Title: Emma Goldman

Based on talk given by Kathleen O'Kelly to Workers 
Solidarity Movement branch meeting in 1994.

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in a Jewish ghetto in 
Russia where her family ran a small inn. When she was 13 
the family moved to St Petersburg.  It was just after the 
assassination of Alexander II and so was a time of political 
repression.  The Jewish community suffered a wave of 
pogroms.  The severe economic hardship of the time meant 
that Emma Goldman had to leave school after six months in 
St Petersburg and work in a factory.

It was here that Goldman secured a copy of Cherychevsky's 
'What is to be done' in which the heroine Vera is converted 
to nihilism and lives in a world of equality between sexes 
and co-operative work.  The book offered an embryonic 
sketch of Goldman's later anarchism and also strengthened 
her determination to live her life in her own way.

At 15 her father tried to marry her off but she refused.  It was 
eventually agreed that the rebellious child should go to 
America with a half sister to join another sister in Rochester.  
Goldman quickly realised that for a Jewish immigrant, 
America was not the land of opportunity that had been 
promised.  America, for Goldman meant slums and 
sweatshops where she earned her living as a seamstress.

What initially drew Goldman to anarchism was the outcry 
that followed the Haymarket Square tragedy in 1886 in 
Chicago.  After a bomb had been thrown into a crowd of 
police during a workers' rally for the 8 hour day. Four 
anarchists were eventually hanged.  Convicted on the 
flimsiest evidence; the judge at the trial openly declared; 
"Not because you caused the Haymarket bomb, but because 
you are Anarchists, you are on trial."

Emma Goldman had followed the event intensely and as the 
day on the day of the hanging she decided to become a 
revolutionary.  By this time Goldman was 20 and had been 
married for 10 months to a Russian immigrant.  The 
marriage had not worked out so she divorced him and 
moved to New York.

Here, she befriended Johann Most, the editor of a German 
language anarchist paper.  He quickly decided to make 
Goldman his protege and sent her on a speaking tour.  Most 
instructed Goldman to condemn the in adequacy of a 
campaign for the eight hour day.  Rather he argued we must 
demand the complete overthrow of capitalism.  Campaigns 
for the eight hour day were merely a diversion.  Goldman 
duly conveyed this message at her public meetings.  
However, in Buffalo, she was challenged by an old worker 
who asked "What were man of his age to do?  They were not 
likely to see the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system.  
Were they also to forego the release of perhaps two hours a 
day form the hated work ? "

>From this encounter Goldman realised that specific efforts 
for improvement such as higher wages and shorter hours, 
far from being a diversion were part of the revolutionary 
transformation of society.

Goldman began to distance herself from Most and became 
more interested in a rival German anarchist journal 'Die 
Autonomie'  Here she was introduced to the writings of 
Kropotkin.  She sought to balance the inclination of human 
beings towards the socialsability and mutual aid which Peter 
Kropotkin stressed with her own strong belief in the 
Freedom of the individual.  This belief in personal freedom 
is highlighted in the story where Goldman was taken aside at 
a dance by a young revolutionary and told it did not become 
an agitator to dance.  Goldman wrote  "I insisted that our 
cause could not expect me to behave as a nun and that the 
movement should not be turned into a cloister.  If it meant 
that, I did not want it.  I want freedom, the right to self 
expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."

In the early days Goldman supported the idea of propaganda 
by deed.  In 1892, together with Alexander Berkman she 
planned the assassination of Henry Clay Finch, who has 
suppressed strikes in the Homestead Pennsylvania factory 
with armed guards.  She even tried unsuccessfully to work as 
a prostitute to raise money for the gun.  They believed that 
by killing a tyrant, a representative of a cruel system, the 
consciousness of the people  would be aroused.  This didn't 
happen.

Berkman only managed to injure Finch and was sentenced 
to 22 years in prison.  Goldman tried to explain and justify 
the attempted assassination insisting that true morality deals 
with the motives not the consequences.  Her time in post-
revolutionary Russian meant that she re-assessed this belief 
that the end justifies the means but I'll come to that later.

Her defence of Berkman made Goldman a marked woman 
and her lectures were regularly disrupted by the authorities.  
In 1893 she was arrested for allegedly urging the unemployed 
to take bread 'by force' and was given a year in Blackwells 
Island penitentiary.

She was imprisoned a second time for distributing birth 
control literature , but her longest sentence resulted from her 
involvement in setting up 'No Conscription' leagues and 
organising rallies against the first world war.  Goldman and 
Berkman were arrested in 1917 for conspiring to obstruct the 
draft and given two years.  Afterwards they were stripped of 
their citizenship and deported along with other undesirable 
'Reds' to Russia.  J. Edgar Hoover, who directed her 
deportation hearing called her "one of the most dangerous 
women in America."

The plus side to deportation meant that Goldman got a free 
ticket to Russia where she was able to witness the Russian 
Revolution at first hand.  Goldman had been prepared to 
bury the hatchet of mans conflict with anarchism in the 1st 
international and support the Bolsheviks .  However, in 1919 
as Goldman and Berkman travelled thoughout the country 
they were horrified by the increased bureaucracy, political 
persecution  and forced labour they found.  The breaking 
point came in 1921 when the Kronstadt sailors and soldiers 
rebelled against the Bolsheviks and sided with the workers 
on strike.  They were attacked and crushed by Trotsky and 
the Red Army.  On leaving Russia in December 1921, 
Goldman set down her findings on Russia in two works - 
'My Disillusionment in Russia' and 'My Further 
Disillusionment in Russia'.  She argued that 'never before in 
all history has authority , government,  the state, proved so 
inherently static, reactionary, and even counter-
revolutionary.  In short, the very antithesis of revolution.

Her time in Russia led her to reassess her earlier belief that 
the end justifies the means.  Goldman accepted that violence 
as a necessary evil in the process of social transformation.  
However, her experience in Russia forced a distinction.  She 
wrote "I know that in the past every great political and social 
change, necessitated violence....Yet it is one thing to employ 
violence in combat as a means of defence.  It is quiet another 
thing to make a principle of terrorism, to institutionalise it 
to assign it the most vital place in the social struggle.  Such 
terrorism begets counter-revolution and in turn itself 
becomes counter-revolutionary."

These views were unpopular among radicals as most still 
wanted to believe that the Russian Revolution was a success.  
When Goldman moved to Britain in 1921 she was virtually 
alone on the left in condemning the Bolsheviks and her 
lectures were poorly attended.  On hearing that she might be 
deported in 1925, a Welsh miner offered to marry her in 
order to give her British Nationality.  With a British 
passport, she was the able to travel to France and Canada.  In 
1934, she was even allowed to give a lecture tour in the 
States.

In 1936 Berkman committed suicide, months before the 
outbreak of the Spanish Revolution.  At the age of 67, 
Goldman went to Spain to join in the struggle.  She told a 
rally of libertarian youth "Your Revolution will destroy 
forever [the notion] that anarchism stands for chaos."  She 
disagreed with the participation of the CNT-FAI in the 
coalition government of 1937 and the concessions they made 
to the increasingly powerful communist for the sake of the 
war effort.  However she refused to condemn the anarchists 
for joining the government and accepting militarisation as 
she felt the alternative at the time was communist 
dictatorship.

Goldman died in 1940 and was buried in Chicago not far 
from the Haymarket Martyrs whose fate had changed the 
course of her life.

Emma Goldman has left behind her a number of important 
contributions to anarchist thought.  In particular she is 
remembered for incorporating the area of sexual politics into 
anarchism which had only been hinted at by earlier 
anarchists.  Goldman campaigned and went to prison for the 
right of women to practice birth control.  She argued that a 
political solution was not enough to get rid of the unequal 
and repressive relations between the sexes.  There had to be 
massive transformation of values and most importantly in 
womens themselves .  She argued that women could do this.

"First, by asserting herself as a personalities and not as a sex 
commodity.  Second, by refusing the right to anyone over 
her body; by refusing to bear children unless she wants them; 
by refusing to be a servant to  God, the state, society, the 
husband, the family  etc, by making her life simpler, but 
deeper and richer.  That is, by trying to learn the meaning 
and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself 
from fear of public opinion and public condemnation.  Only 
anarchist revolution and not the ballot , will set woman free, 
will make her a force hither to unknown in the World, a 
force of divine fire, of giving a creation of free men and 
women."

WSM PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland
