – hence their organising meetings for Goldman to address and the creation of local papers to spread the message. Also participating “fully in trade union life” was seen by most anarchists as a means to connect the struggle today with social revolution (and the Socialist Party urging people to vote socialism into being was hardly connecting day-to-day issues with the struggle for a socialist future).

Yet it cannot be denied that immigrant groups eventually suffered the fate Selfa indicates but this happened after Goldman’s death as it is the same generation being talked about here (the same can be said of Marxist groups, incidentally, as immigrant groupings existed within the Socialist movement as well and likewise died out). As for being “the world that Goldman inhabited”, in reality she viewed herself as an American anarchist and primarily wrote and spoke in English. Indeed, early in her political career, she decided to “devote myself to propaganda in English, among the American people. Propaganda in foreign circles was, of course, very necessary, but real social changes could be accomplished only by the natives. Their enlightenment was therefore much more vital”[59]

Ironically, Selfa later contradicts himself by noting that “Goldman’s speeches and Mother Earth attempted to reach a wider audience, and consciously aimed to get outside the immigrant worker milieu” but spoils this admission of the facts by limiting this to her “tap[ping] into the American-born middle class – what might be called ‘parlor liberals.’”

The Mother Earth period

Selfa’s second part of Goldman’s life is “Emma the Bohemian anarchist in progressive America, which roughly coincided with her editing of the magazine Mother Earth and lasted until the U.S. government deported her in the Palmer Raids in 1919”.

Yes, the monthly Mother Earth “became one of the leading anarchist magazines in the world” and was “a vehicle” to “propagate their particular version of anarchism.” It indeed “published articles by leading anarchists” but it also published articles by syndicalists such as Tom Mann and Émile Pouget as well as reporting and commenting upon the class struggle in America and around the world.

For Selfa, the “period that Goldman edited Mother Earth, from 1906 to 1918” is the one “that most interests her present-day admirers. She crisscrossed the country, speaking before audiences in the hundreds and thousands, on anarchist theory, modern drama, women’s emancipation, and other issues.” Suffice to say, these “other issues” included trade unionism, syndicalism, direct action and the general strike. Between 1904 and 1914 she spoke on:

“The Struggle Between Capital and Labour”, “The General Strike”, “Trade Unionism”, “Direct Action as the Logical Tactics of Anarchism”, “The Relation of Anarchy and Trade Unionism”, “Trade Unionism’s Relation to Anarchy”, “The Relationship of Anarchism to Trades Unionism”, “Anarchism, the Moving Spirit in the Labor Struggle”, “Anarchy and its Relation to the Workingman, “Syndicalism, the Hope of the Worker”, “Syndicalism in Theory and Practice”, “Syndicalism, the Modern Menace to Capitalism”, “Syndicalism, the Strongest Weapon of Labor”, “The Spirit of Anarchism in the Labor Struggle”[60]

Looking at the contents of Mother Earth, it cannot be said to have ignored the class struggle nor the mass struggles of the working class. Given that he quotes from an anthology of Mother Earth[61] which contains 10 essays in the section entitled “The social war” (including Max Baginski’s “Aim and Tactics of the Trade-Union Movement” and Voltarine de Cleyre’s “A Study of the General Strike in Philadelphia”), Selfa is aware of such articles in Goldman’s paper. British syndicalist Tom Mann wrote for Mother Earth and stated it “voiced in clear terms the necessity for ‘working class solidarity,’ ‘direct action in all industrial affairs’ and ‘free association.’ I subscribe to each of these with heart and mind.” It was “labouring so thoroughly to popularise principles calculated, as I believe, to emancipate mankind, intellectually and economically.”[62] The journal, in return, was very praising of him and his activity.[63] Unsurprisingly, it was advertised in I.W.W. papers like Industrial Worker.

Mother Earth need not be read to get an idea of what the activist Selfa calls “Emma the Bohemian anarchist” did to spread the anarchist message. One of Selfa’s sources, Living My Life, recounts how on her return to New York in 1909 “new struggles absorbed me. There was the shirtwaist-makers strike, involving fifteen thousand employees, and that of the steel-workers at McKeesport . . .  The anarchists always being among the first to respond to every need, I had to address numerous meeting and visit labour bodies to plead the cause of their fellow unionists.”[64] And this is someone Selfa claims was not “oriented on the working class”!

Goldman’s activity was not limited to just Mother Earth. “Interest in our ideas,” she noted, “was growing throughout the country. New anarchist publications began to appear: Revolt in New York . . .  the Alarm in Chicago . . .  and the Blast in San Francisco . . .  Directly or indirectly it was connected with all of them.” The latter “was closest to her heart” and it was edited by Berkman, who “had always wanted a forum from which to speak to the masses, an anarchist weekly labour paper to arouse the workers to conscious revolutionary activity.”[65] Her comments on the Blast reflected a long-term goal of creating a labour-orientated paper to supplement Mother Earth as a joint-letter in 1907 indicated:

“Let us not fail to properly appreciate this crucial period in the history of American labour, and let us prove our appreciation actively. We have an all-important work before us. It is for us, as Anarchists, to point out to the workingman the real cause of his dissatisfaction, misery and oppression . . . we must point out to him . . . the revolutionary tactics whose final destiny it is to free labour from all exploitation and oppression, and usher in a free society; the modern, efficient weapons of direct action and general strike.

“The best medium for introducing these battle methods to the workingman is a weekly revolutionary paper. Our magazine, Mother Earth, is doing excellent work. But it is a monthly, and, as such, it must deal with the various manifestations of our social life; it cannot devote itself exclusively to one particular phase. The projected weekly, however, is to deal entirely with labour, its battles, hopes and aspirations.

“To Mother Earth, whose work is theoretical, literary and educational, must be added a practical weekly, a fighting champion of revolutionary labour. We must carry our ideas to the men that toil.”[66]

Clearly, the notion of a “Bohemian anarchist” cannot be maintained in the face of all this which, of course, is why it goes unmentioned.

Selfa ends this second part of her life by acknowledging that “[w]hen Goldman and Berkman responded [to America’s entry into the war] by forming the Non-Conscription League in 1917, their fate was sealed” and they were arrested and deported as a result of the “repressive laws making it a crime to criticize the war effort, the president, and conscription.” This League was built upon the need to win over the mass of workers who would be subject to conscription to refuse and resist, a strange position to take if – as Selfa claims – Goldman dismissed collective, mass action. Unsurprisingly, Mother Earth pointed to mass action as the means of ending the conflict:

“Were the workers of Europe conscious of their power, this war could not last a day . . . the Anarchists . . . have persistently advocated the General Strike as the most powerful and effective weapon of labour to check the aggression of capital and the blood-thirsty ambitions of government . . . May the rank and file of the international Social Democracy, so cruelly duped by their misleaders, learn the significant lesson. We sincerely hope that they will that they will realise the utter futility of the efforts spent in parliamentary activity, and that they will turn to the only effective weapon of labour – DIRECT ACTION and the GENERAL STRIKE.”[67]

As Goldman recalled in her autobiography, “the war [was] a struggle of financial and economic interests foreign to the worker and as the most destructive factor of what is vital and worth while in the world.”[68] Her, unsurprisingly, anti-war work was driven by clear class consciousness and analysis with her tactics reflective of her (unmentioned by Selfa) syndicalist views:

“It is this war of classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities. Those who appreciate the urgent need of co-operating in great struggles . . .  must organise the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state. Industrial and economic preparedness is what the workers need. That alone leads to revolution at the bottom . . .  That alone will give the people the means to take their children out of the slums, out of the sweat shops and the cotton mills . . .  That alone leads to economic and social freedom, and does away with all wars, all crimes, and all injustice.”[69]

Goldman was aware that the “workers, they alone, can avert the impending war; in fact, all wars, if they will refuse to be a party to them . . . the anti-militarist acts; he refuses to be ordered to kill his brothers. His slogan is: ‘I will not kill, nor will I lend myself to be killed.’” It is “this slogan which we must spread among the workers and carry into the labor organizations.” The “determined stand which the workers can take individually, in groups and organizations against war will still meet with ready and enthusiastic response. It would arouse the people all over the land.” There was only one war worth fighting, the “war of all the peoples against their despots and exploiters — the Social Revolution.”[70]

Not either-or but both

The reality of Goldman’s position does creep through in Selfa’s account when he states that “[o]ther anarchists who were more oriented on the working class accused her of going too far to seek allies in the middle class” and points to when Voltairine de Cleyre “criticized” Mother Earth’s “seeming orientation to the Bohemian intelligentsia” and “Goldman shot back: ‘The men and women who first take up the banner of a new liberating idea generally emanate from the so-called respectable classes…. [T]o limit oneself to propaganda exclusively among the oppressed does not always bring the desired results.’” The lesson is clear for Selfa: “Although Goldman was a political anarchist, her idea of broadening her appeal was to appeal to the cultural Bohemia.”

Yet this exchange suggests no such thing. The key word is “exclusively” and if the original rejoinder rather than the short summary Selfa utilises is consulted, nowhere does Goldman deny the need to propagate anarchist ideas within the masses. Rather, the question was whether this should be done so exclusively and she rejected that.[71] Nor was she the only revolutionary to take this view. Has Selfa not read What is to be Done? which proclaimed:

“We said that a Social Democrat, if he really believes it necessary to develop comprehensively the political consciousness of the proletariat, must ‘go among all classes of the population’ . . .  No one doubts that the theoretical work of Social-Democrats should aim at studying all the specific features of the social and political condition of the various classes . . . but one can hardly ever find members of organisations . . .  who are especially engaged in gathering material on some pressing question of social and political life in our country which could serve as a means for conducting Social-Democratic work among other strata of the population . . .  The principal thing, of course, is propaganda and agitation among all strata of the people . . . He is no Social-Democrat who forgets in practice his obligation to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question.”[72]

Is Selfa really suggesting that it was a mistake to recruit non-workers like Marx. Engels (an actual capitalist, like not a few Socialist Parliamentarians), Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg (indeed, every famous Marxist theorist) into the socialist movement? That Marx was wrong when he opposed French mutualist attempts to limit the membership of the International to manual workers only?

Much the same can be said for his sneering comments about Goldman’s writing and lecturing on cultural and other issues, stating that her “speeches on modern drama were promoted as much or more than her speeches on explicitly political topics.” No reference is provided for this claim although one he utilises suggests otherwise: “Goldman intended Mother Earth to be in the cultural as well as the political vanguard. . . Of course art took a back seat to politics, always Goldman’s first priority. . . As its cultural focus indicated, the journal was intended to introduce international anarchism to Americans.”[73]

That he made this (unsupported) comment is telling. Is he really suggesting that working class people have no interest in art, literature, women’s liberation, and the other apparently non-class issues covered by Mother Earth and Goldman? If so, then it is he who is the true elitist. There is more to life than work and more to the struggle for freedom than just strikes and other forms of direct action, even if these are essential. Workers are also men and women with cultural and other interests. It would be an impoverished socialism which failed to address these – it would be aping the very capitalism which tries to turn workers into nothing more than hired hands.

Selfa wants his readers to conclude that anarchists can only do one thing at a time, that if they write or work on “cultural” issues then they cannot write or work on “class” ones. A moment’s reflection shows that this is nonsense: the one does not preclude the other as Goldman showed when she “lectured several times a week, participated in the campaign for the I. W. W. boys arrested in connexion with the miners’ strike in Canada, and at the same time continued working on [her] drama book”[74] Likewise personal and social liberation are not somehow mutually exclusive, with Goldman being well aware that the liberation of the individual and that of the masses were interlinked:

“It is, however, nevertheless true that the individual, whether artist or worker, can never hope to assert himself to the fullest unless the mass is emancipated, unless all the evils of our present system are eradicated root and all, and that can only be done by means of fundamental upheavals, not because we want it so, but because those in power and owning the wealth of the world will fight back as has been proved over and over against even the most pacific attempt on the part of the workers to better their condition.”[75]

Hence Goldman’s comment that direct action “is the logical consistent method of Anarchism” and was to be applied “against the authority in the shop”, “against the authority of the law” and “against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code.”[76] It was never a case of either class struggle or cultural change, social emancipation or individual liberation, revolution or reform, workers’ self-emancipation or women’s self-libertarian, but both. As is clear from her writings and activities.

All this should not be controversial nor need to be stated as it is common-sense. However, for those seeking to distort, such banalities need to be turned into something other than intended. Ultimately, it shows – an elitist? – contempt for his readership to think that they do not know what “exclusively” means and that they will take for granted any assertion without thinking or checking.

Communism against State-Capitalism

Selfa’s third part of her life is Goldman’s time in exile and her activity in the Russian and Spanish Revolutions. It is her opposition to Bolshevism which explains his attempt to rubbish her legacy for her eye-witness account of State-Capitalism under Lenin and Trotsky should be essential reading for all socialists.[77]

He rightly notes that Goldman was “a lifelong opponent of Marxism and socialism” and that her “two years of praise for the Bolsheviks in 1917-18 were the exception, not the rule.” He seems, however, to have forgotten that she praised the Bolsheviks in The Truth About the Bolsheviki because she thought they were “adopting Anarchist revolutionary tactics.”[78] He then suggests “it was somewhat disingenuous of her to characterize her experience in Russia as ‘disillusionment,’ since she wasn’t a supporter of socialism.” Yet Goldman made clear in the preface of her book that its title was not her choice, it was imposed by the publisher without her knowledge.[79] Which shows the danger of not bothering to read the primary sources (Selfa’s quotes from this work via the anthology Red Emma Speaks).

This lack of engagement with My Disillusionment in Russia explains the claim that she and Berkman “spent most of their time, especially in the Ukraine, relating to intellectuals.” The reader her book knows that she visited factories and spoke to workers who complained of the military discipline of the one-man management the Bolsheviks had imposed as well as dissident trade unionists. Yes, she also spoke of “intellectuals” – many of whom were Communist Party functionaries, others members of opposition groups not in prison – but for Goldman the “Revolution and the welfare of the masses in and out of Russia are by far too important to me” and that was the focus of her writings on Bolshevism.

She did “not therefore expect Anarchism to follow in the immediate footsteps of centuries of despotism and submission” but did “hope to find in Russia at least the beginnings of the social changes for which the Revolution had been fought”, that the “workers and peasants as a whole had derived essential social betterment as a result of the Bolshevik régime.” She discovered that “the Russian people have gained nothing from the Bolshevik experiment.” [80] Instead, there was a new class system: a centralised State with a bloated, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy; bureaucrats and appointed dictatorial managers, not workers, controlled the workplaces, work and its product; independent unions and strikes were repressed; the persecution of opposition groups; troops used to take food from the peasants; and, above it all, the dictatorship of the party. Class analysis and solidarity explains her opposition to Bolshevism:

“There is another objection to my criticism on the part of the Communists. Russia is on strike, they say, and it is unethical for a revolutionist to side against the workers when they are striking against their masters. That is pure demagoguery practised by the Bolsheviki to silence criticism.

“It is not true that the Russian people are on strike. On the contrary, the truth of the matter is that the Russian people have been locked out and that the Bolshevik State – even as the bourgeois industrial master – uses the sword and the gun to keep the people out. In the case of the Bolsheviki this tyranny is masked by a world-stirring slogan: thus they have succeeded in blinding the masses. Just because I am a revolutionist I refuse to side with the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party.”[81]

Selfa, then, is right to state that “she adopted the essential anarchist view of the Russian Revolution – with the Russian people in the revolution, against the Bolsheviks.” He fails to note that he is with the Bolshevik dictatorship over the proletariat and against the people – a strange position for a denouncer of “elitism” to hold.

He claims that Goldman “ignores the most important point that anyone who wants to understand this period must know – that it takes place two years into a civil war that has devastated industrial production, and in which the workers’ government is fighting for its survival.” The book’s reader would know that she does indicate this and notes that this explains her slowness in rejecting Bolshevism. Unlike Selfa, Goldman also recognises that the Bolsheviks’ policies and State also contributed to the devastation in industrial production and that the government was also fighting the workers and peasants to maintain its power over them.[82] Significantly, and as she repeatedly noted, the repression continued after the end of the civil war – indeed, it intensified with the final destruction of all opposition groupings outside the party as well as the banning of factions within it.

Goldman’s analysis is distorted by Selfa: “To her, the civil war to defend the revolution is merely the excuse the Bolsheviks use to unmask their real agenda – or as she put it in the preface to My Disillusionment, ‘an insignificant minority bent on creating an absolute State is necessarily driven to oppression and terrorism.’” In reality, Goldman never denied that the revolution had to be defended (although she rejected Bolshevik methods of so-doing[83]) and noted how the civil war was used to bolster the party’s position as well as excuse its activities – and as Selfa shows, it still is as he joins those “Bolshevik apologists who sacrifice all truth in their determination to find extenuating circumstances for the mess made by the Bolsheviki.”[84] She argues that the Bolshevik aim for centralised political and economic power paralysed and alienated popular activity, causing the regime to oppress the very masses in whose name it governed – and making the situation worse in the process.

Bolshevik policy and its impact are ignored by Selfa and instead we get the excuse that “there is no doubt that these conditions led to a degeneration of the revolution”. He suggests that “committed communists felt the only possibility of reinvigorating the revolution lay in its defense against the counterrevolution.” Quite – and almost all members of left groups in Russia supported the regime against the Whites – but Bolshevik success in the civil war was taken by them to be vindication of the policies pursued, including the necessity of party dictatorship, one-man management, centralised management of the economy and so on.

“The thought oppressed me,” Goldman wrote, “that what [the Bolsheviks] called ‘defence of the Revolution’ was really only the defence of [their] party in power.”[85] She came to the conclusion that this was, indeed, the case – and she was right. The Bolsheviks were very clear on this, with Zinoviev proclaiming to the Second Congress of the Comintern that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is at the same time the dictatorship of the Communist Party.”[86] For Lenin, it was a truism that “the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of the class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts . . . that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard . . . Such is the basic mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the essentials of transition from capitalism to communism . . . for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation.”[87]

It was to defend these policies that Victor Serge “wrote to his anarchist comrades”. Yes, as Selfa notes, “Serge was far from an apologist for the Bolsheviks, and certainly no Stalinist. He later became a Trotskyist, opposed to Stalin’s dictatorship.” Yet in the 1920s and for much of the 1930s, he supported the party’s dictatorship.[88]

Selfa does quote Serge on how it “is vital [for anarchists] to respond to this necessity for defence [of the Revolution], as to the necessity for terror and dictatorship, on pain of death.” He fails to quote Serge on how “one group is obliged to impose itself on the others and to go ahead of them, breaking them if necessary, in order then to exercise exclusive dictatorship.” The militants “leading the masses . . . cannot rely on the consciousness, the goodwill or the determination of those they have to deal with; for the masses who will follow them or surround them will be warped by the old regime, relatively uncultivated, often unaware, torn by feelings and instincts inherited from the past.” And so “revolutionaries will have to take on the dictatorship without delay.” The experience of Russia “reveals an energetic and innovative minority which is compelled to make up for the deficiencies in the education of the backward masses by the use of compulsion.” The party “is in a sense the nervous system of the class. Simultaneously the consciousness and the active, physical organisation of the dispersed forces of the proletariat, which are often ignorant of themselves and often remain latent or express themselves contradictorily.” While the party is “supported by the entire working population,” it “maintains its unique situation in dictatorial fashion.” The workers are “sympathising instinctively with the party and carrying out the menial tasks required by the revolution.”[89]

In short, the few rule and think while the many work and obey, as in any class system. Ironically, for all his attempts to link Goldman to “elitism and utopianism” Selfa, like Serge, is happy to defend the dictatorship by an advanced minority (elitism) and seems to think it could be benevolent and incorruptible (utopianism).

With the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt in March 1921, Goldman finally broke with the regime and soon left Russia. She then exposed the reality of the Bolshevik regime to ensure the workers elsewhere did not make the same mistakes. Selfa bemoans that her earlier anti-Marxism “made no difference to the capitalist press that trumpeted her denunciations of the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s as evidence that one of ‘them’ had realized the error of her ways.” The same charge was made by the Stalinists against Trotsky in the 1930s and is unbefitting a socialist for, as Goldman later argued, “the most important phase of a critical attitude to Russia is the premise from which one starts. I do not criticize Russia because Stalin is too revolutionary, but because he is not revolutionary at all. You will agree that that is not the position of the capitalist papers.”[90]

While Selfa acknowledges that Goldman “called herself a small-c communist,” he insists that “she was above all else, an individualist.” His counterpoising of communism to “individualism” is significant. The aim of communism is, after all, to increase individual liberty (to use Marx’s expression” the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”[91]). As such, authentic communism is “individualist” in its aspirations. Given this, Selfa’s comments simply expose the state capitalist nature of Bolshevism. While Goldman was clear that the regime in Russia was an “all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression”[92], Trotsky defended the Stalinist economic system as being socialist at bottom.[93] This is to be expected, as he had advocated and imposed similar policies (and uttered similar rationales) when in power between 1918 and 1923.

But, then again, Selfa has problems understanding Goldman’s communism, stating that she “immediately denounced” Lenin’s New Economic Policy and quotes her stating it was “a reversal of communism itself.” Yet looking at the page Selfa references, we discover her reporting that “most Communists . . . saw in it a reversal of everything that their Party had been proclaiming – a reversal of Communism itself.” For Goldman, “[t]rue Communism was never attempted in Russia.”[94] Again, Selfa knowingly distorts what she actually wrote. Likewise, he fails to note her syndicalist alternative:

“only when the libertarian spirit permeates the economic organizations of the workers that the manifold creative energies of the people can manifest themselves and the revolution be safeguarded and defended. Only free initiative and popular participation in the affairs of the revolution can prevent the terrible blunders committed in Russia . . . The industrial power of the masses, expressed through their libertarian associations – Anarchosyndicalism – is alone able to organize successfully the economic life and carry on production.”[95]

Unlike the Leninist tradition, Goldman had no more difficulty in seeing Lenin’s regime for what it was (“state capitalist”) than she had seeing what Stalin’s was (“state capitalist”[96]). Stalin inherited a party dictatorship ruling a centralised, bureaucratic State based on nationalised property and one-man management from Lenin. He simply intensified certain aspects of it:

“the intelligentsia in the United States . . . are now blaming everything on Stalin, as if he had come to the fore out of nothing, as if he were not merely the dispenser of the legacy left him by Lenin . . . Nothing amuses me so much as the contention that all was well in Russia while Lenin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky were at the helm of state. Actually, the same process of elimination . . . begun by Lenin and his group, took place from the very beginning of the communist ascendancy to power . . .  Trotsky . . . has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The usual bolshevik calumny, falsehoods, and misrepresentations have again been dug out from the family closet and hurled at the memory of the Kronstadt sailors. More than that, neither the dead nor the living are exempt from their venomous and scurrilous attacks . . . Trotsky is woven from the same cloth as his archenemy Stalin”[97]

Given all this, it is obvious that Emma represents the authentic communist tradition, not Leninism. She remembered what socialism was meant to be about, ably analysed the failings of both Lenin’s and Stalin’s regimes based on this and never called regimes which are obviously state capitalist, like Lenin’s, “socialist.”

Conclusion: The Best of the Anarchists

Selfa’s readers would be surprised that Goldman concluded that she was “an Anarchist Communist. I would say Anarchist-Syndicalist with libertarian communism as the basis of a free society.”[98] Those who bothered to read the books he references would not be. As has been proven, his account of Goldman’s life and ideas is a sorry mix of invention, cherry-picking and omissions.

The best that can be said of it is that at least he does not suggest, as Marxists at the time did, that Goldman was “in the employ of the Russian Tsar”[99] or “receiving support from the American Secret Service Department.”[100] Still, the question remains: how could such an obviously knowingly inaccurate article be written and published? Can an ideology which allows its adherents to indulge in such dishonesty be healthy and viable? The answer is obvious. Sadly, this has long been a feature of Bolshevism with Goldman writing about those “agents of the ruling Party” who “went forth to misrepresent and to lie deliberately in behalf of the Bolsheviks”.[101]

On issue after issue, Goldman was right yet her early – often pioneering – support for positions the likes of the Selfa’s party pay lip-service to gains her no credit in his eyes, quite the reverse. Her class analysis of society, war and the women’s movement go unmentioned. Her repeated involvement in and views upon the labour movement and its struggles are ignored. It is easy to assert that she “never really articulated a strategy of getting from here to the society she desired” if you never mention her support for a strategy – syndicalism – which does precisely that.

The claim that Goldman did not “really build an organization of anarchists that could carry that vision forward” in the shape of an American Anarchist Federation reflects a top-down perspective which forgets that her speaking tours and writing helped build the local groups out of which such a body would grow. As for the claim that she “almost always struck the pose of sideline critic, holding to anarchist ideals even when the struggle demanded answers that were practical and concrete”, well the qualifier is significant for it shows she did provide such answers for struggles she was involved in, hence her regularly being called upon during strikes and free-speech fights as well as being deported for her anti-war work. That these ideas did not spread as far as she hoped is unfortunate but then the same can be said for the Marxist movement in America as well. Still, anarchists today can learn from and build on her ideas and activities for these, unlike Bolshevism, were genuinely communist. This is not to suggest that either are above criticism but let such criticism be honest and accurate.

Yes, “the Socialist and Communist Parties eclipsed anarchists in the early part of the last century.”[102] Did they offer “practical and concrete” answers? The Socialist Party – as Selfa admits – became reformist and revolutionaries were expelled or left it to form the Communist Party. As for that, the illusion of “socialism” in the USSR undoubtedly helped its appeal while funding from Moscow undoubted bolstered its fortunes, but the fact remains that its impact was primarily negative as it helped undermine the IWW[103] before spewing Stalinism into the labour movement. As Goldman rightly noted, “the Communist Party in and out of Russia has done so much harm to the labor and revolutionary movement in the world that it may well take a hundred years to undo.”[104]

The notion that for Goldman “the masses were an abstraction, or often, a curse” is demonstrably false. Likewise with the claim that she “was above all else, an individualist who believed that the enlightened few made social change”, for she recognised the key role the masses played in social change even if she did not view them through rose-tinted glasses and recognised the crucial part advanced minorities played in the process. Her crime in the eyes of the apologists of Bolshevism was to publicly expose what happened when a minority seized power in the name of the masses because she sided with the latter against the former.

Likewise the notion that “the best of the anarchists – the anarcho-syndicalists – whose libertarian ideas were most connected to workers’ struggles, joined the Communist Parties” is untrue.[105] Some syndicalists did so, many others – such as Carlo Tresca, Rudolf Rocker, Armando Borghi—did not and rejected Bolshevism just as completely as Goldman. They did so precisely because, like Goldman, they were connected to workers’ struggles and extended their solidarity to the workers oppressed and exploited by the new master class in Russia. That is one of the many reasons why Goldman is amongst the genuine best of the anarchists.

End Notes

[1] “The Poverty of (Marx’s) Philosophy,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 70 (Summer 2017); “Proudhon’s Constituted Value and the Myth of Labour Notes,” Anarchist Studies 25: 1 (Summer 2017).

[2] Albert Meltzer, Anarchism: Arguments for and Against (Edinburgh/San Francisco: AK Press, 2000), 62.

[3] Lance Selfa, “Emma Goldman: A life of controversy”, International Socialist Review No. 34 (March-April 2004). This journal, like its parent organisation the International Socialist Organization (ISO), is defunct although it is still available on-line.

[4] Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Oakland: AK Press, 1995), 8, 13.

[5] As, ironically, acknowledged by Selfa: “Unfortunately most of Goldman’s acolytes and biographers don’t take Goldman’s politics beyond her personal idiosyncrasies. In fact, to many of them, Goldman’s ‘free-spiritedness,’ Bohemianism, and her constant ‘tilting at windmills’ are positively attractive.” That his own account relies on secondary accounts which reflect this does not give him cause for concern.

[6] “Emma Goldman’s Defense”, The Masses, June 1916.

[7] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) I: 489.

[8] “Lucy Parsons: American Anarchist”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 1 (Spring 2022).

[9] “Victor Serge: The Worst of the Anarchists”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review No. 61 (Winter 2014); “Anarchists Never Surrender Review”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review No. 74 (Summer 2018).

[10] Living My Life I: 52-3.

[11] Living My Life I: 54.

[12] Living My Life I: 55-56. It should be noted that her words from Living My Life which were paraphrased much later as “If I cannot dance then I don’t want to be part of your revolution” were uttered during an event raising funds for this strike. (56).

[13] Living My Life I: 121-3.

[14] Living My Life I: 330-1.

[15] Quoted by Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life (London: Virago Press, 1984), 79.

[16] Emma Goldman, “Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice”, Red Emma Speaks (New York: Humanity Books, 1998), 91-99. This was issued as the pamphlet Syndicalism: the Modern Meance to Capitalism (1913).

[17] “Anarchy in the USA: The International Working People’s Association”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 3 No. 2 (Summer 2023).

[18] Goldman, “Syndicalism”, 88-9; Max Baginski, “Michael Bakunin (1814-1914)”, Mother Earth, May 1914.

[19] Living My Life I: 406-7.

[20] “International Review”, Mother Earth, March 1906, 58-9.

[21] “The First May and the General Strike”, Mother Earth, May 1907, 127-8.

[22] “Observations and Comments”, Mother Earth, November 1908, 343.

[23] Emma Goldman, “The Situation in America”, Mother Earth, October 1907, 320-2.

[24] “The Situation in America”, 323.

[25] Harry Kelly, “A Syndicalist League”, Mother Earth, September 1912.

[26] “Emma Goldman’s Lecture”, Freedom, November 1907.

[27] Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What it really stands for”, Red Emma Speaks, 76.

[28] Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1970), 253.

[29] Emma Goldman, Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (New Paltz New York: Commonground Press, 1985), 285.

[30] Vision on Fire, 287.

[31] Quoted by Wexler, 300.

[32] This is not limited to syndicalism, of course. Some have claimed that Goldman had wrote nothing on race, racism and lynching in America when, in reality, she did as Kathy E. Ferguson shows: Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011), 211-222.

[33] Wexler, 136-7.

[34] Emma Goldman, “The International Anarchist Congress”, Mother Earth, October 1907, 315.

[35] “The International Anarchist Congress”, 316.

[36] International Anarchist Congress, “Resolutions”, A Libertarian Reader (Active Distribution, 2023) vol. 2, 85.

[37] Wexler, 131.

[38] Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 247-8.

[39] Living My Life I: 87.

[40] Living My Life I: 86.

[41] Peter Kropotkin, “Agreement”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2. No. 3 (Winter 2022), 42-45.

[42] Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 174-5.

[43] “The London Congress of 1881”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 3 No. 1 (Spring 2023); Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

[44] Emma Goldman, “What I Believe”, Red Emma Speaks, 60.

[45] “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness . . . The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.” (Lenin, “What is to be Done”, Collected Works 5: 375) History, of course, shows no such thing.

[46] Emma Goldman, “The Individual, Society and the State”, Red Emma Speaks, 111.

[47] Emma Goldman, “Minorities versus Majorities”, Red Emma Speaks, 85.

[48] “Anarchism: What it really stands for”, 76.

[49] Living My Life 1: 491.

[50] “Syndicalism”, 95; For details of the Lawrence strike see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (Essex: Longman, Essex, 1996), 327-8.

[51] Vision on Fire, 285.

[52] Life My Living I: 220-1.

[53] Emma Goldman, “The Situation in America”, Mother Earth, October 1907, 324.

[54] Living My Life I: 491.

[55] James P. Cannon, “Eugene V. Debs: The Socialist Movement of His Time, and its Meaning Today”, Eugene V. Debs Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1972), 26, 27, 28.

[56] Lenin, “What is to be Done?”, Collected Works 5: 396.

[57] Emma Goldman, “Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap”, Red Emma Speaks, 107.

[58] Cannon, 26-7.

[59] Living My Life I: 155.

[60] Drawn from Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years volume 2: Making Speech Free, 1902-1909 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2005) and Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 3: Light and Shadows, 1910–1916 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2012).

[61] Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (Washington: Counterpoint, 2001).

[62] Tom Mann, “Mother Earth and Labour’s Revolt”, Mother Earth, March 1915, 413-4.

[63] This undoubtedly explains Goldman’s obvious disappointment in Mann when he later embraced the Bolshevik Myth and joined the Communist Party: “Tom Mann and British Syndicalism”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 3 (Autumn 2021).

[64] Living My Life 1: 456.

[65] Living My Life 2: 567.

[66] “To Our Comrades”, Mother Earth, September 1907, 292-3.

[67] “Observations and Comments”, Mother Earth, August 1914, 181-2. This is later echoed in Goldman’s memoirs (Living My Life II: 546).

[68] Living My Life II: 564.

[69] Emma Goldman, “Preparedness: The road to universal slaughter”, Red Emma Speaks, 309-10.

[70] Emma Goldman, “The Promoters of the War Mania”, Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, 396-7.

[71] Emma Goldman, “A Rejoinder,” Mother Earth, December 1910, 325-328.

[72] Lenin, “What is to be Done?”, Collected Works 5: 424-5.

[73] Marion J. Morton, Emma Goldman and the American Left (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 46.

[74] Living My Life II: 520.

[75] Vision on Fire, 241.

[76] “Anarchism: What it really stands for”, 76-7.

[77] Space excludes discussing all aspects of Selfa’s comments on Goldman and the Russian Revolution, much of it being simply apologetics for the Bolshevik dictatorship. As his comments on the Spanish Revolution regurgitate the standard Trotskyist account, they will be ignored as these have been debunked many a time.

[78] My Disillusionment in Russia, xliv-xlv.

[79] My Disillusionment in Russia, li.

[80] My Disillusionment in Russia, llvi , xlvii-xlviii.

[81] My Disillusionment in Russia, xlix.

[82] See section H.6, An Anarchist FAQ (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2012) Volume 2.

[83] Goldman pointed to the Makhnovists as the alternative: “It was the Makhno idea that the social revolution was to be defended against all enemies, against every counter-revolutionary or reactionary attempt from right and left. At the same time educational and cultural work was carried on among the peasants to develop them along anarchist-communist lines”. (My Disillusionment in Russia, 62) The Makhnovists also encouraged workers’ self-management of industry as well as free soviets, socialisation of land and industry, a democratic military and freedom of press, speech, and organisation for opposition groups – Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno Anarchy’s Cossack: The struggle for free soviets in the Ukraine 1917-1921 (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2004)

[84] My Disillusionment in Russia, 213.

[85] My Disillusionment in Russia, 57.

[86] Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress 1920 (New York: Pathfinder, 1991) 1: 152.

[87] Lenin, Collected Works 32: 21.

[88] “The Trotskyist School of Falsification”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review No. 79 (Spring 2020).

[89] Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919-1921 (London: Redwords, 1997) 106, 92, 115, 67, 66, 6.

[90] Emma Goldman, Nowhere at Home: Letters from Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 55.

[91] “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, The Marx-Engels Reader (London & New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), 491. Elsewhere Marx talks of “the free development of individualities” (285).

[92] “Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia,” Red Emma Speaks, 388.

[93] “The Bureaucracy in Exile: Trotsky’s limited Anti-Stalinism”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 3 No. 3 (Autumn 2023).

[94] “Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia,” 387, 389.

[95] “Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia,” 394.

[96] “There is no Communism in Russia”, Red Emma Speaks, 405-420.

[97] Nowhere at Home, 269.

[98] Vision on Fire, 299.

[99] Living My Life I: 481.

[100] Living My Life II: 954.

[101] My Disillusionment in Russia, 213-4.

[102] Interestingly, Selfa makes no mention of the Trotskyist movement which was eclipsed by the Communists in numbers and so, according to the logical of his argument, presumably also offered little in the way of “answers that were practical and concrete”.

[103] Regardless of what Selfa suggests, are far as IWW members went “the big majority, after several years of wavering, went the other way” and did not join the Communist Party. (James P. Cannon, The IWW: The Great Anticipation [New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1956], 33).

[104] Nowhere at Home, 269-270.

[105] Selfa fails to mention how many of those syndicalist turncoats became Stalinists and repeated against Trotsky similar lies to those they had spread about Goldman and other anarchist critics of Bolshevism.