In her “New Declaration of Independence”, written in 1909 for a newspaper that subsequently refused to publish it once they had read it, political anarchist, Emma Goldman, writes the following:
“When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.
The mere fact that these forces — inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.”
Goldman’s declaration may seem quite quaint couched in ancient language that apes that of the original US Declaration of Independence. Yet her problematic seems very contemporary to today - even from 1909. She states it thusly:
“A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians. Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread, and many of her daughters are driven into the street, while thousands of tender children are daily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.”
Sound familiar? But what is the solution? Goldman puts it this way:
“That each and every individual is and ought to be free to own himself and to enjoy the full fruit of his labor; that man is absolved from all allegiance to the kings of authority and capital; that he has, by the very fact of his being, free access to the land and all means of production, and entire liberty of disposing of the fruits of his efforts; that each and every individual has the unquestionable and unabridgeable right of free and voluntary association with other equally sovereign individuals for economic, political, social, and all other purposes, and that to achieve this end man must emancipate himself from the sacredness of property, the respect for man-made law, the fear of the Church, the cowardice of public opinion, the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious, and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life. And for the support of this Declaration, and with a firm reliance on the harmonious blending of man’s social and individual tendencies, the lovers of liberty joyfully consecrate their uncompromising devotion, their energy and intelligence, their solidarity and their lives.”
Emma Goldman was born as what we would now call a Lithuanian Jew although, at the time of her birth, in 1869, her birth city of Kaunas (then called Kovno) was in the Russian Empire. She was to become, in the first half of the 20th Century, one of the pivotal figures of Anarchism in America and Europe, a woman not only of strident views but of determined social activism. Goldman emigrated to America in 1885 aged only 16 and, besides her generally anarchist views, for which she would be arrested and imprisoned several times in the US, she was also found guilty of distributing then illegal information about birth control for women as well as for inciting people not to enlist in the newly instituted draft of 1917. After two years in prison for the latter offence she was deported back to Russia.
Thereafter, she lived a travelling life in England, France and Canada, including a visit to Spain in the 1930s at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to support the anarchists there. It can be seen from even this all too brief survey that Goldman was no effete theorist of Anarchism: she was a practitioner of it. She believed wholeheartedly that Anarchism, the movement on behalf of human liberty, must be carried forward by human beings who were liberated themselves. So, on one occasion, whilst dancing among fellow anarchists one evening when she was cautioned for her behaviour by an associate due to her enthusiastic way of taking part in the evening’s events, she rebuked him, telling him to mind his own business. Later, in her autobiography, she would write that “freedom of self-expression” and “freedom from convention regarding ‘appropriate behaviour’” were exactly things that she was fighting for. She did not think she should have to act as a nun to speak on behalf of Anarchism, or to appear “respectable”, and neither did she intend to act like one. This incident itself is the source of the quote, often credited to Goldman, “If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!” And revolution was what Goldman was about. In this her enemy was the State and imposed order of any kind. She was a believer in the essential freedom of the individual and, indeed, in this as the ground of any and all other freedoms.
As a writer, one of her major publications was 1910’s Anarchism and Other Essays in which she collected together heartfelt polemics she had written or delivered as lectures about Anarchism, political violence, prisons, patriotism, women’s suffrage and other subjects. The anarchist core at the heart of Goldman’s thought was what tied this perhaps disparate set of themes together. The action of overarching (and, to Goldman’s mind, illegitimate) authorities in impinging on simple human freedoms was the common enemy. Here the first essay of this book, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” is programmatic in this respect. In it the link of anarchism with, as Goldman sees it, nature, and the naturalness of simple human freedom, is espoused. Anarchism is here defined as “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” In the body of the essay she attempts to fuse together the individual freedom she regards as basic with the social tendencies human beings equally give evidence for. In a eulogy to Anarchism part way into the essay she states the following:
“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, anymore than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of the precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence - that is, the individual - pure and strong.”
Goldman claims that “the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world” and claims to want “the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts.” To this end, there are three active enemies that Goldman mentions - religion, property and government - which correspond to the stealing of people’s minds, the capturing of people’s needs and the policing of people’s conduct. Religion, by which one can imagine Goldman primarily means Christianity, she regards as that which makes people nothing and which regards God as a despot with all the power. Under the rubric ‘property’, Goldman states that “the only demand that property recognises is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade.” In her writing, Goldman often uses the term “capitalism” to describe this same phenomenon and inequality of wealth and property. Power inequality, which is an automatic result thereof, is very much in her sights. She speaks with heartfelt passion of those “doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for 30 years... in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.” This she regards as “machine subserviency” and a “slavery more complete than bondage to the King.” Consequently, “Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production.” In their place she imagines anarchistic “voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism”. However, “Anarchism… also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.”
But then we come to the third and greatest of the foes Goldman opposes: government. This, indeed, she describes as “the third and greatest foe of social equality”. She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as one who had said that “All government in essence is tyranny” and, not distinguishing in essence between the government of divine right or that of some form of majority rule, damns them all as “absolute subordination of the individual.” For Goldman, then, all government is coercion at the least and “might is right” writ large as a generality. She quotes another American, Henry David Thoreau, with favour, when he states:
“Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavouring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice.”
Injustice, in fact, Goldman regards as “the keynote of government”, going on to say that “The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.” Goldman is further bold enough to suggest that “In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.” To the objections of some that government is based on a kind of natural law she retorts:
“A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law.”
To obey such laws, says Goldman, “requires only spontaneity and free opportunity”. Certainly not government! Thus, she agrees with the thought that “Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature.” She denigrates those that argue government is the imposition of beneficial order or that it serves to diminish crime to general benefit. She argues, instead, that “Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guarantee; yet that is the only ‘order’ that governments have ever maintained.” Crime she sees as inevitable “so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live.” Besides, she notes almost as an aside, “laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.” Here Goldman powerfully puts the case for the inauthenticity of modern life in capitalist democracies, something existentialist writers would point up more fully throughout the 20th Century.
Although anarchy as a word is derived from the Greek ἀναρχία, without beginning and, by extension, without first principle, originating power or authority, Goldman is not content to see anarchy portrayed as merely a negative or as the negation of all the benefits a political or political-economic system is imagined to have. This is to say that, for Goldman, anarchy is not primarily a taking away. Instead, it is the swapping out of a system of oppression that is fundamentally against natural freedom as something inherent to its own existence for something better able to provide just such a thing. So, in Goldman’s polemic, Anarchism aims to give work meaning and make it a choice rather than a necessity or even a compulsion. She sees anarchistic work as “both recreation and hope”. In addition, Goldman’s brand of anarchy is about rescuing “the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority” since she claims that “only in freedom can men grow to [their] full stature”. It is only in personal freedom, claims Goldman, that human beings can exercise themselves to their greatest possibility. This is so not only in individual ways but also in the various combinations of possible social relationships that may prove attainable. Only in freedom to associate or not are the most genuine social bonds forged. “With human nature caged in a narrow space,” says Goldman, “whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of [human] potentialities?” In summary, “Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.”
Goldman pens her polemic for human freedom from the United States in the early 20th Century and her complaints, and defences, are couched in ways that address the problems of that time and place. Yet, since I began writing this part of my essay, another figure, or group of figures, has come to mind as having compatible views to Emma Goldman yet from their own, very different, time and place. These people are Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics and what they found argument with was the civilising ways of the Greek city state and the later Hellenisation that continued throughout the Roman Empire. Thus, I would now say a few words about these too.
So who were the Cynics? The Cynics of ancient Greece and Rome existed for perhaps 1000 years, 400 years before and 600 years after the turn of the Common Era. The most famous Cynic is without doubt Diogenes of Sinope, a Greek from what is now the Turkish coast of the Black Sea. Diogenes is remarkably well attested throughout Hellenistic Greek and Roman literature and was clearly a popular figure of the time, not least with those who would write about ethics. Many perhaps apocryphal stories have made it down even to our day about him and what he was like. He is said to have told the mighty Alexander the Great to move out of his sun, to have presented a plucked bird to Plato as an example of a man (thus refuting his definition of what a man was), to have shunned ordinary society by living in a barrel or large tub and to have done what we might regard as disgusting acts such as spitting in people’s faces or performing bodily functions in public places. So what were Diogenes, called “the dog” for his way of living, and the Cynics who would claim allegiance to his way of life about? What was the ethic of their lives?
Put simply, it was naturalism, the belief that anything done according to nature could not be unethical. So why not masturbate in the street to relieve the sexual urge, as Diogenes is said to have done? Such urges are natural and normal and so not a cause for shame. They are also quite easily dealt with. Today if you masturbated openly in the street you would be treated with extreme suspicion as a person and certainly criminalised. But why? What ethical harm would have resulted from your action? To a Cynic this would make no sense for the relief of natural urges cannot be unethical. To a Cynic, in fact, the problem was civilisation itself with its arbitrary customs and civilised ways that had no basis in nature at all. Cynics were those who wanted to uncivilise people and destroy the destructive civilising ideal which, for them at least, was contrary to nature. Cynics wanted a life without artifice and they criticised civilised life as something entirely artificial, something with no basis in anything at all.
At the heart of this is the question of what the human animal is and what makes someone human. There is a well known story about Diogenes to this effect. He is depicted going around a marketplace in the daytime with a lantern looking for “an honest man” - as many modern versions have it today. But the actual Greek states that Diogenes was searching for “a human being” (literally an ‘anthropos’). So the Cynic notion of ethics is to follow that ethic which makes us human beings and to practice what that means. And they did not think that the civilised, artificial customs of those who lived in cities were promoting this. They thought it was to make those who observed such customs less than human. A human being cannot be a slave to artificial customs in naturalist Cynic thinking. The Cynic problematic, accordingly, was that most people appear human but are not. It might even be argued that they saw civilisation as a kind of nihilism based in empty notions of right and wrong in a way not so distant from the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.
We moderns perhaps need to get under the skin of the Cynic mentality to have this make some sense to us since many of us are now many times more civilised, and so dehumanised in Cynic thinking, than those whom the Cynic historically addressed. To us, it might even be suggested, civilisation is humanity and lack of it is what dehumanises. Here the Cynic relationship to wider Greek society becomes pertinent. Cynics were illegitimate or foreign, outsiders, either in fact or by declaration or both. One expression of this is their declaration of being cosmopolitan, citizens of the world as Diogenes had it, and thus of no nation or city state or nationalistic grouping which was to intentionally embrace the vulnerability this implies. The Cynic recognises themselves as only a human being and oblivious of the distinctions of others, part of a natural world and a natural order. Birth, upbringing, race, family, gender, ethnicity are of no import. Cynics were marginal meddlers, invalidating and defacing the civilised world. Not for them a life of attaining wealth or power or a higher standard of living. They willfully existed on a minimum, what nature provided, and their abode was whatever offered shelter. The Cynic does not even attain to the longest life possible. Today may be the first and last day of life and that is fine. Such a stance in life makes them antisocial unless amongst fellow Cynics and Cynics also practiced shamelessness, as any naturalist must, shame being a thing upon which civil society is seen to run. Their naturalism could not allow shame for what animal, animals being those things that perfectly exemplify living according to nature, displays shame? Yet they called this shamelessness freedom for when the animal acts "shamelessly" it does so not to break apparent rules but because it can, because nature allows.
There are a number of Greek terms which symbolise the Cynic ethic. Autarkeia, self-sufficiency, is certainly one. Euteleia, frugality, is another. Parrhesia, freedom of speech, is yet another. Askēsis, asceticism, is a fourth. Cynics were happy to live life according to Tyche, chance, luck or contingency, to be atimia, without civic rights, to accept the ponoi, the hardships of a natural life lived according to physis, nature, and opposed to nomos, custom or law. Their archetype was Heracles who had completed twelve labours and they conceived of their own natural lives as labours too. Their antitype was Prometheus who had stolen fire from the gods and so enabled human beings to begin civilising themselves. Fire is symbolic here for with it we can become many things that we cannot without it. No other animal uses fire. It sets us apart from the natural world. Cynics, on the other hand, would wash in cold water if they washed at all and would eat raw food. If they were male (we do have record of at least one female Cynic, Hipparchia, who was married to the Cynic Crates) they would not shave and so they had long, unkempt beards and hair. They wore few clothes and no shoes, the tribon or cloak being their one notable item of clothing. For the Cynic the simple life was the natural life and they accepted what hardships came along with this as part and parcel of what makes us human. They did not care for length of life for they valued its quality and authenticity over its amount. Ten years of naturalism trumps one hundred years of artificiality in the Cynic mind. Cynics were those who believed your form of life affected your being-in-the-world. They did not believe freedom was a matter of a physical situation for, as in a story told about Diogenes being made a slave, he still regarded himself as a king nevertheless. For Cynics a human being is born free, a child of the natural world rather than a citizen of a state.
Cynics acted with avowed ethical intent. They lived a life in pursuit of virtue and claimed to be demonstrating the virtuous life. To the civilised, however, they often appeared like dogs or savages, backwards, and as Luddites rejecting human progress. The term "Cynic”, which comes from the Greek for dog, was meant to be pejorative, an insult, but those so called actually saw in it a truthful and worthy designation. Cynics sought virtue and believed in reason. But they did not value the false and domesticated versions of these things they regarded as being found in civilisation. These things were more authentically found in nature and they observed it for instruction as when Diogenes, seeing a child scoop up water with cupped hands, threw away his cup. They had an ethic of simplicity such that, in their seemingly universal nay-saying, the Cynic avoided traditional clothes, jewellery and bodily adornments for their own ‘uniform’; they restricted their diet; did not live in a house; derided bathing, sports, the Games of the ancient world; scoffed at festivals, sacrifice, prayer and religious life generally; did not marry, dodged work and steered clear of the courts, assembly, army and other arenas of political participation. They even strived to break out of old patterns of talking, and tossed up for themselves a wild new language, the language of chreiai, short, pithy sayings intended to be didactic for the insightful among their hearers.
The Cynic, in short, was a countercultural, a person who did not run with the herd, who did not tinker at the edge of life but argued that humans were going in entirely the wrong direction and risked not living their full humanity at all with the creation of their artificial civility and polity. Accordingly, the Cynic had a different appreciation of time to those civilised who, necessarily, begin to write histories and build future plans. The Cynic, on the contrary, lived in the ever present (much like a Taoist might try to, in fact). An important Cynic precursor, Antisthenes, claimed to satisfy his desires with “whatever is present”, Diogenes was more concerned about the sun’s warmth than building an empire. Other Cynics claim they can own only the patch of ground they stand on or even nothing at all.
One outworking of this belief about time and our place in it is that Cynics were not afraid to commit suicide when they believed their useful life was done. They did not, as more civilised notions up to today demonstrate more clearly, believe that one should strive to live as long as possible. So if today one should counter Cynic beliefs with all the supposed benefits that civilisation has brought us, not least medical, they would be met with a blank stare of irrelevance by a Cynic. Cynics were usually individualists without family or children. This seems to have been a practical thing and was certainly tendentious since no Cynics could really deny that the sexual urge or procreation were contrary to nature. However, they regarded themselves, as some classical texts show, as carers of humanity as a whole. Here, for example, is a section from the Dissertations of Epictetus : ““How then”, asked the young man, “will a Cynic preserve society”? In the name of God, man, who is the greater benefactor to mankind? Those who bring forth two or three ugly-snouted children to take their place, or those who watch over all mankind as best they can, observing what they do, how they spend their time, what they care for, and what they disregard contrary to their duty?”
So Cynics were individualists who saw themselves with a communal duty to enable people to live a fully authentic humanity. But it was recognised that this was not easy and, indeed, its hardship was made a key part of the Cynic mentality. As William Desmond writes in his 2008 book, Cynics:
"the Cynics simply enjoyed whatever was at hand, even if it were only lentils and sunshine. But to be able to enjoy the chance occurrences of the present is very difficult, and such a radical simplicity requires both physical and psychological discipline. Hence askēsis was central to the Cynic lifestyle, although theirs was a cheerful and hedonistic, not a world-denying, asceticism. That is, they paradoxically welcomed pain as a necessary condition of elemental pleasure. Askēsis made them true hedonists, to such an extent that they might even get pleasure in their self-chosen pains: “the scorn of pleasure is the greatest pleasure”.... one can find a similar view adumbrated in Julian: the true Cynic must first practice askēsis to free himself from the desire for pleasures, but once he is able to “trample” on them at will, then “he may permit himself to dip into that sort of thing if it come his way.”"
This is to say only that Cynics lived opportunistically, in the moment, as those who live by nature’s rules must. An animal, for example, may naturally feed on what it can forage for or kill, if it eats meat. But, should it come across a cooked meal left in the street, what animal would turn its nose up and pass it by?
So this is a concise appreciation of the Cynic way. It is a naturalism which is claimed to be the way of virtue and of human authenticity. It is not recognised as the easy choice and, as we have seen, its pains are even taken as markers of its “elemental pleasure.” What I find of importance here is the central notion that how you live affects and shapes you as a person which is true whether you accept the Cynics’ beliefs or not. The Cynic was saying that how you live (which is the ethical question) affects who you are and who you become, an equation also evident in the writing of Emma Goldman to which I will soon return. So we can see that their ethical intent is clear, again, whether you believe they were going about it the right way or not. Cynics did not divorce theory from practice and they were holists in this respect (again like Goldman), viewing thought about life and “doing life” as essentially all of a piece. You need not theorise about how to be virtuous or what an authentic human life is: You lived it. You demonstrated it. You made radical choices and lived their consequences. This is greatly to their credit and demonstrates how highly they held the notion of an ethical life and of living human lives thought authentic in themselves. As such, Cynicism is functionally a naturalistic form of anarchy very much compatible with, or complimentary to, the ideas of Emma Goldman.
I must now take stock of where we are, returning to Goldman again as my primary example of Anarchism. Her writings give us several things to think about if we are going to put what has, in modern times, become the wholesale assumption of the natural hegemony of capitalist democracies in question. This has become a habit which blinds us to the fact that, in much of the world, universal suffrage is barely 100 years old and for the vast majority of human civilisation both capitalism and democracy have been absent. Let me start with three items for and against Anarchism as a non-system of no-politics that might replace the political systems and politics many countries currently employ. I begin with the objections to Anarchism and then follow with the items in favour of it.
Objections to Anarchism:
One. Politics is the means for, and humanity’s only reasonable hope to achieve, general welfare, protection, health, wealth and stability.
Two. Anarchy would be lawlessness, a place where the strong would inevitably enslave the weak.
Three. Only community produces genuine human goods and multiplies their possibility.
In Favour of Anarchism:
One. Politics, and now civic society in general, for example in media, including social media, and business, is all about centralisation and even monopoly. This centralisation can be observed, in fairly obvious ways, to be the wielding of great power to the detriment of many. It is particularly ripe for abuse and the outcome of that is detrimental to the whole. This power to control whole populations through centralisation is exactly the point of it. Consequently, decentralisation and dissolution of such power bases would act to negate such modern forms of control, exploitation and sometimes even crime. The ultimate decentralisation is Anarchism.
Two. Human freedom begins with individual freedom. If individuals are not really free to live their lives as they wish then systems cannot make them any freer or be conduits of freedom themselves.
Three. Anarchy is simply living in accordance with the way of nature itself. If you live and die according to nature you cannot be unhappy. For there is no other standard that is evident, save the rhetorical fancies of human beings which occur from time to time, and which are not obviously and manifestly better, whilst, at the same time, raising the expectations of people to levels which, in retrospect, they can never deliver on. Better to live simply in peace than to engage in tumultuous enterprises with obviously detrimental effects.
In thinking about these pros and cons of Anarchism it struck me that, actually, if we are going to put politics as a whole, and capitalist democracies in general, under the microscope - and even put them in question - then the question we are really asking ourselves is what is politics for ? What is a given political system there for? What is it meant to be achieving and, in reality, is it able to achieve such things? But that leads into a lot of other questions. We might, in that context, reasonably ask what morality is for and where it comes from and if governments are perpetrators or preservers of it. We might ask if there are such things as general human goods, what they are and how they might best be encouraged to occur. We might ask if there is such a thing as human duty or human responsibility, both in general and in various political bodies. What is certain, however, is that civic society and political authority are both entirely artificial and based upon habit, custom and law.
Here we come back to the objections to Anarchism I cited above and which, when turned around, become reasons for political systems at all. Here it must be questioned if politics and even civilisation is humanity’s only hope of general welfare, protection, health, wealth and stability. But, more than this, we can see that this objection to Anarchism starts out by begging all the relevant questions. Who has decided that life is about these things which spring up in this objection like traps ready to capture any human being who strays into being born? Can a human being not decide for themselves what life is about without the answer being imposed upon them? Is this not Goldman’s whole point in her writing on the subject? Has she not argued that people should be free to draw their own conclusions and come to solutions based on free, rather than coerced, decisions based on whatever social formations people deem fit amongst themselves? Goldman’s whole argument is that a government, any government, and a political system, is an imposition. That conclusion cannot be put off by listing government’s supposed benefits even if you agreed with them. For even in agreeing with them it does not commit you to the belief that government is the way to achieve them or that humanity as a whole is what the individual should be concerned with. Goldman would also no doubt add that a greater good based on individual enslavement to a communal goal was no real good at all besides pointing out the false thinking that government and politics actually ever really achieve these things which always seem to be, in the reality, things that are always in process and always out of reach. Like a politician’s promise, the actuality never matches up to what was put on offer. In short, Goldman’s position, and its surely one to consider, is that government manifestly doesn’t really work. In Goldman’s mind if you choose government you end up with the dunce or the rogue:
“The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.”
Goldman’s further conclusion is both depressing but also very insightful. The issue with politics is not so much systems as people:
“One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.”
So systems cannot make right what human frailty inevitably corrupts, diverts and mitigates. We shall search forever and a day for “good people” with “the right motives”, let alone for the solutions we say we want to problems that never seem to go away. Whatever else politics and government are, they never seem to be equality and fairness with the same justice for all. That promise being empty and undeliverable, why should we pretend that government is the solution to human living anymore?
As to the second objection to Anarchism, that it must inevitably lead to lawlessness and to the enslavement of the weak by the strong, Goldman has already headed this argument off at the pass. Firstly, she points out that these things already happen. So it is not as if politics and government have stamped them out - as our prisons and law courts make clear. Indeed, as Goldman makes plain many times, these things invent new and even worse ways for people to oppress, exploit and degrade other human beings. It might even be argued to be the case that in their systemic nature they invent systemic evils which become systemic ways to oppress, exploit and degrade - as our social security systems (or lack of them) make plain. The argument in favour of decentralisation as a reason for Anarchism is a powerful one in this case. Our technological advancement has made the centralising power of government all the more invasive in ways that Goldman could never have imagined a century ago when she wrote. Despite government, politics, democracy and the supposed ‘trickle down economics’ of capitalism in the America she wrote in, we know that in that same America tens of thousands of Americans will kill each other in a single year with tens of thousands more being injured. America’s love affair with the gun leads to consequences that pretty much everyone but those who don’t want to see can see and government, that protector of the people and guarantor of stability in some arguments, is doing nothing to stop the carnage. Meanwhile millions will live in fear of ill health or the medical circumstances of their lives as the capitalist insurance system in place there means the system will not insure many for the treatments and medicines they need, effectively leaving these same people fearing penury due to, and as well as, ill health. What has government done about this situation in which the strong capitalists dictate the terms both to (and from) government and to the people at large? On the issue of climate breakdown, what do government do to mitigate this whilst capitalists benefiting from no change pour millions into negating the findings of the vast majority of climate scientists? Does not all this seem like the bellum omnium contra omnes already?
And then people say that Anarchism would lead to lawlessness and crime?! What do they think the situation is now? The point here, I think, is twofold. Firstly, government and, thus, the people voting for them, are generally speaking not serious about solving the problems they claim to identify. The result of political action and interaction is more often than not compromise or the watering down of a measure until it is insipid and ineffectual. Politics promotes and encourages lowest common denominatorism. Second, the problem of crime and of right behaviour is one for human individuals and not political systems. Crime and immoral actions occur because of human nature not because there is a political system, and because criminal actions or, in the absence of law, destructive or immoral behaviour, is ubiquitous due to the frailty of the human condition. As such, the notion that Anarchism would be lawlessness where a political system would not is manifestly false and so, at the most, it becomes a discussion of degree rather than difference in kind. To suggest that Anarchism would be lawlessness, as if in the realm of government crime, dishonesty and public immorality and its consequences are simply problems that have been resolved, is to have a double blindness; one which is blind to the crime-ridden societies we live in (by which I mean detected and undetected crime as well as all behaviour which detrimentally affects others) and another which ignores the power of our centralised world in which more harm can be done by the touch of the right button than a convinced criminal could commit in a lifetime. And that, by the way, is if you even accept that in a world without governments people would simply turn to their neighbours, attack them and make off with their belongings or just simply enslave them, a prospect that, to say the least, does not seem fully borne out by human history in all its particularity.
The third and final objection to Anarchism I gave above was that “Only community produces genuine human goods and multiplies their possibility.” With this Goldman would not completely agree, not least because she would not be bound to the view that human goods are necessarily things they must create - although they could be things they create. Some might simply be natural, such as individual human freedom. But I also imagine she would not really deny the premise either for Goldman’s anarchistic philosophy is not a denial of community or communal effort but merely an impugning of it when it manifests as coercion. Coerced community based on laws enforced by the violence and authority of the State are in Goldman’s sights and not mere community in the slightest. Goldman is quite happy for there to be free association and community building among people based on their conscience and free decision making processes. So, in this case, we may wonder if this is actually an objection to anything that Goldman is trying to propose at all. Whilst it may be true that two human beings may be able to achieve together more, for their common good, than each could by themselves, there is a world of difference between this as a choice made free of coercion or imposed need by these same people and the same choice imposed upon them by the oppressive conditions of the State, some government or other, or the social environment in some political system. Such is our world today in the West were certain lifestyles are mandated if one wishes to partake in society as a mainstream citizen in order not to be left behind by society as a whole.
If one were to say that one is not forced to take part in such a society this could easily be shown to be a bad faith argument of the highest order in a world of CCTV cameras which surveil us wherever we go (in the UK, at least), in which we require identity documents to cross entirely artificial borders and in which the currency of society is increasingly electronic, necessitating that you sign up to society in the first place in order to take part, something which, more often than not, entails your digital footprints being tracked, collated, stored, stolen, and even sold to others for profit. The conclusion may easily be drawn that refusal to accede to the conditions that this society enforces upon the individual, under threat of force and criminal sanction, results in a harsh punishment for not doing so and exploits them while they do in a good old ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ fashion. We can be sure that Emma Goldman would be entirely against such developments, regarding the price for such enforced community to be far too high for individual liberty to pay. And, we may say, this does not really seem like what human fraternity should be, the free association of individuals based in their uncoerced choice and the good will of one human being towards another.
And so this is my brief appraisal of Anarchism via the thought of Emma Goldman with a brief detour through the world and ethics of the Cynics. Anarchism, in modern context, is the belief that human beings do not need, and would be better served by, no government and by the disappearance of the State as an existing entity. Anarchists, consequently, are those who view these things as frustrators of, and obstructions to, proper human freedom and human possibility along with all the apparatus of democracy and capitalistic society, both of which exist to draw power to coerce to themselves. In this, anarchists are entirely sincere regardless of the fact that there may those who, from time to time, simply want to watch the world burn. Such people, however, should not simply be equated with “anarchists” anymore than those described as “cynical” today are anything to do with the historical Cynics to which I earlier referred. It will be remembered that those same Cynics were referred to in my text as those who, as good Greeks, sought virtue and tried to live up to their reasoned formulations of it. We may regard anarchists such as Goldman in exactly the same way, which is to say as entirely sincere and virtuous people who have imagined that they espy a better way to live than is currently available to, or imagined by, others. If they then rail against the State, all forms of centralising oppression, government and societal coercion they are not, by their lights, being “immoral”, they are, instead, acting according to what they regard as the higher and natural law of nature as opposed to the entirely artificial and always self-serving ways of human beings, ways which become more powerful, more dangerous and more potentially destructive the more centralised they are. In that respect, too, Anarchism is a door to freedom.
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