Anarcho Communists

"Like the women civil rights activists, Jewish radicals have historically had a range of responses to Jewish identity. Emma Goldman, for example, balanced the universalism of her anarchist philosophy with an appreciation for Jewish culture and a clear commitment to speaking out against anti-Semitism. Revolutionary socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, was hostile to any attempts to link her politics to her Jewish identity and was particularly critical of the Jewish socialist Bund."

"Looking well in spite of her advancing years, Emma Goldman now made her home in London. She had known great hardship, and had led a fighting life, in behalf of the right of the masses to lead decent lives, but she still had an astonishing fund of energy. Some inner fire seemed to sustain her. The blue eyes were mellowed with age, but her face remained smooth, and she still had the fair complexion that had so impressed me two decades earlier. Lately she had returned from Spain. And as an eye-witness, who had spent much time in both the Spanish cities and the rural districts, she gave us a compelling picture of those who were valiantly defending their republic, the industrial workers and peasants who had so few friends in France, England, and the Americas. She told also of the co-operative movement which had grown strong in many cities and towns, particularly in Catalonia, the care given to children, and the rise of women, who were coming into their own after centuries of Oriental subservience. When one remembered that all this was achieved while the Spanish people were fighting off a powerful and relentless enemy, one was awed...I found Emma busy with Spanish refugee children, visiting authorities, conferring with heads of numerous organizations in their behalf, publishing a newspaper, and lecturing. At the time she was busy preparing an exhibition to demonstrate pictorially what the war had done to the Spanish people. Declaring that the English newspapers had misrepresented their struggle, she had a collection of photographs of co-operative factories, and of co-operative farms with peasants working on them, that impressed her in Catalonia. In odd contrast to my mental picture of Emma as a public figure, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, in that miserable flat, that she was an excellent cook and a thoughtful hostess...No American would believe what she and others ate in Russia during the famine there, to sustain life. The memory of that period was still sharp in her mind. "What's happening now is only a beginning," she said, as the talk reverted to Spain. "Any day war may spread across Europe, and it will be more terrible than anything the world has ever seen. There will be suffering here and on the Continent comparable only to the days of the Black Plague.""

"Emma Goldman, fearless champion of human rights, in Madison Square Garden. Short-sleeved, her fists clenched, she vehemently opposes our entry into the world holocaust, and is threatened with arrest. "I defy the police, when the lives of millions are at stake!"... Alexander Berkman also speaks: "The men of this great land will never let themselves be led by the nose into an imperialist war!""

"Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm X"

"Throughout the history of the socialist movement there has, therefore, been a strand of feminist critique from within. Many feminists shared in the vision of a just society, but criticised the ways in which communist parties sought to bring it about. Amongst the Bolsheviks, Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai were early critics of their party's policies and practice, and they, along with anarchist feminists such as Emma Goldman, laid some of the early groundwork in identifying socialism's failures."

"When Emma Goldman declared, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution," she was talking about the necessity of joy. Joy, hope, love, healing, are powerful forces. Just because at times these ideas have been manipulated to reinforce individualism doesn't make them sentimental distractions."

"Emma Goldman lived at the Anarchist's House too. Describe Emma Goldman? Her interest to Meridel Le Sueur was as "the first sexually 'free' woman" she met. "The women and feminists of that period never dealt with sex. They were Puritans.""

"women's marginalization in the process of History-making has set them back intellectually and has kept them for far longer than was necessary from developing a consciousness of their collectivity in sisterhood, not motherhood. The cruel repetitiousness by which individual women have struggled to a higher level of consciousness, repeating an effort made a number of times by other women in previous centuries, is not only a symbol of women's oppression but is its actual manifestation. Thus, even the most advanced feminist thinkers, up to and including those in the early 20th century, have been in dialogue with the "great men" before them and have been unable to verify, test and improve their ideas by being in dialogue with the women thinkers before them...Emma Goldman argued for free love and a new sort of communal life against the models of Marx and Bakunin; a dialogue with the Owenite feminists Anna Wheeler and Emma Martin might have redirected her thinking and kept her from inventing "solutions" which had already proven unworkable fifty years earlier...Simone de Beauvoir's erroneous assertion that, "They [women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own," was not just an oversight and a flaw, but a manifestation of the basic limitations which have for millennia limited the power and effectiveness of women's thought."

"As early as 1825 American working girls had organized in trade unions for economic demands and, briefly, used political as well as economic means to advance these demands. But their movement remained generally isolated from the woman's rights movement. Among the advocates of other forgotten alternatives to the woman's rights movement were Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, Ernestine Rose, John Humphrey Noyes, Henry C. Wright, and later Charlotte Gilman, Victoria Woodhull, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger. These radicals had in common the convictions that the institutions of society were as oppressive to women as were its laws, that the patriarchal family was a questionable institution, and that sexual morality as hitherto defined would have to change. Their methods for attack and their specific programs varied, but they made the connection between religion, the family, sexual mores, and the social status of women. They pointed out, even if not always in specific terms, that merely constitutional changes would not basically alter the position of women."

"Recent scholarship has brought to light the important role played by Emma Goldman and other feminist women in the socialist and anarchist movement. Goldman lectured widely on birth control from 1910 on and served sixty days in jail for distributing pamphlets which offered advice on birth control methods and devices. She was one of the earliest influences on Margaret Sanger, who later sought to deny the socialist roots of her inspiration."

"I fear my anarchists are not as free from sexual inhibitions and confusions as Emma Goldman and others expected. The intersection of personal sexuality and social community seems to always be a dangerous one, with a lot of red lights and sideswipes."

"I read Goodman and Kropotkin and Emma and the rest, and finally found a politics I liked. But then I had to integrate these political ideas, which I'd formulated over a good year's reading, into a novel, a utopia. The whole process took quite a while, as you might imagine, and there were hundreds of little details that never found their way into the novel."

"Odonanism is roughly identifiable with anarchism. I think it is a fairly identifiable form of the anarchist lineage of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and, to a large extent, Paul Goodman. It's pacifist anarchism, an identifiable tradition, not Bakhunism. It's just that nobody else had ever used it for fiction-it seemed such a pity."

"The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 acted as a catalyst for the protracted workers' rights struggles and widespread sociopolitical change that would define much of the twentieth century. Transformative figures like anarchist organizers Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons, socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, Knights of Labor head Terence Powderly, and AFL founder Samuel Gompers were all inspired by the massive forty-five-day railroad strike that cost hundreds of millions in damage, resulted in one hundred casualties, and saw a thousand people imprisoned."

"Until somewhere toward the end of the 1960's, anarchism and feminism seemed irrelevant anachronisms to most Americans, each an old joke which in one version had Emma Goldman as the punch line. Like the punch line of other passé stories, Goldman's name, if remembered at all, was slightly offensive, flat, recalling a style that had long since passed. Even among radicals, in the last few decades, few have shared her disgust with the regimented centralization and mechanization that characterize modern life. Her libertarian vision was derided as hopelessly utopian and laughably naive. In 1969 almost every word she wrote had long been out of print and her life-which Theodore Dreiser once described as "the richest of any woman's of the century"-all but forgotten. Even her vigorous and lucid autobiography, Living My Life, went out of print. Now, as everyone knows, things have changed. Old punch lines are new slogans. "Anarchism," proclaims an article in a recent literary journal, "was dead and is alive." Likewise, feminism. And likewise, the anomalously named "Anarchist Queen," Emma Goldman. In 1970 Goldman's books were all suddenly reissued, not only for the libraries, but in paperback. Her style of theater is being reenacted on street corners, and nowadays there is likely to be someone with her implacable commitment on trial for conspiracy or being hunted by the FBI. The revolutionary Goldman is back in her old haunts, up to her old tricks. "For further information [about me]," she advises her readers, "consult any police department in America or Europe"...one can sense the discrepancy between Emma Goldman the demon of the legend and Emma Goldman the idealistic revolutionary who from the age of twenty wished for nothing less than to free the world. Between the two personae is a courageous if egotistical, a dedicated if cantankerous woman, a veritable "mountain of integrity" as the novelist Rebecca West described her, an unmovable visionary, but one whose tongue and passion no one could tame."

"The Spanish Civil War shaped the political consciousness of a whole generation, which overwhelmingly saw it as representing heroic resistance to Fascism. Goldman and J. C. Powys did not belong to that generation – they belonged to the generation of its parents or, even, grandparents. And rather than resistance to Fascism, it was the social achievements of the Spanish Revolution that inspired them. In that they stand alone, among figures of the front rank, with Read and Orwell..."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"Mollie Steimer and Emma Goldman were deported to Russia. Many of these women, if not all, are now dead. But in a great crisis they stood staunch and true in defense of peace and democracy."

"My interest in Magón led me to read Emma Goldman's autobiography. She told about meeting Magón in 1911: “I found California seething with discontent... The revolution in Mexico was the expression of a people awakened to the great economic and political wrongs in their land. The struggle inspired large numbers of militant workers in America, among them many anarchists and the I.W.W. [Industrial Workers of the World], to help their Mexican brothers across the border. Thoughtful persons on the Coast, intellectuals as well as proletarians, were imbued with the spirit behind the Mexican revolution.” Emma Goldman's autobiography contained another observation that impressed me: "However they may dislike the idea, professors are also proletarians; intellectual proletarians, to be sure, but even more dependent upon their employer than ordinary mechanics." Soon I began organizing graduate teaching assistants and professors into a faculty union."

"Although many social workers like Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, and socialists like Emma Goldman advocated the rights of immigrants and working women, in most instances during the 1890 to 1910 period their advocacy had little or no effect on the suffragist movement's attitude toward minority or working-class women"

"Joseph Cohen "The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America" translated into English by Emil Kerenji"

"On April 10, 1904, we went to see and hear Emma Goldman for the first time. The event was to be held at the Odd Fellows Temple on Broad and Arch, not far from City Hall. When we came there, we saw a cordon of policemen encircling the entire building. The street was full of people who were forbidden from standing there. Mounted policemen drove the crowd from the sidewalks, like Cossacks had done in holy Russia. I stood there dumbfounded; at first I could not comprehend what was going on. That here, in America, in a free country, peaceful citizens should not be allowed to gather in a venue to hear a speaker—I simply could not believe my eyes!"

"Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure; the spirit which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny — the spirit which is willing to dare and suffer."

"The Eastern-European born revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, the most famous examples, marched onto the pages of radical history and represented a new kind of Jewish woman, at odds with the balebuste of old."

"They were always busy, always thinking of America and their friends there, and longing for wider activity."

"As activists and rebels, Jewish women like Emma Goldman, Maud Nathan, Rose Schneiderman, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan influenced many of the key social movements of their eras suffrage, trade unionism, international peace, and the contemporary women's rights movement."

"Emma was my education," Alix Kates Shulman said; "she connected me with a radical world." Goldman's conflicts over the problem of individualism, dissent, minority voice, authority, hierarchy, and her great issues-"the relation between the sexes, the organization of society, and most profoundly, the connection between the two"-paralleled Shulman's own, and Goldman's life immediately gave Shulman a context in which to understand the unfolding women's liberation movement. From Goldman, she learned that "an idea, a cause, a movement could give meaning to a life," a lesson she was beginning to draw from her own life and came to inspire several of her novels. Another parallel lay in their attitudes toward Judaism, which each discarded as a formal identity but remained connected to in characteristically Jewish ways. An atheist, Goldman never criticized Judaism as harshly as she did Christianity, and she considered Jews to be "the mainstay" of "every revolutionary endeavor." Her oratory often contained biblical references, and her radical style was rooted in the prophetic tradition."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"If voting changed anything, it would be made illegal."

"Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established. In the true sense one's native land, with its back ground of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home. A certain atmosphere of “belonging,” the consciousness of being “at one” with the people and environment, is more essential to one's feeling of home. This holds good in relation to one's family, the smaller local circle, as well as the larger phase of the life and activities commonly called one's country. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings than in his native land."

"The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labelled "queer," "different," and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life."

"In conclusion, I wish to say that my attitude to the whole tragic question is not dictated by my Jewish antecedents. It is motivated by my abhorrence of injustice, and man’s inhumanity to man. It is because of this that I have fought all my life for anarchism which alone will do away with the horrors of the capitalist régime and place all races and peoples, including the Jews, on a free and equal basis. Until then I consider it highly inconsistent for socialists and anarchists to discriminate in any shape or form against the Jews."

"I have been taught that the land should belong to those who till the soil. With all of his deep-seated sympathies with the Arabs, our comrade cannot possibly deny that the Jews in Palestine have tilled the soil. Tens of thousands of them, young and deeply devout idealists, have flocked to Palestine, there to till the soil under the most trying pioneer conditions. They have reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens. Now I do not say that therefore Jews are entitled to more rights than the Arabs, but for an ardent socialist to say that the Jews have no business in Palestine seems to me rather a strange kind of socialism."

"I have for many years opposed Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish State with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police, militarism and the rest. In other words, a Jewish State machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many. Reginald Reynolds is wrong, however, when he makes it appear that the Zionists were the sole backers of Jewish emigration to Palestine. Perhaps he does not know that the Jewish masses in every country and especially in the United States of America have contributed vast amounts of money for the same purpose. They have given unstintingly out of their earnings in the hope that Palestine may prove to be an asylum for their brothers, cruelly persecuted in nearly every European country. The fact that there are many non-Zionist communes in Palestine goes to prove that the Jewish workers who have helped the persecuted and hounded Jews have done so not because they are Zionists, but for the reason I have already stated, that they might be left in peace in Palestine to take root and live their own lives. (‘Palestine and Socialist Policy’ article)"

"What is generally regarded as success — acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige — I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished — his development has stopped at that point. I have always striven to remain in a state of flux and continued growth, and not to petrify in a niche of self-satisfaction. If I had my life to live over again, like anyone else, I should wish to alter minor details. But in any of my more important actions and attitudes I would repeat my life as I have lived it. Certainly I should work for Anarchism with the same devotion and confidence in its ultimate triumph."

"Regardless of the present trend toward the strong-armed man, the totalitarian states, or the dictatorship from the left, my ideas have remained unshaken. In fact, they have been strengthened by my personal experience and the world events through the years. I see no reason to change, as I do not believe that the tendency of dictatorship can ever successfully solve our social problems. As in the past, so I do now insist that freedom is the soul of progress and essential to every phase of life. I consider this as near a law of social evolution as anything we can postulate. My faith is in the individual and in the capacity of free individuals for united endeavor."

"The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre, one of America's great Anarchists, Moses Harman, the pioneer of woman's emancipation from sexual bondage, Horace Traubel, sweet singer of liberty, and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot. I, too, feel enriched beyond measure. But that is due to the discovery of Anarchism, which more than anything else has strengthened my conviction that authority stultifies human development, while full freedom assures it."

"Motherhood in the true sense should embrace all children. Because so few realize this truth, child life is so empty of warmth, of love, of color, and beauty. A home—what is it to-day but a cage from which most of its inhabitants wish to escape? No, I should never have found happiness in such a place. My ideals, the struggle for them, and whatever hardships and suffering they have brought, far from wasting my life, have enriched it a thousandfold. To me it has been a grand adventure which I should not have missed for all the wealth in the world."

"It is true that parents today are learning to enhance the physical qualities of their children. But their minds and characters they cannot mould. The antiquated system of education and our perverse social influences unfortunately do that. In view of the numerous misfit and marred children these institutions have created, I am quite content not to have contributed any of my own."

"The ideal of human kinship that would brook no injustice or social wrong agave the only meaning and purpose to my life. This ideal I found in anarchism. Not, to be sure, in the distorted image of anarchism presented in the Press and by pseudo-social economists or hounded and persecuted by the powers that be. I found anarchism the moving spirit of beauty—of social harmony—of a free and untrammeled growth of the individual. This became my inspiration and my highest goal."

"Station, power, wealth—how inadequate they have proved! How useless and insecure!"

"My life — I had lived in its heights and its depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop. I had lived my life. Would I had the gift to paint the life I had lived! (chapter 56)"

"My own long struggle to find my bearings, the disillusionments and disappointments I had experienced, had made me less dogmatic in my demands on people than I had been. They had helped me to understand the hard and lonely life of the rebel who had fought for an unpopular cause. Whatever bitterness I had felt against my old teacher had given way to deep sympathy long before his death. (about Johann Most)"

"I spoke after Sasha, for an hour. I discussed the farce of a government undertaking to carry democracy abroad by suppressing the last vestiges of it at home. I took up the contention of Judge Mayer that only such ideas are permissible as are "within the law." Thus he had instructed the jurymen when he had asked them if they were prejudiced against those who propagate unpopular ideas. I pointed out that there had never been an ideal, however humane and peaceful, which in its time had been considered "within the law." I named Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, Giordano Bruno. "Were they 'within the law"?" I asked. "And the men who set America free from British rule, the Jeffersons and the Patrick Henrys? The William Lloyd Garrisons, the John Browns, the David Thoreaus and Wendell Phillipses-were they within the law?" (chapter 45)"

"Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. (p. 402)"

"The people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs. (p. 304)"

"America had declared war with Spain.... It did not require much political wisdom to see that America's concern was a matter of sugar and had nothing to do with humanitarian feelings. Of course there were plenty of credulous people, not only in the country at large, but even in liberal ranks, who believed in America's claim. I could not join them. I was sure that no one, be it individual or government, engaged in enslaving and exploiting at home, could have the integrity or the desire to free people in other lands. (p. 226)"