Vargha Poralli
30th December 2006, 17:11
While revleft was down i came across this article.http://www.isreview.org/issues/34/emmagoldman.shtml
which is a critic of Emma Goldman's politics. It makes very valid points and i see her politics match some of the views of anarchists/ultra leftists in RevLeft.I want a rebuttal from anarchists+ultra leftists to the points which are made by that article.
Something of my interest were
Her Early American Days
Goldman’s earliest years in the anarchist movement brought her into contact and collaboration with the leading anarchists of the post—Haymarket generation. The repression that followed the Haymarket affair drove much anarchist activity underground. The International Working Peoples’ Association, which claimed as many as 5,000 members nationwide before Haymarket, was reduced to a shadow of itself. But Haymarket had echoes that drew people such as Goldman to it. At the same time, immigrant anarchists from Europe and Russia–Italians, Spaniards, Jews, and Germans–sustained anarchist circles around different newspapers and other publications. This was the anarchist movement that Emma Goldman joined. Her first mentor was Johann Most, the co-author with Albert Parsons of the Pittsburgh Manifesto of 18838 and the leading anarchist of the day. Most promoted Goldman as a speaker. 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."9 The fight for a shorter workday served "only to distract the masses from the real issue–the struggle against capitalism, against the wage system, for a new society."10 So early on, Goldman displayed a trademark of her politics throughout her life–a purist, ultraleft position on a number of the questions of the day.
Moreover, Goldman never turned away from the idea that heroic individuals, not masses, make history. In her 1910 essay, "Minorities Versus Majorities," she wrote: "Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move." The majority "cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display. It matters not whether that be a dog show, a prize fight, [or a]…lynching."
Goldman’s attitude to the majority extended to the realm of working-class politics as well. Two strains of Goldman’s thought–elitism and utopianism–put her at odds with the first attempts to form the socialist party. In the last few years of the nineteenth century and first few years of the twentieth century, the American working-class movement was undergoing a regroupment of forces and a reevaluation of strategies. For the first time, leading working-class organizers–such as Eugene V. Debs–were breaking from the capitalist parties and attempting to assemble a socialist party that would reach a mass audience.
At this time, small, predominantly immigrant groups carrying out propaganda or running local election campaigns or experiments in communes and collective living arrangements represented socialism in the United States. Debs’ Social Democratic Party (SDP) hosted representatives of other left political forces in 1898 to discuss the creation of a more coherent political vehicle for working-class politics. The SDP had supported the creation of a "cooperative commonwealth," a utopian commune that would be set up in a Western state as an example for socialism. However, in the last years of the nineteenth century, Debs and other working-class activists had increasingly become convinced that this utopian scheme was impractical. They concluded that political organization among workers–the building of a socialist party–was necessary. At the 1898 convention, the utopians and the politicals clashed. Supporters of the utopian vision 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. Because of illness, Debs missed the crucial debate over the direction of the party. When he heard the results of the conference, he joined with a breakaway group led by Morris Hillquit to launch another party that would focus on political action. This led to the formation of the Socialist Party in 1901.
Having helped sink the efforts to create a serious party, Goldman had little to do with the utopian-dominated SDP after the conference. In any case, the colonization scheme collapsed–and Goldman had bigger fish to fry. Over the next two decades, she became a vocal critic of the politicals in the Socialist Party and often debated socialists on platforms.
Much of what Goldman said about the Socialist Party was true. The left of the Socialist Party–which became the base of the Communist Party after the Russian Revolution–criticized the large number of middle-class members in the party, its lack of coherence, and its character–as the revolutionary socialist James P. Cannon called it–as "a socialist variety store."18 The left also slammed the decision of the party executive in 1912 to expel 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. But where 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. She argued that workers’ political action–that is, any participation in electoral activity–was a betrayal of ideals. In her attacks on socialism, she displayed the same elitist disdain for the masses she showed in other contexts:
In order to achieve these "revolutionary" measures, the elite in the Socialist ranks go down on their knees to the majority, holding out the palm leaf of compromise, catering to every superstition, every prejudice, every silly tradition. Even the Socialist politicians know that the voting majority is intellectually steeped in ignorance, that it does not know as much as the ABC of Socialism. One would therefore assume that the aim of these "scientific" Socialists would be to lift the mass up to its intellectual heights. But no such thing. That would hurt the feelings of the majority too much. Therefore the leaders must sink to the low level of their constituency, therefore they must cater to the ignorance and prejudice of the voters. And that is precisely what Socialism has been doing since it was caught in the political trap.
In Red Russia
Unlike people such as Victor Serge or Bill Shatoff, Goldman and Bergman were unwilling to compromise their autonomy by identifying too closely with the government. .......
In her autobiography and her two books on her experiences in Russia–My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia–Goldman narrates an accumulation of little observations that make her uneasy: party workers receiving better rations than other members of the population, model schools for the few and bad schools for the majority, anarchists being forced to meet in semi-clandestine conditions, arrests of anarchists, and so on. She writes about how many anarchists tell her that these are small matters compared to defending the revolution against counterrevolution, and working with the revolution. She is initially willing to accept these explanations, until events make her unable to defend the Bolsheviks anymore. The 1921 suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, which Goldman and Berkman observed from close range in Petrograd, was the last straw for them. So, in her books, she adopted the essential anarchist view of the Russian Revolution–with the Russian people in the revolution, against the Bolsheviks. 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."
All of this may sound credible to someone picking up her books for the first time. But it 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 government desperately tried to hold out against the indigenous counterrevolutionaries and fourteen foreign armies, hoping that a revolution in Europe would come to its aid. And while there is no doubt that these conditions led to a degeneration of the revolution, committed communists felt the only possibility of reinvigorating the revolution lay in its defense against the counterrevolution. Victor Serge, an anarchist who joined the revolution, wrote to his anarchist comrades, "It is vital to respond to this necessity for revolutionary defense, as to the necessity for terror and dictatorship, on pain of death. For the grim reality of revolutions is that half-measures and half-defeats are not possible, and that victory means life, defeat means death." Serge was far from an apologist for the Bolsheviks, and certainly no Stalinist. He later became a Trotskyist, opposed to Stalin’s dictatorship. But he, like most anarchists in Russia who joined the Communist Party, recognized that only victory against the counterrevolution would create the possibility for anything the anarchists said they stood for.
Goldman wrote that the government imprisoned anarchists for their ideas........
Anarchists didn’t confine their criticism of the government to words. In fact, they engaged in terrorism against the regime and bank robberies to finance their movement. Moscow anarchists organized Black Guards, which criminal elements infiltrated, to carry out these actions. The Left SR Fanny Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin in 1918. And in September 1919, shortly before Goldman arrived in Russia, anarchists and Left SRs actually bombed the Moscow Communist Party headquarters, killing twelve and injuring fifty-five. Even with these outrages, the repression meted out against the anarchists was far more inconsistent than Goldman made it out to be. Anarchists arrested one week were released the next. Most who promised not to take up arms against the government were released. Anarchist bookstores remained open throughout the 1920s, and in 1921 the state organized a funeral for the death of anarchist leader Peter Kropotkin at which Goldman spoke.
Krondast
Even the government suppression of the rebellion of sailors at the Kronstadt garrison in 1921–which become the central article in the anarchist case against the Russian Revolution–can be defended. If the anarchist-influenced sailors had succeeded in their uprising against the government, the counterrevolutionary Whites would have had a breach that they would have exploited to roll back the revolution. And instead of having"Soviets without Bolsheviks," as the Kronstadt anarchists demanded, they’d get the elimination of the soviets, the return of pogroms, and a right-wing dictatorship. Even the main anarchist historian of the rebellion, Paul Avrich, wrote "the historian can sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them." By Goldman and Berkman’s telling, this was the last straw for their support for the Russian government. They organized a group of anarchists, including Serge, to monitor events. Goldman and Berkman offered to lead an anarchist delegation to persuade the sailors to surrender, but the government never responded. Goldman and Berkman’s proposal "may have had some effect," because the Petrograd Soviet wired the sailors with a proposal that they meet with a delegation from the Soviet, including communists and non-party comrades. The sailors rejected this, proposing no more than 15 percent Communist Party members in any such delegation. Negotiations between the sides thus ended.
When the government suppressed the uprising, Goldman and Berkman issued a protest in the name of three anarcho-syndicalist groups, a protest that Serge refused to sign. Goldman accused him of cowardice and being in bed with the Bolsheviks, but as Serge’s testimony above shows, he had principled political reasons for his stand. Even though the Bolsheviks suppressed the uprising, they realized it signified the growing opposition of the peasantry, from which most of the Kronstadt sailors were drawn, to the forced requisition of grain under the extreme measures of "war communism." The government immediately began to implement the New Economic Policy, which reintroduced market relations. This had the effect of increasing the production of food and winning back some support from the peasants, but Goldman immediately denounced it as "a reversal of communism itself.
When Goldman wrote in 1918 that "The Russian Revolution…demonstrates every day how insignificant all theories are in comparison with the actuality of the revolutionary awakening of the people," she could have been describing anarchism as one of those theories. Serge criticized the anarchists for being unable to offer anything other than criticism and opposition to the regime. He said that those who failed to "adopt a clear and distinct position…if they do not unhesitatingly and everywhere align themselves with the revolution…then they will be worthless." Noting the dwindling of their influence, Serge wrote that anarchists would find themselves either "trailing behind the more determined Communists" or "following in the footsteps of reaction." In public, Berkman denounced the government. But in private, he considered the criticisms of comrades like Serge. He wrote in his diary in December 1920,"Many vital problems find no adequate answer in our books and theories. Result–the tragedy of the Anarchists in the midst of the revolution and unable to find their place or activity?" He wrote that it wasn’t good enough just to oppose the "‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Have we anything to offer in its place?
Although she called herself a small-c communist, she was above all else, an individualist who believed that the enlightened few made social change. For her, the masses were an abstraction, or often, a curse. Trotsky caught this essence of Emma Goldman’s politics in his Diary in Exile in 1936, when he compared her essays to the Autobiography of Mother Jones:
Lying in the open air, I looked through a collection of articles by the anarchist Emma Goldman with a short accompanying biography, and am now reading the autobiography of "Mother Jones." They both came from the ranks of American working women. But what a difference! Goldman is an individualist, with a small "heroic" philosophy concocted from the ideas of Kropotkin, Nietzsche and Ibsen. Jones is a heroic American proletarian, without doubts or rhetoric, but also without a philosophy. Goldman sets herself revolutionary aims, but tries to achieve them by completely unrevolutionary means. Mother Jones always sets herself the most moderate aims: more pay and less hours, and tries to achieve them both by bold and revolutionary means. They both reflect America, each in her own way: Goldman by her primitive rationalism, Jones by her no less primitive empiricism. But Jones represents a splendid landmark in the history of her class, while Goldman signifies a departure from her class into individualistic nonexistence. I could not stomach the Goldman articles: lifeless moralizing which smacks of rhetoric, despite all its sincerity.
Bolds are made by me.
I see parallels between anarchists,ultra leftists of revleft and politics of Emma Goldman. Many issues still have valid today like anarchists+ultra leftists Views about both DotP and participating in elections etc.This is my question what is the alternative from anarchists+ultraleftists to both DotP and bourgeoisie democracy ?
P.S: Mods I am not sure where to post it so pls move if you think this is not the appropriate section.
which is a critic of Emma Goldman's politics. It makes very valid points and i see her politics match some of the views of anarchists/ultra leftists in RevLeft.I want a rebuttal from anarchists+ultra leftists to the points which are made by that article.
Something of my interest were
Her Early American Days
Goldman’s earliest years in the anarchist movement brought her into contact and collaboration with the leading anarchists of the post—Haymarket generation. The repression that followed the Haymarket affair drove much anarchist activity underground. The International Working Peoples’ Association, which claimed as many as 5,000 members nationwide before Haymarket, was reduced to a shadow of itself. But Haymarket had echoes that drew people such as Goldman to it. At the same time, immigrant anarchists from Europe and Russia–Italians, Spaniards, Jews, and Germans–sustained anarchist circles around different newspapers and other publications. This was the anarchist movement that Emma Goldman joined. Her first mentor was Johann Most, the co-author with Albert Parsons of the Pittsburgh Manifesto of 18838 and the leading anarchist of the day. Most promoted Goldman as a speaker. 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."9 The fight for a shorter workday served "only to distract the masses from the real issue–the struggle against capitalism, against the wage system, for a new society."10 So early on, Goldman displayed a trademark of her politics throughout her life–a purist, ultraleft position on a number of the questions of the day.
Moreover, Goldman never turned away from the idea that heroic individuals, not masses, make history. In her 1910 essay, "Minorities Versus Majorities," she wrote: "Always, at every period, the few were the banner bearers of a great idea, of liberating effort. Not so the mass, the leaden weight of which does not let it move." The majority "cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display. It matters not whether that be a dog show, a prize fight, [or a]…lynching."
Goldman’s attitude to the majority extended to the realm of working-class politics as well. Two strains of Goldman’s thought–elitism and utopianism–put her at odds with the first attempts to form the socialist party. In the last few years of the nineteenth century and first few years of the twentieth century, the American working-class movement was undergoing a regroupment of forces and a reevaluation of strategies. For the first time, leading working-class organizers–such as Eugene V. Debs–were breaking from the capitalist parties and attempting to assemble a socialist party that would reach a mass audience.
At this time, small, predominantly immigrant groups carrying out propaganda or running local election campaigns or experiments in communes and collective living arrangements represented socialism in the United States. Debs’ Social Democratic Party (SDP) hosted representatives of other left political forces in 1898 to discuss the creation of a more coherent political vehicle for working-class politics. The SDP had supported the creation of a "cooperative commonwealth," a utopian commune that would be set up in a Western state as an example for socialism. However, in the last years of the nineteenth century, Debs and other working-class activists had increasingly become convinced that this utopian scheme was impractical. They concluded that political organization among workers–the building of a socialist party–was necessary. At the 1898 convention, the utopians and the politicals clashed. Supporters of the utopian vision 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. Because of illness, Debs missed the crucial debate over the direction of the party. When he heard the results of the conference, he joined with a breakaway group led by Morris Hillquit to launch another party that would focus on political action. This led to the formation of the Socialist Party in 1901.
Having helped sink the efforts to create a serious party, Goldman had little to do with the utopian-dominated SDP after the conference. In any case, the colonization scheme collapsed–and Goldman had bigger fish to fry. Over the next two decades, she became a vocal critic of the politicals in the Socialist Party and often debated socialists on platforms.
Much of what Goldman said about the Socialist Party was true. The left of the Socialist Party–which became the base of the Communist Party after the Russian Revolution–criticized the large number of middle-class members in the party, its lack of coherence, and its character–as the revolutionary socialist James P. Cannon called it–as "a socialist variety store."18 The left also slammed the decision of the party executive in 1912 to expel 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. But where 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. She argued that workers’ political action–that is, any participation in electoral activity–was a betrayal of ideals. In her attacks on socialism, she displayed the same elitist disdain for the masses she showed in other contexts:
In order to achieve these "revolutionary" measures, the elite in the Socialist ranks go down on their knees to the majority, holding out the palm leaf of compromise, catering to every superstition, every prejudice, every silly tradition. Even the Socialist politicians know that the voting majority is intellectually steeped in ignorance, that it does not know as much as the ABC of Socialism. One would therefore assume that the aim of these "scientific" Socialists would be to lift the mass up to its intellectual heights. But no such thing. That would hurt the feelings of the majority too much. Therefore the leaders must sink to the low level of their constituency, therefore they must cater to the ignorance and prejudice of the voters. And that is precisely what Socialism has been doing since it was caught in the political trap.
In Red Russia
Unlike people such as Victor Serge or Bill Shatoff, Goldman and Bergman were unwilling to compromise their autonomy by identifying too closely with the government. .......
In her autobiography and her two books on her experiences in Russia–My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia–Goldman narrates an accumulation of little observations that make her uneasy: party workers receiving better rations than other members of the population, model schools for the few and bad schools for the majority, anarchists being forced to meet in semi-clandestine conditions, arrests of anarchists, and so on. She writes about how many anarchists tell her that these are small matters compared to defending the revolution against counterrevolution, and working with the revolution. She is initially willing to accept these explanations, until events make her unable to defend the Bolsheviks anymore. The 1921 suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, which Goldman and Berkman observed from close range in Petrograd, was the last straw for them. So, in her books, she adopted the essential anarchist view of the Russian Revolution–with the Russian people in the revolution, against the Bolsheviks. 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."
All of this may sound credible to someone picking up her books for the first time. But it 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 government desperately tried to hold out against the indigenous counterrevolutionaries and fourteen foreign armies, hoping that a revolution in Europe would come to its aid. And while there is no doubt that these conditions led to a degeneration of the revolution, committed communists felt the only possibility of reinvigorating the revolution lay in its defense against the counterrevolution. Victor Serge, an anarchist who joined the revolution, wrote to his anarchist comrades, "It is vital to respond to this necessity for revolutionary defense, as to the necessity for terror and dictatorship, on pain of death. For the grim reality of revolutions is that half-measures and half-defeats are not possible, and that victory means life, defeat means death." Serge was far from an apologist for the Bolsheviks, and certainly no Stalinist. He later became a Trotskyist, opposed to Stalin’s dictatorship. But he, like most anarchists in Russia who joined the Communist Party, recognized that only victory against the counterrevolution would create the possibility for anything the anarchists said they stood for.
Goldman wrote that the government imprisoned anarchists for their ideas........
Anarchists didn’t confine their criticism of the government to words. In fact, they engaged in terrorism against the regime and bank robberies to finance their movement. Moscow anarchists organized Black Guards, which criminal elements infiltrated, to carry out these actions. The Left SR Fanny Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin in 1918. And in September 1919, shortly before Goldman arrived in Russia, anarchists and Left SRs actually bombed the Moscow Communist Party headquarters, killing twelve and injuring fifty-five. Even with these outrages, the repression meted out against the anarchists was far more inconsistent than Goldman made it out to be. Anarchists arrested one week were released the next. Most who promised not to take up arms against the government were released. Anarchist bookstores remained open throughout the 1920s, and in 1921 the state organized a funeral for the death of anarchist leader Peter Kropotkin at which Goldman spoke.
Krondast
Even the government suppression of the rebellion of sailors at the Kronstadt garrison in 1921–which become the central article in the anarchist case against the Russian Revolution–can be defended. If the anarchist-influenced sailors had succeeded in their uprising against the government, the counterrevolutionary Whites would have had a breach that they would have exploited to roll back the revolution. And instead of having"Soviets without Bolsheviks," as the Kronstadt anarchists demanded, they’d get the elimination of the soviets, the return of pogroms, and a right-wing dictatorship. Even the main anarchist historian of the rebellion, Paul Avrich, wrote "the historian can sympathize with the rebels and still concede that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them." By Goldman and Berkman’s telling, this was the last straw for their support for the Russian government. They organized a group of anarchists, including Serge, to monitor events. Goldman and Berkman offered to lead an anarchist delegation to persuade the sailors to surrender, but the government never responded. Goldman and Berkman’s proposal "may have had some effect," because the Petrograd Soviet wired the sailors with a proposal that they meet with a delegation from the Soviet, including communists and non-party comrades. The sailors rejected this, proposing no more than 15 percent Communist Party members in any such delegation. Negotiations between the sides thus ended.
When the government suppressed the uprising, Goldman and Berkman issued a protest in the name of three anarcho-syndicalist groups, a protest that Serge refused to sign. Goldman accused him of cowardice and being in bed with the Bolsheviks, but as Serge’s testimony above shows, he had principled political reasons for his stand. Even though the Bolsheviks suppressed the uprising, they realized it signified the growing opposition of the peasantry, from which most of the Kronstadt sailors were drawn, to the forced requisition of grain under the extreme measures of "war communism." The government immediately began to implement the New Economic Policy, which reintroduced market relations. This had the effect of increasing the production of food and winning back some support from the peasants, but Goldman immediately denounced it as "a reversal of communism itself.
When Goldman wrote in 1918 that "The Russian Revolution…demonstrates every day how insignificant all theories are in comparison with the actuality of the revolutionary awakening of the people," she could have been describing anarchism as one of those theories. Serge criticized the anarchists for being unable to offer anything other than criticism and opposition to the regime. He said that those who failed to "adopt a clear and distinct position…if they do not unhesitatingly and everywhere align themselves with the revolution…then they will be worthless." Noting the dwindling of their influence, Serge wrote that anarchists would find themselves either "trailing behind the more determined Communists" or "following in the footsteps of reaction." In public, Berkman denounced the government. But in private, he considered the criticisms of comrades like Serge. He wrote in his diary in December 1920,"Many vital problems find no adequate answer in our books and theories. Result–the tragedy of the Anarchists in the midst of the revolution and unable to find their place or activity?" He wrote that it wasn’t good enough just to oppose the "‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Have we anything to offer in its place?
Although she called herself a small-c communist, she was above all else, an individualist who believed that the enlightened few made social change. For her, the masses were an abstraction, or often, a curse. Trotsky caught this essence of Emma Goldman’s politics in his Diary in Exile in 1936, when he compared her essays to the Autobiography of Mother Jones:
Lying in the open air, I looked through a collection of articles by the anarchist Emma Goldman with a short accompanying biography, and am now reading the autobiography of "Mother Jones." They both came from the ranks of American working women. But what a difference! Goldman is an individualist, with a small "heroic" philosophy concocted from the ideas of Kropotkin, Nietzsche and Ibsen. Jones is a heroic American proletarian, without doubts or rhetoric, but also without a philosophy. Goldman sets herself revolutionary aims, but tries to achieve them by completely unrevolutionary means. Mother Jones always sets herself the most moderate aims: more pay and less hours, and tries to achieve them both by bold and revolutionary means. They both reflect America, each in her own way: Goldman by her primitive rationalism, Jones by her no less primitive empiricism. But Jones represents a splendid landmark in the history of her class, while Goldman signifies a departure from her class into individualistic nonexistence. I could not stomach the Goldman articles: lifeless moralizing which smacks of rhetoric, despite all its sincerity.
Bolds are made by me.
I see parallels between anarchists,ultra leftists of revleft and politics of Emma Goldman. Many issues still have valid today like anarchists+ultra leftists Views about both DotP and participating in elections etc.This is my question what is the alternative from anarchists+ultraleftists to both DotP and bourgeoisie democracy ?
P.S: Mods I am not sure where to post it so pls move if you think this is not the appropriate section.