"Red Emma" was born in Russia (Lithuania) and emigrated to the United States in December 1885, just before the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, which radicalized her. She worked for many radical causes — for the labor movement, yes, but also for women's rights and against WWI. For this last sentiment she was arrested, jailed for two years, and (in 1919, prefiguring the Palmer raids of the 1920s) deported to the USSR.
Government is bad. Bad, bad, bad. No matter what crimes individuals commit, governments carry out (and sanction) worse crimes. In this interpretation, the term "crimes" refers not to lawbreaking but (a) to the lawmaking that creates an unjust society, e.g., the laws against striking, and (b) to the subsequent enforcement of this system of injustice, e.g., the killing of union activists. In a sense, then, the government is no different from any other protection racket: it says there are threats and offers to solve them for a price, but the threats are of its own making. She puts this in another way, saying that the government makes you feel small, then offers itself and its supposedly noble cause as a way for you to feel large.
Furthermore, even the best government restricts liberty, uses force, and finally, whether it wants to or not, becomes The State (i.e., a small ruling class, as the sociologist Robert Michels [1876-1936; born in Germany but spent most of his life teaching in Italy] noted in his "Iron Law of Oligarchy"). Thus anarchism is about liberty from the oppression, both physical and mental, of the State. Anarchism is thus a critique of this oppression, not a bunch of bomb-throwing radicals.
Note that Goldman's essay contains virtually nothing about what sort of order might arise when government is eliminated. How would people coordinate their actions if they disagreed? — she doesn't say. In other words, in the picture I gave earlier in the course about the dialectic between construction and critique, Goldman's essay is entirely on the "critique" side. It is an injustice to Goldman to evaluate her critique as a statement of construction. (Or maybe not. Maybe she really did think that if we just got rid of government, people would magically get along. One standard argument by anarchists is that without the distortions of the government and the competitive economic system, people's natural cooperativeness would come to the fore, and so disagreements would be settled not through force but rather through mutual good will.)
Notice that Goldman's critique is not as profound (or at least as rigorous and detailed) as Marx's, even though she owes much to him.
Quiz question: xx
Dialectic. Can be seen as ...
... construction and critique.
Each is necessary. Each can be taken on its own merits.
Kohlberg's sequence of moral reasoning stages: premodernity ---> Stage 4 [e.g., Bork, Reed] ---> Stage 4 1/2 [e.g., Goldman, Allen] ---> Stage 5 [e.g., Locke, Burke] ---> Stage 5 1/2 [Marx] etc. Note anarchism and libertarianism as being at Stage 4 1/2, with reactionaries trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube by returning to Stage 4. [Let me clarify my objections to reactionary thought. The naive objection to it, held by many students, is that change is good, that the world progresses and we must adapt to it, etc. But this line of argument assumes that change is automatically good. It also assumes that progress (a) exists and (b) is what has actually happened up to now. These assumptions are questionable. Not all change is good. Progress may be an illusion. And even if there is such a thing as progress, what we've actually been doing may not be progress. A better objection to reactionary thought is that it does not acknowledge the reasons why people sought change in the first place. Even if we were to grant reactionaries their claim that we have taken a wrong turn in our society, we can't just go back to the good old days. Do we have to go back to the world of the 1950s, where racial segregation was legal and omnipresent, where we lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation, where women's place was in the home? No, we don't; there are reasons why we took the path we did. Now, maybe we chose poorly back then and need to try other choices, but saying that is different from saying that we simply want to go back to the old ways.]
Note "radical" critique vs. "conservative" construction. Note neither is higher than the other.
Goldman: Based on her experience with the Haymarket riots, she sees the State as only, at root, a repressive body. A protection racket — a system of exploitation secured by violence. The government makes people afraid, and then it offers to "protect" them. The government makes people small, and then offers them a cause to believe themselves large. "Order" = regimentation, repression, death.
Government commits crimes (or what should be crimes in a just society) in a variety of ways:
In reply to certain common objections raised against anarchist society, anarchists say:
All government winds up oligarchical (Robert Michels's "Iron Law of Oligarchy") and oppressive. This is true even of regimes supposedly founded on egalitarian principles (e.g., the USSR. All leaders try to keep power.
Critique of "human nature" arguments (which are often used to criticize anarchist positions, holding that humans are "naturally" competitive with each other):
[Read aloud 266B/3 to 267A/5.]
More miscellaneous lecture notes:
Government is a disease masquerading as a cure.
Make people afraid and then offer them a remedy (like the deodorant example).
Make people small and then offer oneself as a cause to make them large.
Exploitation secured by violence.
Goldman notes, correctly, that the defiance of laws is illegal but that this defiance is exactly what is needed to create the new, law-less society.
Profound distrust of government. Bakunin intro & essay says that all leaders will try to keep power. All government rests on force and therefore violates people's freedom and degrades people's value. (It must do so to protect its rule.) Government commits crimes in the name of protecting people, when all they're really doing is paying for the lazy [= the owners, not welfare queens] and "the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires [266B/2/5-6]. Paraphernalia: most police, military, prisons, war, executions. Paying for the lazy: corporate welfare, tax breaks.
Inhuman treatment of ordinary labor (as with the Marxian "alienation" critique). "The ideal is to have jobs that require no training at all" (meaning maximum vulnerability of the workers).
Conversely, desire for a good life (similar to the goals of communism): personal creativity, sociality / solidarity, surrounded by the beauty created by the immense powers this frees. We will still have plenty, since a major problem of capitalism is overproduction, not scarcity.
Crime is only misdirected energy. (A search for meaning, I believe.)
These are genuine advantages — albeit only potential. Certainly the critique is well-taken.
Construction: ?? "Spontaneous organization"? This ignores the existential problem of our finiteness.
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