Libertarian Labyrinth - New pages [en]

In Memoriam: Louise Michel

2010-08-31T17:46:10Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'IN MEMORIAM: LOUISE MICHEL {{small-caps|January 9, mcmv}} By Richard Ellis Roberts :{{small-caps|Red}} Virgin! whose impassioned war ::Was waged against the high and cruel, :E…'

IN MEMORIAM: LOUISE MICHEL

{{small-caps|January 9, mcmv}}

By Richard Ellis Roberts

:{{small-caps|Red}} Virgin! whose impassioned war
::Was waged against the high and cruel,
:Ever before thee, like a star,
::Shone the imperishable jewel

:Of Peace and Love and Brotherhood;
::And if, while gazing at the sky,
:At times you stumbled into blood
::And soil'd the skirts of Liberty:

:Shall he condemn, who, safe from smutch,
::At politics discreetly gambles,
:You who loved Light and Life so much,
::You sought them through the reeking shambles?

:Wild prophetess of Freedom's cause!
::Who, in your mad revolt from awe,
:Broke through divine and human laws
::To herald in the Larger Law,

:You err'd: by older, slower ways
::The kingdom is more surely built;
:And freedom yet shall have due praise,
::Although no Thiers' blood be spilt.

:But though the reckless deeds you wrought,
::Lost in a mist of blood, Louise,
:Shall be forgot, your master-thought
::Shall triumph o'er the centuries.

[[Category:Louise Michel]]
[[Category:poems]]
[[Category:Works by Richard Ellis Roberts]]

To Louise Michel

2010-08-31T17:36:18Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

'''To Louise Michel'''

By Edwin Markham

:I cannot take your road, Louise Michel,
::Priestess of Pity and of Vengeance — no:
::Down that amorphous gulf I cannot go —
:That gulf of Anarchy whose pit is Hell.
:Yet, sister, though my first word is farewell,
::Remember that I know your hidden woe;
::Have felt the grief that rends you blow on blow;
:Have knelt beside you in the murky cell.

:You never followed hate (let this atone)
:Nor knew the wrongs of others from your own:
::Wild was the road, but Love has always led,
:So I am silent where I cannot praise;
:And here now at the parting of the ways,
::I lay a still hand lightly on your head.

[[Category:poetry]]
[[Category:Works by Edwin Markham]]
[[Category:Louise Michel]]

Peace on Earth and Good Will towards Men

2010-08-17T06:27:47Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN

By Emma Goldman.

IN response to the request of the Newspaper Enterprise Association for an article on how the American
people can best help to restore "peace on earth and
good will toward men," I sent the following:

To ask how we Americans can best help to restore
"Peace on earth and good will towards men," is to assume that such a thing ever existed save in the ideal of
Jesus and of those who were his immediate followers.
As a matter of fact it never has existed in any other
way, nor was there an attempt even on the part of Christianity to make the ideal of its teacher a living force.
Truth is, the teacher himself was not quite clear as to
the meaning of "Peace on earth and good will toward
men," if we are to believe the data contained in the
biblical records.

Jesus said, "Give unto the Lord what is the Lord's
and to Caesar what is Caesar's." We are also informed
that he said "The poor shall never cease out of the land,"
which is but a logical sequence of man's duty to the Lord
and to Caesar.

Few sincere Christians, and they are very few, indeed,
realize that if man must forever render unto the Lord
and unto Caesar out of the products of his labor, "peace
on earth and good will towards men" can never exist
It does not matter whether the Lord be the relentless
Jewish God or his more kindly son who came to redeem
mankind: so long as the Lord may exact a toll from man,
the two will be at war with each other. Hence neither
peace nor good will can prevail.

Equally so it matters not whether Caesar be the ruler
of Rome, the Czar upon the bloody throne of Russia, the
German Kaiser obsessed by militarism, or the money in-
terests of America—so long as they exact taxes from
the sweat and blood of the people, neither peace nor good
will is possible.

What then must we Americans do to be saved and help
save others? We must transvalue our values; we must
be brave enough to throw overboard the ballast of false
gods; we must realize that neither the Lord nor Caesar
have any claim on what they have not themselves produced. We must get off our complacent, self-satisfied
position of the "better than thou," and fact the truth that
but for circumstances the best placed man and the most
secured woman might be in the criminal dock or red light
district.

Yes, circumstances represent the most cruel chariot
wheel which gives special privileges to those who never
work and yet monopolize the earth, while they deny common humanity to those who always work and are excluded from the table of life. Circumstances which decree that the masses shall live in squalor and drabness,
while the few gorge themselves upon the blood of children, the youth of women, the integrity of men.
With such a Moloch ever present, insatiable in its
voracity, there can be neither peace nor good will. We
Americans who more than any other nation are in the
thralls of that monster, are perhaps among the least of
them who can bring about peace on earth and good will
toward men.

And yet—and yet we of all nations ought to be in the
lead. We who with Jefferson proclaimed that the best
government is the one which governs least; who emphasized with Thoreau that the best government is the one
which does not govern at all. We who pointed out with
Emerson that character, as represented through men and
women, and not through a listless, immobile majority
driven hither and thither by unscrupulous politicians, is
the basis of democracy. We, in short, who are not handicapped by the decadent, crumbling military dynasties,
we ought to be in the lead.

The first step, then, to bring about peace on earth and
good will toward men is to concede the superiority of the
individual, as the unit of social life, to the organized force
known as the State. Secondly, to emancipate the masses
from economic and social slavery. In other words to
teach man the value of himself and his right to take the
things which he has produced. That alone will establish
peace on earth and good will toward men.

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Mother Earth/09

2010-08-17T06:25:33Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with '{{Nav|08|10}} == 9, 1 == To Our Friends I The Feast of Belshazzar Voltairine de Cleyre 4 Observations and Comments 5 The Menace of the Unemployed Alexander Berkman ii The Paris C…'

{{Nav|08|10}}
== 9, 1 ==
To Our Friends
I
The Feast of Belshazzar
Voltairine de Cleyre
4
Observations and Comments
5
The Menace of the Unemployed
Alexander Berkman
ii
The Paris Commune
Voltairine de Cleyre
14
The Past of Social Democracy
Jack Radclifte
10
August Strindberg
Max Baginski
24

== 9, 2 ==

== 9, 3 ==

== 9, 4 ==
* OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS
* DENVER By Julia May Courtney
* THE FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH IN TARRYTOWN By Leonard D. Abbott.
* THE RANGEL-CLINE CASE
* MUTUAL AID: AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN EVOLUTION By Peter Kropotkin
* A REBEL VOICE FROM SOUTH AFRICA
* COLORADO By Gertrude Nafe
* A MARTYR TO MILITARISM By Lily Gair Wilkinson
* EN ROUTE By Emma Goldman

== 9, 5 ==
To Our Martyred Dead—Poem
Adolf Wolff
The Lexington Explosion
Police Activities in Connection with the
Explosion
Repudiation of Our Dead Comrades by the
I. W. W.
The Claiming of the Bodies
Suppression of the Funeral by the Police
The Cremation
Further Discrimination by the Authorities
The Union Square Demonstration
Alexander Berkman's Opening Address
Leonard D. Abbott's Speech
Rebecca Edelsohn's Speech
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's Speech
Dave Sullivan's Speech
Charles Robert Plunkett's Speech
Emma Goldman's Telegram
The Viewing of the Urn
Charles Berg ) Louise Berger
Carl Hanson J
The Fight i
Dynamite!
The Fight in Tarrytown and Its Tragic Outcome
Leonard D. Abbott
Page
Charles Robert Plunkett 164 £
A Gauge of Change
Alexander Berkman 167
The Pantheon of the Social Revolution 169
Upton Sinclair's Statement 170
* Max Nettlau, [[Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both]]. - 170
To Our Friends
Emma Goldman 176
== 9, 6 ==
War—Poem <.
Adoif Wolff 177 :;
I'. War on War 178 ',',
* • 4 1
*. Observations and Comments 179 *•
|| Postponement of the International Anarchist Congress 184 ||
**
Down with Militarism! Up with the Rights of Man
Charles A. Breckenridge 185 X
::
Insurrection Rather Than War
Gustave Herve 188
The General Strike and the Insurrection in Italy
Enrico Malatesta 190
Becky Edelsohn: The First Political Hunger Striker
in America
Alexander Berkman 192
The Farcical Trial in Tarrytown
Leonard D. Abbott 196
Fathers and Sons 200
The Rangel-Cline Case 201
Los Angeles Impressions
Perry E. McCullough 203
On the Trail
Emma Goldman 204
In Memory of Claude Riddle
Charles T. Sprading 207

== 9, 7 ==

== 9, 8 ==
To Our Comrades and Friends ',',
Emma Goldman 241 ;;
4 t
Observations and Comments 243 *.
A. D. 1914 (Poem)
Frank Stephens 254
My Resurrection Jubilee
Alexander Berkman 255
I If We Must Fight, Let Us Fight for the Social Revolution 255
Nietzsche On War 260
Voltairine de Geyre's Posthumous Book
Leonard D. Abbott 265 ±
Chicago, Attention!
Emma Goldman 270

== 9, 9 ==

== 9, 10 ==
Special Notice to our New York Friends
Observations and Comments
L. D. A.
The War and the Workers
E. L. Pratt
Wars and Capitalism
Peter Kropotkin
My Lectures in New York
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman in Chicago
Margaret C. Anderson
Alfred Marsh
Harry Kelly
San Quentin
Rebekah E. Raney
A Ferrer Colony
Anti-Militarist League Fund
Alexander Berkman Dates
== 9, 11 ==
OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS
* [[Peace on Earth and Good Will towards Men]] By Emma Goldman.

== 9, 12 ==
Hymn of the War Kings
Gerald B. Breitigam
369 ::
To Our Friends
Emma Goldman
370 ::
Observations and Comments
371 ::
The Futility of Investigations
• 1
• •
Stella Comyn
376 '•[
The Sanger Case
• *
Leonard B. Abbott
379 ::
To the Anti-Militarists, Anarchists, and Free
Thinkers
F. Domela Nieuvenhuis 380 |
Letters on the War
J. W. Fleming—S. Linder 384 f
Death of Anselmo Lorenzo 385
An Innocent Abroad—II.
Alexander Berkman 388
Renewed Activity
Emma Goldman 390
Proclamation to the City of Chicago
The Unemployed League 391
Feminism in America
By R. A. P. 392
Wars and Capitalism
By Peter Kropotkin 394

Donald Vose: The Accursed

2010-08-17T03:38:46Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'DONALD VOSE: THE ACCURSED By Emma Goldman EIGHTEEN years ago I made my second lecture tour to the Pacific Coast. While in Oregon I was invited to Scio, Oregon, a small hamlet. …'

DONALD VOSE: THE ACCURSED

By Emma Goldman

EIGHTEEN years ago I made my second lecture
tour to the Pacific Coast. While in Oregon I was
invited to Scio, Oregon, a small hamlet. The com-
rade who arranged the meeting and with whom I stayed
while in Scio was Gertie Vose.

I had heard of Gertie through the pages of Fire Brand
and Free Society, from a number of friends, and a few
letters exchanged with her. As a result I was eager to
meet the woman who, in those days, was one of the
few unusual American characters in the radical move-
ment. I found Gertie to be even more than I had ex-
pected,—a fighter, a defiant, strong" personality, a tender
hostess and a devoted mother. She had with her at the
time her six year old son, Donald Vose. Another child,
a girl, lived with her father, a Mr. Meserve, from whom
Gertie had separated.

The stress and travail of life interrupted a correspon-
dence which was a great inspiration for a number of
years after my visit. But I knew Gertie Vose had taken
up land in the Home Colony at Lake Bajr, Washington,
and that her son was with her: that she continued to be
the fiehter when the occasion demanded. Between 1898
and 1907 I did not pet to the Coast and when I finally
revisited the Home Colony about six years ago, Gertie
Vose was away and so was her son.

In May, 1914. while in Los Aneeles. I was informed
from Mother Earth office that Donald Vose, the son of Gertie Vose, had come to our quarters with a letter from
his mother begging that we befriend her boy, since he
had no one else in New York. Mother Earth was then
installed in a large house and as we rented out rooms,
it was perfectly natural that our Comrade Berkman, in
my absence, should have taken Donald Vbse into the
house. But even if we had lived in small quarters, we
should have been willing to share them with a child of
Gertie Vose; she who had been my friend for years; she
who had been one of the greatest supporters to Berkman in his terrible prison days. How could we refuse
her child?

In August of 1914, while in Seattle, I went over to
the Home Colony and there was again entertained by
Gertie Vose. We talked of the old days and old friends.
There I learned how cruelly hard life had been with
Gertie; how it had whipped her body, but her spirit was
the same, though more mellowed by disappointment, by
pain and sorrow. Her one great joy, however, was that
her boy had finally gotten into the right atmosphere, that
now he would become a man active in the movement.
She told me of the glowing reports he was writing about
Berk (as he called Berkman), the unemployed and anti-military activities in New York at the time and how interested Donald had become. Poor Gertie Vose! Like the
last ray of the dying sun, clinging to the horizon, so
Gertie,—old, worn, bruised, beaten,—clung to her son in
the hope that he would fulfil her aspiration for humanity.
How tragically blind motherhood is; how alien to the
soul of its own creation!

I returned to New York, September 15th, 1914. I
found confusion, entanglements and burdens in Mother
Earth. To save the situation the house had to be given
up and our whole life reorganized. The stress and strain
of the situation absorbed me completely. I forgot even
that the son of Gertie Vose was living in the house. I
reproached myself for such neglect of him. One even-
ing I went to his room and there for the first time in
eighteen years saw the boy I had met as a child of six.
My first impression of Donald Vose was not agreeable;
perhaps because of his high pitched, thin voice and shift-
ing eyes. But he was Gertie's son, out of work, wretch-
edly clad, unhealthy in appearance. I stifled my aversion and told him that as I was about to give up the house, he
might go to the little farm on the Hudson belonging to a
friend of ours which I had been permitted to use for a
number of years. (This farm, like a ghost, is traveling
the country as E. G.'s estate.)

He said that as a matter of fact he had planned to
leave for the Home Colony earlier in the summer, but at
that time he was waiting for Berkman, who had con-
templated a Western trip and was prevented from doing
so through the Anti-Military and unemployed agitation.
Later Donald Vose lost his job as a chauffeur and was
now expecting money to take him West. The main thing,
however, which delayed his departure from New York,
Donald said, was the message given to him by some one
in Washington for M. A. Schmidt, the delivery of which
was imperative.

Fate works inexorably. The last Saturday in September Matthew A. Schmidt called at the house to meet a
few friends, Lincoln Steffens and Hutchins Hapgood,
Alexander Berkman and Eleanor Fitzgerald made up the
party of that afternoon. Matthew Schmidt was about to
leave when Doald Vose returned to his room. With him
was Terry Carlin. I told Schmidt that Donald Vose had
a letter for him from a friend in Washington, whereupon
Schmidt asked to see Donald and also Carlin, whom he
had known in California. The meeting of the three men
took place in the presence of the other guests and lasted
not more than ten minutes. The conversation was general. Schmidt departed and nothing more was thought
of his meeting with Vose.

A few days later we moved to 20 East 125th Street.
Donald and Carlin went to the farm. I saw Donald
Vose after that only when he would call for mail, as my
time and energy were taken up with a new course of lectures and the daily grind of the readjustment to our new
and hard mode of life. The third week in October I left
on a lecture tour which brought me back to New York
the 24th of December, 1914. From that time on per-
sistent rumors came to me about Donald Vose spending
a great deal of money on drink though he was not work-
ing. Yet he continued to look shabby and would often
sit for a long time in the office "to warm up," as he
stated. He did not even have an overcoat. When I asked him why he did not get warm clothing, he replied:
"I am waiting for my check from Washington." Yet
during all that time Donald Vose was dissipating with
nearly everyone who was willing to carouse with him.
The situation become altogether too suspicious. I
wrote to friends in Washington and after a long delay
received a reply that no one was sending Donald money.
A week later he left for the Coast. Shortly after that
Matthew A. Schmidt and David Caplan were arrested. At
once we realized that Donald Vose was the Judas Iscariot.
Still so appalling is the thought of suspecting anyone of
such a dastardly act, that even after the arrest, I hated
myself for harboring such suspicions against the child
of Gertie Vose.

Soon positive proofs came from the Coast. It was
Donald Vose who coldbloodedly, deliberately betrayed
the two men. They who had been his friends; David
Caplan who had shared his hearth, his bread, his all
with him for two weeks; had betrayed Matthew A.
Schmidt, who had befriended him in New York. The
thing was altogether too awful. It was the most terrible blow in my public life of twenty-five years. Terrible because of the mother of that cur; terrible because
he had grown up in a radical atmosphere, above all terrible
that he had been under my roof and that he had met
one of his innocent victims in my house.

It is of little consolation that it was utterly impossible
to suspect a child of Gertie Vose, recommended by her
and kindly spoken of by many people on the coast. For
to do such a thing means to suspect one's own shadow.
Nor could I console myself with the fact that if Wm. J.
Burns had not found Donald, some other despicable tool
would have lured our comrades into the net. All that
cannot lessen the horror that was mine all year. At
least I wanted it known through Mother Earth that
Donald Vose met M. A. Schmidt in my house and that
it was Donald Vose who had sold him as well as David
Caplan.

I shall not now describe my torture, agony, and disgust
since the arrest of our comrades. Gladly would I erive
ten years of my life if Donald Vose had never stepped
over my threshhold. But what did his victims do;
Matthew A. Schmidt and David Caplan? They who have been described as murderers; Schmidt who was con-
victed before he was tried! They begged me, yes, in-
sisted, even as late as last month, that Mother Earth
should not expose Donald Vose. They had broken bread
with him and they would not brand him for life as the
sneak-thief who had stolen into their hearts and then
turned them over, sold them for a few peaces of silver.
Thus my hands were tied and Mother Earth was
gagged. But now that the spy himself has spoken, that
he has brazenly taken the stand and face to face with
Matthew A. Schmidt has testified in open court that
since May, 1914, he was in the employ of W. J. Burns,
that he was sent by the latter to New York to trail
Schmidt, that he was coached to pose as a radical and
that under false pretense he obtained his mother's letter
of introduction to Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. I must acquaint the readers of Mother Earth
with the fact that Donald Vose is the liar, traitor, spy
who has deceived everyone, myself included, and has
used everybody's credulity as a shield to cover his dastardly crime.

Donald Vose you are a liar, traitor, spy. You have
lied away the liberty and life of our comrades. Yet
not they but you will suffer the penalty. You will roam
the earth accursed, shunned and hated; a burden unto
yourself, with the shadow of M. A. Schmidt and David
Caplan ever at your heels unto the last.
And you Gertie Vose, unfortunate mother of your ill-
begotten son—? My heart goes out to you Gertie Vose.
I know you are not to blame. What will you do? Will
you excuse the inexcusable? Will you gloss over the
heinous ? Or will you be like the heroic figure in Gorky's
Mother? Will you save the people from your traitor
son? Be brave Gertie Vose, be brave!

[Jan. 1916.]
[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth]]

Mother Earth/10

2010-08-17T03:30:35Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

{{Nav|09|11}}
== 10, 1 ==
The Road to Hell—Poem, by Clement Richardson Wood 401
Mother Earth Tenth Anniversary, by Emma Goldman.. 402
Anniversary Musings, by Alexander Berkman 404
Mother Earth, igos—1915, by Harry Kelly 408
To the Friend of All of Us, Mother Earth, by Rebekah
E. Raney 411
What Mother Earth Means to Me, by David Rudin 412
Mother Earth and Labor's Revolt, by Tom Mann 413
An Appreciation by an Artist, by Robert Henri 415
Congratulations—Plus, by Adeline Champney 416
The Two Extremes, by Theodore Schroeder 421
My Debt to Anarchism, by Sara Bard Field 422
Anarchism—Limited, by William Marion Reedy 424
Impressions of Mother Earth, by Bertha Fiske 428
A Tribute, by Gilbert E. Roe 430
The Great Debacle, by E. Arrnand 431
An Inspiration, by Margaret C. Anderson 435
Governmentalism, by Bolton Hall 437
The Door, by R. A. P 439
The Rebel Press, by Charles Erskine Scott Wood 440
Why Emma Goldman Is a Dangerous Woman, by Cassius
V. Cook 441
Souvenir, by Fred P. Young 444
Schmidt and Caplan, by Dr. Ben L. Reitman 44s
Bundle Day and the Poor of New York, by Stella Comyn 446
Berkman in Denver, by Gertrude Nafe 449
An Appeal for Financial Help, Francisco Ferrer Assn... 450
The Present Status of the Sanger Case, by Leonard D.
Abbott 451
Polish Jews' Appeal to the Civilized World 452
Notice to Subscribers 455
Wars and Capitalism,—Conclusion, by Peter Kropotkin. 456

== 10, 2 ==
War's Winecup 65
May S. Forrester
Observations and Comments 66
The Barnum and Bailey Staging of the "An-
archist Plot" 73
Emma Goldman
A Letter From Margaret Sanger 75
The Recantation of Frederick Sumner Boyd 78
Looking Forward 80
A. Schapiro
Two Versions of the Mexican Situation 80 i
The Organizing Junta of the Mexican Liberal
Party " 85
George Brown 87
James B. Elliott
A Tribute to Jack Whyte 90
R. E. R.
A. C. Zibelin 91
Stella Comyn
* Sadakichi Hartmann, Voltairine De Cleyre 92

== 10, 3 ==
A Prayer 97
Dr. Ben. L. Reitman
Observations and Comments 98
Real Men and Women 103
Morrison I. Swift
Legendizing the Martyrs of Revolution 104
Emma Goldman
The Unemployed 106
James Peter Warbasse
Straight Thoughts by the Road Side 108
Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman in Los Angeles 112
"Billie" McCullough
Walter Loan 113
J. M.
Schenectady Socialism 115
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
International Anarchist Manifesto on the War 119
Our Agitation in and About New York 122
E. G.
The Case of Joe Hill 125
E, W. Vanderlieth
Death of F. Tarrida Del Marmol 125
E. Malatesta

== 10, 4 ==

== 10, 5 ==
£ Caplan and Schmidt
Eric the Red 225
J Observations and Comments 226
What We Have Been, We Still Remain
E. Armand 229
War and the Workers £
Tom Mann 233 *
• A New Adventure in Arcadia
Louise Bryant 235
On The Road
Alexander Berkman 239
Truth in the Desert
Rap 242
| The Honorable Flag
Marius L'Marvanre 244
| The Tour
Ben L. Reitman 245
2 First Year of the War 248
• ^ Diplomacy and Tactics
Voltaire 250 ±
;; Anselmo L. Figueroa 252
;; When the War Came to Belgium
;; G. Marin 253
i; Caplan-Schmidt Defense Fund 254

== 10, 6 ==

== 10, 7 ==

== 10, 8 ==
Lay of the Hobo 257 ;;
Mac
Observations and Comments 25E
To Our Friends 265
The War at Home 265
Alexander Berkman
Schmidt and Caplan on Trial 26!
M. B.
'Orrors, 'Orrors 2®
Mathew A. Schmidt
5 The Conviction of William Sanger 26
Leonard D. Abbott
5 War and the Worker 27
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
Emma Goldman in San Francisco 27
David Leigh
J The Pittsburgh Camp—A New Trick 28
Abraham Feiler
A Chinese Revolutionist 2£
H. E. Shaw

== 10, 9 ==
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
Carl Hamblin 289
OBSERVATIONS AND
COMMENTS 290
ALEXANDER BERKMAN
Reflections 299
W. S. VAN VALKENBURG
Schenectady Awakened 302
A LETTER FROM THE
TRENCHES 304
STELLA COMYN—The
Spoon River Anthology 307
REMY DE GOURMONT
The Bull of Saint-Malo 310
GEORGE EDWARDS
A Portrait of Portland 311
FRENCH MILITARISM 314
EMMA GOLDMAN
To Our Readers 317
SCHMIDT-CAPLAN
DEFENCE 318

== 10, 10 ==
To Our Readers 321
Observations and Comments 322
The Murder of Joseph Hillstrom
W. S. Van Valkenburgh 326
An Intimate Word to the Social Rebels of America
Alexander Berkman 328
Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter
Emma Goldman 331
Why?
Gertrude Boyle 339
English Workers' Victory by Direct Action
Tom Mann 339
Emma Goldman in Philadelphia, Pittsburg
and Washington 341
Prosecution Tactics in Schmidt Trial 346
In Defense of Caplan-Schmidt 348
Don't Submit! 350

== 10, 11 ==
* Emma Goldman, [[Donald Vose: The Accursed]]
* OBSERVATIONS AND COMMENTS
* NOT GUILTY! By Margaret H. Sanger
* THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE LECTURES By Ben L. Reitman, M.D.
* FREE THOUGHT AND SOCIALISM By Walter Merchant
* TWO WEEKS ENLIGHTENMENT FOR CHICAGO By Ben Mandell
* TO ANARCHISTS, TO SYNDICALISTS, TO MEN
* A BRIEF SOJOURN By Sol. Dav1s, (England)
* THE HARBOR By Ernest Poole

== 10, 12 ==
Lex Talionis
Makuba
385
Observations and Comments
386
The Fallacy of Democracy
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
394
Address of Mathew A. Schmidt
397
The Blast
399
Gag Rule At The Hebrew Institute of Chicago
Emma Goldman
400
Stop It!
E. F. Magon
402
To Our Subscribers
403
To My Friends
Margaret H. Sanger
405
Joe O'Brien
Hutchins Hapgood
405
Gerhart Hauptmann—The Weavers
M. B.
407
[[The Philosophy of Atheism]]
Emma Goldman

Mother Earth/11

2010-08-16T11:17:05Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

{{Nav|10|12}}
== 11, 1 ==
Freedom's Patriot
417
Ernest Howard Crosby
Observations and Comments
418
Danger First
425
Robert Minor
My Arrest and Preliminary Hearing
Emma Goldman
426
Two Heroines of The Revolution
Max Baginski
431
David Caplan
447
Emma Goldman
Come To Jesus!
448
Theodore Wigand
David Ingar
452
Two Attitudes
453
Pierre Chardon
In Memoriam of Philip Hoffeler
457

== 11, 2 ==
The Mothers of the Race 449
Moses Harman
An Urgent Appeal to My Friends 450
E. G.
The Historical Side of the Birth Control
Movement 451
Leonard D. Abbott
Carnegie Hall Speech of Dr. Wm. J. Robinson 457
Carnegie Hall Speech of Dr. A. L. Goldwater 460
Carnegie Hall Speech of Theodore Schroeder 463
Date of Miss Goldman's Trial 467
The Social Aspects of Birth Control 468
Emma Goldman
Birth Control
A Mother of Seven Children 475
The Crowbar vs. Words 479
Reb. Raney
A Human Document 480
G.
The Carnegie Hall Meeting 483
Harold Titus
One More Plea For David Caplan 487
Emma Goldman
America and Mexico 488
W. C. Owen
The Arrest of the Magon Brothers 491
E. Pinchon
A Letter from Margaret Sanger 492
Books on Socialism M. B. 494

== 11, 3 ==
The Voices of the Unborn
495
C. E. S. Wood
Emma Goldman Before the Bar
496
Reflections on Emma Goldman's Trial
Leonard D. Abbott
504
"Pinched"
507
Ben. L. Reitman, M. D.
Observations and Comments
509
Emma Goldman in Washington
Anna W.
515
The Free Speech and Birth Control Dinner
Robert Morris
518
Protest of Forty San Francisco Women
521
Emma Goldman in Jail
523
The Manager
Welcome to Emma Goldman at Carnegie Hall
525

== 11, 4 ==
Observations and Comments 497
To Delinquent Subscribers 503
A Paean to Freedom 504
Padraic H. Pearse
On the Death of James Connolly and Francis
Sheehy-Skeffington 505
Padraic Colum
Ben L. Reitman Before the Bar, May 8th, 1916 508
To My Friends, Old and New 516
Emma Goldman
An Appeal in Behalf of the Magons 521
The Second Carnegie Hall Meeting 522
Birth Control Demonstration on Union Square 525

== 11, 5 ==
"Vengeance"
S29
Ben L. Reitman
Observations and Comments
530
Brutal Reaction in Footsteps of War
536
Mr. Bolton Hall's Case
538
The Great American Scapegoat
C. E. S. Wood
539
The Echo from Erin
542
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
Situation in England
544
Tom Mann
Through the Bars
546
Ben L. Reitman
Meetings in Cleveland and Denver
549
R. G.—Ellen A. Kennan
A Poet's Tragic Fate
551
Letter from Enrique Magon
556
The Mighty Police Constable in India
Ram Chandra
558

== 11, 6 ==
I Sit and Look Out 561
Walt Whitman
Observations and Comments 562
Good Prospects for Anti-Militarism 568
Address of Enrique Magon in Federal Court 570
Woman and Property 578
Mary Wollstonecraft
Speech after Release from Prison 581
Ben L. Reitman
Stray Thoughts 587
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman has been in Los Angeles 590
N. T. C.

== 11, 7 ==
The Revolution
593
B. W. Ball
Observations and Comments
594
Planning Judicial Murder
597
Alexander Berkman
Law and Its Lies
604
Leo Tolstoy
The San Francisco Bomb
608
Robert Minor
Death Penalty for Strikers
612
Enrique Flores Magon
Stray Thoughts
615
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman in Portland
622
Daisy D. Ross

== 11, 8 ==

== 11, 9 ==
Freedom in America 657
Walter Crane
Observations and Comments 658
Labor's Inferno in the Law Courts 664
Back to New York 668
Alexander Berkman
Again the Birth Control Agitation 669
Emma Goldman
The Return of the Heroes 672
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
My First Impressions 674
Enrique Flores Magon
Anarchist Morality 675
Peter Kropotkin
What Will You Do? 682
James Gilday
The Grain that was Like an Egg 685
Leo Tolstoy

== 11, 10 ==
Exceptional Offer
Observations and Comments
Government by Murderous Vigilantes
From the Field of the Social War
Minnie Rimer
Life and Death Struggle in San Francisco
Alexander Berkman
698
The Petty Discrimination of the Law
Emma Goldman
701
The Warfare (Poem)
703
I. G. Blanchard
So that All May Know
704
706
707
Harrison George
The Nemesis of Remorse
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
To Our New York Friends—Propaganda Work
Emma Goldman
Anarchist Morality (Continued)
Peter Kropotkin
710
718
Review of Books
M. B.

== 11, 11 ==

== 11, 12 ==
To Birth Control 753
Fred A. Pease
Observations and Comments 754
Teaching Liberty to Santo Domingo 759
The Cleveland Myth 761
Ben L. Reitman
Anarchism on Trial in San Francisco 766
The Fallacies of War 770
Don
To the Gentlemen of the Press 772
Charles Ashleigh
The Movement in Great Britain 775
Fred Watson
Anarchist Morality 777
Peter Kropotkin

Mother Earth/12

2010-08-16T07:10:51Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

{{Nav|11|12}}
== 12, 1 ==
* Walt Whitman, From Leaves of Grass - 1
* Observations and Comments - 2
* [[Emma Goldman]], [[The Promoters of the War Mania]] - 5
* Thomas Mooney, Lynch Jury in San Francisco Convicts - 11
* Ben L. Reitman, M.D., It is More Blessed to Give - 14
* Hunger Demonstrations the Outcome of National Prosperity - 17
* Obituary—James Guillaume—Octave Mirbeau - 20
* Peter Kropotkin, [[Anarchist Morality]] (Conclusion) - 23
* An Average Man's Average Mind - 30
* Contributions for Birth Control Trials - 31
== 12, 2 ==
[missing issue]

== 12, 3 ==
* The Song - 65
* Observations and Comments - 67
* Alexander Berkman, America and the Russian Revolution - 75
* [[Emma Goldman]], [[The Woman Suffrage Chameleon]] - 78
* W. S. Van Valkenburgh, Columbia Has Awakened 81
* Ernest Bloch, Man and Music (Conclusion) - 85
* Ram Chandra, Press Censorship in India - 89
* Ben Hecht, The Mob - 92

== 12, 4 ==
The Holiday 97
Emma Goldman
Observations and Comments 98
June 5th 105
Saxe Commins
Conscription 108
Ben L. Reitman, M.D.
The No Conscription League 112
The Turning Of The Tide 114
W. S. Van Valkenburgh
The War and The Intellectuals 117
Randolph Bourne
Army Recruiting Methods 122
Maxwell Bodenheim
Correspondence 125

== 12, 5 ==
The Trial and Conviction of Emma Goldman
and Alexander Berkman 129
Alexander Berkman's Speech in Court 138
Emma Goldman's Speech in Court 150
Observations and Comments 164
"The Immutables" 167
Margaret C. Anderson
An Impression of the Hunt's Point Palace
Meeting 174
Did Judge Mayer Read This? 176
Thomas A. Weston
How One Young Man Met the Challenge of
Conscription 179
It Is to Laugh 181
Charles Erskine Scott Wood
The War and the Intellectuals 186
Randolph Bourne

== 12, 6 ==
* Gertrude Boyle, Peace with Victory! - 193
* Observations and Comments - 194
* [[Emma Goldman]], [[The Indictment of Alexander Berkman in San Francisco]] - 199
* Leonard D. Abbott, The War Hysteria and Our Protest - 202
* [[Emma Goldman]], [[Between Jails]] - 207
* Alexander Berkman, To My Friends - 213
* Martha Gruening, Speaking of Democracy - 213
* Stella Comyn, In Mwinoriam—Miguel Almereyda - 218
* Alexander Berkman, The Totem - 219
* Jack Karney, Kaiserism in the Copper Industry - 222
* The Arrest of Two Ann Arbor Students - 223
* Correspondence

----

'''Continued by [[Mother Earth Bulletin]]'''

The Woman Suffrage Chameleon

2010-08-16T06:43:54Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE CHAMELEON

By [[Emma Goldman]]

FOR well-nigh half a century the leaders of woman
suffrage have been claiming that miraculous results
would follow the enfranchisement of woman. All
the social and economic evils of past centuries would be
abolished once woman will get the vote. All the wrongs
and injustices, all the crimes and horrors of the ages
would be eliminated from life by the magic decree of a
scrap of paper.

When the attention of the leaders of the movement was called to the fact that such extravagant claims convince no one, they would say, "Wait until we have the
opportunity; wait till we are face to face with a great
test, and then you will see how superior woman is in her
attitude toward social progress."

The intelligent opponents of woman suffrage, who
were such on the ground that the representative system
has served only to rob man of his independence, and that
it will do the same to woman, knew that nowhere has
woman suffrage exerted the slightest influence upon the
social and economic life of the people. Still they were
willing to give the suffrage exponents the benefit of doubt.
They were ready to believe that the suffragists were sincere in their claim that woman will never be guilty of the
stupidities and cruelties of man. Especially did they look
to the militant suffragettes of England for a superior
kind of womanhood. Did not Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst
make the bold statement from an American platform that
woman is more humane than man, and that she never
would be guilty of his crimes: for one thing, woman does
not believe in war, and will never support wars.

But politicians remain politicians. No sooner did England join the war, for humanitarian reasons, of course,
than the suffrage ladies immediately forgot all their
boasts about woman's superiority and goodness and immolated their party on the altar of the very government
which tore their clothing, pulled their hair and fed them
forcibly for their militant activities. Mrs. Pankhurst and
her hosts became more passionate in their war mania, in
their thirst for the enemy's blood than the most hardened
militarists. They consecrated their all, even their sex attraction, as a means of luring unwilling men into the military net, into the trenches and death. For all this they
are now to be rewarded with the ballot. Even Asquith,
the erstwhile foe of the Pankhurst outfit, is now convinced
that woman ought to have the vote, since she has proven
so ferocious in her hate, and is so persistently bent on
conquest. All hail to the English women who bought
their vote with the blood of the millions of men already
sacrificed to the monster War. The price is indeed great,
but so will be the political jobs in store for the lady politicians.

The American suffrage party, bereft of an original idea
since the days of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone,
and Susan Anthony, must needs ape with parrot-like
stupidity the example set by their English sisters. In the
heroic days of militancy, Mrs. Pankhurst and her followers were roundly repudiated by the American suffrage
party. The respectable, lady-like Mrs. Catt would have
nothing to do with such ruffians as the militants. But
when the suffragettes of England, with an eye for the
flesh pots of Parliament, turned sommersault, the American suffrage party followed suit. Indeed, Mrs. Catt did
not even wait until war was actually declared by this
country. She went Mrs. Pankhurst one better. She
pledged her party to militarism, to the support of every
autocratic measure of the government Ion? before there
was any necessity for it all. Why not? Why waste an-
other fifty years lobbying for the vote if one can get it
by the mere betrayal of an ideal? What are ideals among
politicians, anyway!

The arguments of the antis that woman does not need
the vote because she has a stronger weapon—her sex—was met with the declaration that the vote will free
woman from the degrading need; of sex appeal. How
does this proud boast compare with the campaign started
by the suffrage party to lure the manhood of America
into the European sea-blood? Not only is every youth
and man to be brazenly solicited and cajoled into enlisting by the fair members of the suffrage party, but wives
and sweethearts are to be induced to play upon the emotions and feelings of the men, to bring their sacrifice to
the Moloch of Patriotism and War.

How is this to be accomplished? Surely not by argument. If during the last fifty years the women politicians failed to convince most men that woman is entitled
to political equality, they surely will not convince them
suddenly that they ought to go to certain death while the
women remain safely tucked away at home sewing bandages. No, not argument, reason or humanitarianism has
the suffrage party pledged to the government; it is the sex
attraction, the vulgar persuasive and ensnaring appeal of
the female let loose for the glory of the country. What
man can resist that? The greatest have been robbed of
their sanity and judgment when benumbed by the sex
appeal. How is the youth of America to withstand it?

The cat is out of the bag. The suffrage ladies have at
last proven that their prerogative is neither intelligence
nor sincerity, and that their boast of equality is all rot;
that in the struggle for the vote, even, the sex appeal was
their only resort, and cheap political reward their only
aim. They are now using both to feed the cruel monster
war, although they must know that awful as the price is
which man pays, it is as naught compared with the cruel-
ties, brutalities, and outrage woman is subjected to by
war.

The crime which the leaders of the American woman
suffrage party have committed against their constituency
is in direct relation of the procurer to his victim. Most
of them are too old to effect any result upon enlistment
through their own sex appeal, or to render any personal
service to their country. But in pledging the support of
the party they are victimizing the younger members.
This may sound harsh, but it is true nevertheless. Else
how are we to explain the pledge, to make a house to
house canvass, to work upon the patriotic hysteria of
women, who in turn are to use their sex appeal upon the
men to enlist. In other words, the very attribute woman
was forced to use for her economic and social status in
society, and which the suffrage ladies have always repudiated, is now to be exploited in the service of the
Lord of War.

In justice to the Woman's Political Congressional
Union and a few individual members of the suffrage party
be it said that they have refused to be. cajoled by the
suffrage leaders. Unfortunately, the Woman's Political
Congressional Union is really between and betwixt in its position. It is neither for war nor for peace. That was
all well and good so long as the monster walked over
Europe only. Now that it is spreading itself at home, the
Congressional Union will find that silence is a sign of
consent. Their refusal to come out determinedly against
war practically makes them a party to it.

In all this muddle among the suffrage factions, it is refreshing indeed to find one woman decided and firm.
Jannette Rankin's refusal to support the war will do more
to bring woman nearer to emancipation than all political
measures put together. For the present she is no doubt
considered anathema, a traitor to her country. But that
ought not to dismay Miss Rankin. All worth-while men
and women have been decried as such. Yet they and not
the loud mouthed, weak-kneed patriots are of value to
posterity.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Woman Suffrage Chameleon}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

The Promoters of the War Mania

2010-08-16T06:37:07Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

THE PROMOTERS OF THE WAR MANIA

By Emma Goldman

AT THIS most critical moment it becomes imperative
for every liberty-loving person to voice a fiery pro-
test against the participation of this country in the
European mass-murder. If the opponents of war, from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, would immediately join their
voices into a thunderous No!, then the horror that now
menaces America might yet be averted. Unfortunately
it is only too true that the people in our so-called Democracy are to a large extent a dumb, suffering herd rather
than thinking beings who dare to give expression to a
frank, earnest opinion.

Yet it is unthinkable that the American people should
really want war. During the last thirty months they have
had ample opportunity to watch the frightful carnage in
the warring countries. They have seen universal murder, like a devastating pestilence, eat into the very heart
of the peoples of Europe. They saw cities destroyed, en-
tire countries wiped off the map, hosts of dead, millions
of wounded and maimed. The American people could
not help witnessing the spread of insane, motiveless hatred
among the peoples of Europe. They must realize the
extent of the famine, the suffering and anguish gripping
the war stricken countries. They know, too, that while
the men were killed off like vermin, the women and children, the old and the decrepit remained behind in help-
less and tragic despair. Why then, in the name of all that
is reasonable and humane, should the American people
desire the same horrors, the same destruction and devastation upon American soil?

We are told that the "freedom of the seas" is at stake
and that "American honor" demands that we protect that
precious freedom. What a farce! How much freedom
of the seas can the masses of toilers, or the disinherited
and the unemployed, ever enjoy? Would it not be well
to look into this magic thing, "the freedom of the seas,"
before we sing patriotic songs and shout hurrah?

The only ones that have benefitted by the "freedom of
the seas" are the exploiters, the dealers in munition and
food supplies. The "freedom of the seas" has served
these unscrupulous American robbers and monopolists as a pretext to pilfer the unfortunate people of both Europe
and America. Out of international carnage they have
made billions; out of the misery of the people and the
agony of women and children, the American financiers
and industrial magnates have coined huge fortunes.

Ask young Morgan. Will he dare admit his tremendous pecuniary gain from the export of munition and
food supplies? Of course not. But the truth will out,
sometimes. Thus a financial expert recently proved that
even old Pierpont Morgan would be astounded could he
see the dazzling profits gathered in by his son through
war speculations. And, incidentally, do not let us forget
that it is this speculation in murder and destruction which
is responsible for the criminal increase in the cost of
living in our own land. War, famine and the capitalist
class are the only gainers in the hideous drama called
nationalism, patriotism, national honor and freedom of
the seas. Instead of putting a stop to such monstrous
crimes, war in America would only increase the opportunities of the profit mongers. That and only that will be
the result if the American people will consent to thrust
the United States into the abyss of war.

President Wilson and other officials of the administration assure us that they want peace. If that claim held
even one grain of truth, the government would have long
ago carried out the suggestion of many true lovers of
peace to put a stop to the export of munition and food
stuffs. Had this shameful trade with the implements of
slaughter been stopped at the beginning of the war, the
good results for peace would have been manifold.

First, the war in Europe would have been starved out
through the stoppage of food exports. Indeed, it is no
exaggeration when I say that the war would have been
at an end long ago, had the American financiers been
prevented from investing billions in war loans and had
the American munition clique and food speculators not
been given the opportunity to supply warring Europe
with the means to keep up the slaughter.

Second, an embargo on exports would have automatically taken out American ships from the war and sub-
marine zones, and would have thus eliminated the much
discussed "reason" for war with Germany.

Third, and most important of all, the brazen, artificial
increase in the cost of living, which condemns the toiling
masses of America to semi-starvation, would be an impossibility were not the great bulk of American products
shipped to Europe to feed the fires of war.

Peace meetings and peace protests have no meaning
whatever unless the government is challenged to stop
the continuance of exports. If for no other reason, this
ought to be insisted upon, be it only to prove that Washington is capable of nice phrases, but that it has never
made a single determined step for peace. That will help
to demonstrate to the American people that the government represents only the capitalists, the International
War and Preparedness-Trust, and not the workers. Are
then, the people of America good enough only to pull
the chestnuts out of the fire for the thieving trusts?
That is all this wild clamor for war means as far as the
masses are concerned.

The attempt to light the torch of the furies of war is
the more monstrous when one bears in mind that the
people of America are cosmopolitan. If anything, America should be the soil for international understanding, for
the growth of friendship between all races. Here, all
narrow, stifling national prejudices should be eradicated.
Instead, the people are to be thrown into the madness
and confusion of war, of racial antagonism and hatred.

True, there never was much love wasted in this country on the unfortunate foreigner, but what about the
boast that the Goddess of Liberty holds high the beacon
to all oppressed nations? What about America as the
haven of welcome? Should all this now become the symbol of national persecution? What can result from it but
the pollution of all social relationship? Think of it, war
in this country is at present only a possibility, and already the Germans and the Austrians are being deprived
of employment, ostracized and spied upon, persecuted
and hounded by the jingoes. And that is only a small
beginning of what war would bring in its wake.

I do not have to emphasize that I entertain not a particle of sympathy with the Germany of the Hohenzollern
or the Austria of the Hapsburgs. But what have the
Germans and the Austrians in America—or in their own
country, for that matter—to do with the diplomacy and politics of Berlin or Vienna? It is nothing but blind,
cruel national and patriotic madness which would make
these people, who have lived, toiled and suffered in this
country, pay for the criminal plans and intrigues in Berlin and Vienna palaces.

These millions of Germans and Austrians who have
contributed more to the real culture and growth of Amer-
ica than all the Morgans and Rockefellers are now to be
treated like enemy aliens, just because Wall Street feels
itself checked in its unlimited use of the seas for plunder,
robbery and theft from suffering America and bleeding
Europe.

Militarism and reaction are now more rampant in
Europe than ever before. Conscription and censorship
have destroyed every vestige of liberty. Everywhere the
governments have used the situation to tighten the militaristic noose around the necks of the people. Every-
where discipline has been the knout to whip the masses
into slavery and blind obedience. And the pathos of it
all is that the people at large have submitted without a
murmur, though every country has shown its quota of
brave men that would not be deluded.

The same is bound to take place in America should the
dogs of war be let loose here. Already the poisonous seed
has been planted. All the reactionary riff-raff, propagandists of jingoism and preparedness, all the beneficiaries of exploitation represented in the Merchants and
Manufacturers' Association, the Chambers of Commerce,
the munition cliques, etc., etc., have come to the fore with
all sorts of plans and schemes to chain and gag labor, to
make it more helpless and dumb than ever before.

These respectable criminals no longer make a secret of
their demand for compulsory military training. Taft, the
spokesman of Wall Street, expressed it cynically enough
that now, in face of the war danger, the time has come
to demand the introduction of compulsory militarism.
Subserviently echoing the slogan, principals and superintendants of our schools and colleges are hastening to
poison the minds of their pupils with national "ideals"
and patriotic forgeries of history to prepare the young
generation for "the protection of national honor," which
really means the "glory" of bleeding to death for the
crooked transactions of a gang of legalized, cowardly thieves. Mr. Murray Butler, the lick-spittle of Wall Street, is in the lead and many others like him are crawling before the golden calf of their masters. Talk about
prostitution! Why, the unfortunate girl in the street is
purity itself compared with such mental degeneration.

Added to this process of poisoning are the huge appropriations rushed through by Congress and the state
legislatures for the national murder machinery. Sums
reaching into the hundreds of millions for the Army and
Navy fly through the air within such enticing reach that
the Steel Trust and other corporations manufacturing
ammunition and war supplies are dissolving in patriotic
sentiment and enthusiasm and have already offered their
generous services to the country.

Hand in hand with this military preparedness and war
mania goes the increased persecution of the workers and
their organizations. Labor went wild with enthusiasm
and gratitude to the President for his supposed humanity
in proclaiming the eight-hour law before election, and
now it develops that the law was merely a bait for votes
and a shackle for labor. It denies the right to strike and
introduces compulsory arbitration. Of course it is common knowledge that strikes have long since been made
ineffective by anti-picketing injunctions and the prosecution of strikers, but the Federal eight-hour law is the
worst parody on the right to organize and to strike and it
is going to prove an additional fetter on labor. In connection with this arbitrary measure goes the proposition
to give the President full power in case of war to take
control of the railroads and their employees, which would
mean nothing less than absolute subserviency and industrial militarism for the workers.

Then there is the systematic, barbarous persecution of
radical and revolutionary elements throughout the land.
The horrors in Everett, the conspiracy against labor in
San Francisco, with Billings and Mooney already sacrificed,—are they mere coincidences? Or do they not
rather signify the true character of the war which the
American ruling class has been waging against labor?

The workers must learn that they have nothing to expect from their masters. The latter, in America as well
is in Europe, hesitate not a moment to send hundred
thousands of the people to their death if their interests demand it. They are ever ready that their misguided
slaves should have the national and patriotic banner over
burning cities, over devastated country-sides, over homeless and starving humanity, just as long as they can find
enough unfortunate victims to be drilled into man-killers,
ready at the bidding of their masters to perform the
ghastly task of bloodshed and carnage.

Valuable as the work of the Women's Peace Party and
other earnest pacifists may be, it is folly to petition the
President for peace. The workers, they alone, can avert
the impending war; in fact, all wars, if they will refuse
to be a party to them. The determined anti-militarist is
the only pacifist. The ordinary pacifist merely moralizes;
the anti-militarist acts; he refuses to be ordered to kill
his brothers. His slogan is: "I will not kill, nor will I
lend myself to be killed."

It is this slogan which we must spread among the
workers and carry into the labor organizations. They
need to realize that it is monstrously criminal to voluntarily engage in the hideous business of killing. It is
terrible enough to kill in anger, in a moment of frenzy,
but it is still more so to blindly obey the command of your
military superiors to commit murder. The time must
come when slaughter and carnage through blind obedience
will not only not receive rewards, monuments, pensions
and eulogies, but will be considered the greatest horror
and shame of a barbaric, blood-thirsty, greed-obsessed
age; a dark, hideous blotch upon civilization.

Let us understand this most valuable truth: A man
has the power to act voluntarily only as long as he does
not wear the uniform. Once you have donned the garb
of obedience, the "voluntary" soldier becomes as much
a part of the slaughter machine as his brother who was
forced into military service. It is still time in our land
to decide against militarism and war, to hold out determinately against compulsory military service for the murder of your fellow men. After all, America is not yet
like Germany, Russia, France or England in the throes
of a military regime with the mark of a Cain upon her
brow. The determined stand which the workers can take
individually, in groups and organizations against war
will still meet with ready and enthusiastic response. It
would arouse the people all over the land. As a matter of fact, they want no war. The cry for it comes from
the military cliques, the munition manufacturers and their
mouthpiece, the press, this most degenerate criminal of
all criminals. They all stand by the flag. Oh, yes; it's a
profitable emblem that covers a multitude of sins.

It is still time to stem the bloody tide of war, by word
of mouth and pen and action. The promoters of war
realize that we have looked into their cards and that we
know their crooked, criminal game. We know they want
war to increase their profits. Very well, let them fight
their own wars. We, the people of America, will not do
it for them. Do you think war would then come or be
kept up? Oh, I know it is difficult to arouse the workers, to make them see the truth back of the nationalistic,
patriotic lie. Still we must do our share. At least we
shall be free from blame should the terrible avalanche
overtake us in spite of our efforts.

I for one will speak against war so long as my
voice will last, now and during war. A thousand times
rather would I die calling to the people of America to re-
fuse to be obedient, to refuse military service, to refuse
to murder their brothers, than I should ever give my
voice in justification of war, except the one war of all
the peoples against their despots and exploiters—the Social Revolution.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Promoters of the War Mania}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Intellectual Proletarians

2010-08-16T05:33:08Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'INTELLECTUAL PROLETARIANS BY EMMA GOLDMAN. THE proletarization of our time reaches far beyond the field of manual labor; indeed, in the larger sense all those who work for thei…'

INTELLECTUAL PROLETARIANS

BY EMMA GOLDMAN.

THE proletarization of our time reaches far beyond
the field of manual labor; indeed, in the larger
sense all those who work for their living, whether
with hand or brain, all those who must sell their skill,
knowledge, experience and ability, are proletarians.
From this point of view, our entire system, excepting a
very limited class, has been proletarianized.

Our whole social fabric is maintained by the efforts
of mental and physical labor. In return for that, the
intellectual proletarians, even as the workers in shop
and mine, eke out an insecure and pitiful existence, and
are more dependent upon the masters than those who
work with their hands.

No doubt there is a difference between the yearly income of a Brisbane and a Pennsylvania mine worker.
The former, with his colleagues in the newspaper office,
in the theater, college and university, may enjoy material
comfort and social position, but with it all they are proletarians, inasmuch as they are slavishly dependent upon
the Hearsts, the Pulitzers, the Theater Trusts, the publishers and, above all, upon a stupid and vulgar public
opinion. This terrible dependence upon those who can
make the price and dictate the terms of intellectual activities, is more degrading than the position of the worker
in any trade. The pathos of it is that those who are
engaged in intellectual occupations, no matter how sensitive they might have been in the beginning, grow callous, cynical and indifferent to their degradation. That
has certainly happened to Brisbane, whose parents were
idealists working with Fourier in the early co-operative
ventures. Brisbane, who himself began as a man of
ideals, but who has become so enmeshed by material
success that he has forsworn and betrayed every principle of his youth.

Naturally so. Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. Yet that is the
goal of our day. It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who
begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they
would, create anything out of themselves.

In other words, those who are placed in positions
which demand the surrender of personality, which insist
on strict conformity to definite political policies and
opinions, must deteriorate, must become mechanical, must
lose all capacity to give anything really vital. The world
is full of such unfortunate cripples. Their dream is to
"arrive," no matter at what cost. If only we would stop
to consider what it means to "arrive," we would pity the
unfortunate victim. Instead of that, we look to the
artist, the poet, the writer, the dramatist and thinker who
have "arrived," as the final authority on all matters,
whereas in reality their "arrival" is synonymous with
mediocrity, with the denial and betrayal of what might
in the beginning have meant something real and ideal.
The "arrived" artists are dead souls upon the intellectual horizon. The uncompromising and daring spirits
never "arrive." Their life represents an endless battle
with the stupidity and the dullness of their time. They
must remain what Nietzsche calls "untimely," because
everything that strives for new form, new expression or
new values, is always doomed to be untimely.

The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature
have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and
repudiated. And if, as in the case of Zola, Ibsen and
Tolstoy, they compelled their time to accept them, it was
due to their extraordinary genius and even more so to the
awakening and seeking of a small minority for new
truths, to whom these men were the inspiration and intellectual support. Yet even to this day Ibsen is unpopular, while Poe, Whitman and Strindberg have never
"arrived."

The logical conclusion is this: those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think
other people's thoughts or wear other people's political
clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that
which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is
brutal. I realize that those who have the courage to
defy the economic and social whip are among the few,
and we have to deal with the many.

Now, it is a fact that the majority of the intellectual
proletarians are in the economic treadmill and have less freedom than those who work in the shops or mines.
Unlike the latter, they cannot put on overalls, and ride
the bumpers to the next town in search of a job. In the
first place, they have spent a lifetime on a profession, at
the expense of all their other faculties. They are therefore unfitted for any other other work except the one
thing which, parrot-like, they have learned to repeat. We
all know how cruelly difficult it is to find a job in any
given trade. But to come to a new town without connections and find a position as teacher, writer, musician,
bookkeeper, actress or nurse, is almost impossible.
If, however, the intellectual proletarian has connections, he must come to them in a presentable shape; he
must keep up appearances. And that requires means, of
which most professional people have as little as the
workers, because even in their "good times" they rarely
earn enough to make ends meet.

Then there are the traditions, the habits of the intellectual proletarians, the fact that they must live in a certain district, that they must have certain comforts, that they must buy clothes of a certain quality. All that has emasculated them, has made them unfit for the stress and strain of the life of the bohemian. If he or she drink
coffee at night, they cannot sleep. If they stay up a little later than usual, they are unfitted for the next day's
work. In short, they have no vitality and cannot, like the manual worker, meet the hardships of the road.
Therefore they are tied in a thousand ways to the most
galling, humiliating conditions. But so blind are they
to their own lot that they consider themselves superior,
better, and more fortunate than their fellow-comrades in
the ranks of labor.

Then, too, there are the women who boast of their
wonderful economic achievements, and that they can now
be self-supporting. Every year our schools and colleges
turn out thousands of competitors in the intellectual market, and everywhere the supply is greater than the demand. In order to exist, they must cringe and crawl and
beg for a position. Professional women crowd the offices,
sit around for hours, grow weary and faint with the
search for employment, and yet deceive themselves with
the delusion that they are superior to the working girl,
or that they are economically independent.

The years of their youth are swallowed up in the acquisition of a profession, in the end to be dependent upon
the board of education, the city editor, the publisher or
the theatrical manager. The emancipated woman runs
away from a stifling home atmosphere, only to rush from
employment bureau to the literary broker, and back again.
She points with moral disgust to the girl of the redlight
district, and is not aware that she too must sing, dance,
write or play, and otherwise sell herself a thousand times
in return for her living. Indeed, the only difference be-
tween the working girl and the intellectual female or male
proletarian is a matter of four hours. At 5 a. m. the
former stands in line waiting to be called to the job and
often face to face with a sign, "No hands wanted." At
9 a. m. the professional woman must face the sign, "No
brains wanted."

Under such a state of affairs, what becomes of the high
mission of the intellectuals, the poets, the writers, the
composers and what not? What are they doing to cut
loose from their chains, and how dare they boast that
they are helping the masses? Yet you know that they
are engaged in uplift work. What a farce! They, so
pitiful and low in their slavery themselves, so dependent
and helpless! The truth is, the people have nothing to
learn from this class of intellectuals, while they have
everything to give to them. If only the intellectuals
would come down from their lofty pedestal and realize
how closely related they are to the people! But they will
not do that, not even the radical and liberal intellectuals.

Within the last ten years the intellectual proletarians
of advanced tendencies have entered every radical movement. They could, if they would, be of tremendous importance to the workers. But so far they have remained
without clarity of vision, without depth of conviction,
and without real daring to face the world. It is not because they do not feel deeply the mind- and soul-destroying effects of compromise, or that they do not know the
corruption, the degradation in our social, political, business, and family life. Talk to them in private gatherings,
or when you get them alone, and they will admit that
there isn't a single institution worth preserving. But
only privately. Publicly they continue in the same rut as
their conservative colleagues. They write the stuff that will sell, and do not go an inch farther than public taste
will permit. They speak their thoughts, careful not to
offend any one, and live according to the most stupid conventions of the day. Thus we find men in the legal profession, intellectually emancipated from the belief in government, yet looking to the fleshpots of a judgeship; men who know the corruption of politics, yet belonging to political parties and championing Mr. Roosevelt. Men who
realize the prostitution of mind in the newspaper profession, yet holding responsible positions therein. Women
who deeply feel the fetters of the marital institution and
the indignity of our moral precepts, who yet submit to
both; who either stifle their nature or have clandestine
relations—but God forbid they should face the world and
say, "Mind your own damned business!"

Even in their sympathies for labor—and some of them
have genuine sympathies—the intellectual proletarians do
not cease to be middle-class, respectable and aloof. This
may seem sweeping and unfair, but those who know the
various groups will understand that I am not exaggerating. Women of every profession have flocked to Lawrence, to Little Falls, of Paterson, and to the strike districts in this city. Partly out of curiosity, often out of
interest. But always they have remained rooted to their
middle-class traditions. Always they have deceived
themselves and the workers with the notion that they
must give the strike respectable prestige, to help the
cause.

In the shirtwaistmakers' strike professional women
were told to rig themselves out in their best furs and
most expensive jewelry, if they wanted to help the girls.
Is it necessary to say that while scores of girls were man-
handled and brutally hustled into the patrol wagons, the
well-dressed pickets were treated with deference and allowed to go home? Thus they had their excitement, and
only hurt the cause of labor.

The police are indeed stupid, but not so stupid as not
to know the difference in the danger to themselves and
their masters from those who are driven to strike by
necessity, and those who go into the strike for pastime
or "copy." This difference doesn't come from the degree
of feeling, nor even the cut of clothes, but from the degree of incentive and courage; and those who still com-
promise with appearances have no courage.

The police, the courts, the prison authorities and the
newspaper owners know perfectly well that the liberal
intellectuals, even as the conservatives, are slaves to appearances. That is why their muckraking, their investigations, their sympathies with the workers are never
taken seriously. Indeed, they are welcomed by the press,
because the reading public loves sensation, hence the
muckraker represents a good investment for the concern
and for himself. But as far as danger to the ruling class
is concerned, it is like the babbling of an infant.

Mr. Sinclair would have died in obscurity but for "The
Jungle," which didn't move a hair upon the heads of the
Armours, but netted the author a large sum and a reputation. He may now write the most stupid stuff, sure of
finding a market. Yet there is not a workingman anywhere so cringing before respectability as Mr. Sinclair.

Mr. Kibbe Turner would have remained a penny-a-liner but for our political mudslingers, who used him to make capital against Tammany Hall. Yet the poorest-paid laborer is more independent than Mr Turner, and certainly more honest than he.

Mr. Hillquit would have remained the struggling revolutionist I knew him twenty-four years ago, but for
the workers who helped him to his legal success. Yet
there is not a single Russian worker on the East Side so
thoroughly bound to respectability and public opinion as
Mr. Hillquit.

I could go on indefinitely proving that, though the intellectuals are really proletarians, they are so steeped in
middle-class traditions and conventions, so tied and
gagged by them, that they dare not move a step.

The cause of it is, I believe, to be sought in the fact that
the intellectuals of America have not yet discovered their
relation to the workers, to the revolutionary elements
which at all times and in every country have been the
inspiration of men and women who worked with their
brains. They seem to think that they and not the work-
ers represent the creators of culture. But that is a disastrous mistake, as proved in all countries. Only when
the intellectual forces of Europe had made common cause with the struggling masses, when they came close to the
depths of society, did they give to the world a real culture.

With us, this depth in the minds of our intellectuals is
only a place for slumming, for newspaper copy, or on a
very rare occasion for a little theoretic sympathy. Never
was the latter strong or deep enough to pull them out of
themselves, or make them break with their traditions and
surroundings. Strikes, conflicts, the use of dynamite, or
the efforts of the I. W. W. are exciting to our intellectual
proletarians, but after all very foolish when considered
in the light of the logical, cool-headed observer. Of
course they feel with the I. W. W. when he is beaten and
brutally treated, or with the MacNamaras, who cleared
the horizon from the foggy belief that in America no one
needed use violence. The intellectuals gall too much
under their own dependence not to sympathize in such a
case. But the sympathy is never strong enough to establish a bond, a solidarity between him and the disinherited.
It is the sympathy of aloofness, of experiment.

In other words, it is a theoretic sympathy which all
those have who still enjoy a certain amount of comfort
and therefore do not see why anyone should break into a
fashionable restaurant. It is the kind of sympathy
Mrs. Belmont has when she goes to night courts.
Or the sympathy of the Osbornes, Dottys and Watsons
when they had themselves locked up in prison for a
few days. The sympathy of the millionaire Socialist who
speaks of "economic determinism."

The intellectual proletarians who are radical and liberal
are still so much of the bourgeois regime that their sympathy with the workers is dilletante and does not go farther than the parlor, the socalled salon, or Greenwich
village. It may in a measure be compared to the early
period of the awakening of the Russian intellectuals described by Turgenev in "Fathers and Sons."

The intellectuals of that time, while never so superficial
as those I am talking about, indulged in revolutionary
ideas, split hairs through the early morning hours, philosophized about all sorts of questions and carried their
superior wisdom to the people with their feet deeply
rooted in the old. Of course they failed. They were indignant with Turgenev and considered him a traitor to
Russia. But he was right. Only when the Russian intellectuals completely broke with their traditions; only
when they fully realized that society rests upon a lie, and
that they must give themselves to the new completely
and unreservedly, did they become a forceful factor in
the life of the people. The Kropotkins, the Perovskayas,
the Breshkovskayas, and hosts of others repudiated wealth
and station and refused to serve King Mammon. They
went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves
to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give
themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the
heroism, the art, the literature of Russia, the unity between the people, the mujik and the intellectual. That
to some extent explains the literature of all European
countries, the fact that the Strindbergs, the Hauptmanns,
the Wedekinds, the Brieux, the Mirbeaus, the Steinlins
and Rodins have never dissociated themselves from the
people.

Will that ever come to pass in America? Will the
American intellectual proletarians ever love the ideal
more than their comforts, ever be willing to give up external success for the sake of the vital issues of life? I
think so, and that for two reasons. First, the proletarization of the intellectuals will compel them to come closer
to labor. Secondly, because of the rigid regime of puritanism, which is causing a tremendous reaction against
conventions and narrow moral ties. Struggling artists,
writers and dramatists who strive to create something
worth while, aid in breaking down dominant conventions; scores of women who wish to live their lives are
helping to undermine our morality of to-day in their
proud defiance of the rules of Mrs. Grundy. Alone they
cannot accomplish much. They need the bold indifference and courage of the revolutionary workers, who have
broken with all the old rubbish. It is therefore through
the co-operation of the intellectual proletarians, who try
to find expression, and the revolutionary proletarians who
seek to remould life, that we in America will establish a
real unity and by means of it wage a successful war
against present society.

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both

2010-08-10T16:12:34Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

ANARCHISM: COMMUNIST OR INDIVIDUALIST?—BOTH

By Max Nettlau.

ANARCHISM is no longer young, and it may be time to ask ourselves why, with all the energy devoted to its propaganda, it does not spread more rapidly. For even where local activity is strongest, the results are limited, whilst immense spheres are as yet hardly touched by any propaganda at all. In discussing this question, I will not deal with the problem of Syndicalism, which, by absorbing so much of Anarchist activity and sympathies, cannot by that very fact be considered to advance the cause of Anarchism proper, whatever its other merits may be. I will also try not to repeat what I put forward in other articles in years gone by as possible means of increasing the activity of Anarchists. As my advice was not heeded, it cannot, in any case, be considered to have hampered the progress of our ideas.

I will consider the theories of Anarchism only; and here I have been struck for a long time by the contrast between the largeness of the aims of Anarchism—the greatest possible realization of freedom and well-being for all—and the narrowness, so to speak, of the economic program of Anarchism, be it Individualist or Communist. I am inclined to think that the feeling of the inadequacy of this economic basis—exclusive Communism or exclusive Individualism, according to the school—hinders people from acquiring practical confidence in Anarchism-, the general aims of which appeal as a beautiful ideal to many. I feel myself that neither Communism nor Individualism, if it became the sole economic form, would realize freedom, which always demands a choice of ways, a plurality of possibilities. I know that Communists, when asked pointedly, will say that they should have no objection to Individualists who wished to live in their own way without creating new monopolies or authority, and ''vice versa''. But this is seldom said in a really open and friendly way; both sections are far too much convinced that freedom is only possible if ''their'' particular scheme is carried out. I quite admit that there are Communists and Individualists to whom their respective doctrines, and these alone, give complete satisfaction and leave no problem unsolved (in their opinion); these would not be interfered with, in any case, in their lifelong constancy to ''one'' economic ideal. But they must not imagine that all people are constituted after their model and likely to come round to their views or remain "unreclaimed" adversaries on whom no sympathy is to be wasted. Let them but look on real life, which is bearable at all only by being varied and differentiated, in spite of all official uniformity. We all see the survivals of earlier Communism, the manifold workings of present-day solidarity, from which new forms of future Communism may develop—all this in the teeth of the cut-throat capitalist Individualism which predominates. But this miserable bourgeois Individualism, if it created a desire for solidarity, leading to Communism, certainly also created a desire for a genuine, free, unselfish Individualism, where freedom of action would no longer be misused to crush the weaker and to form monopolies, as to-day.

Neither Communism nor Individualism will ever disappear; and if by some mass action the foundations of some rough form of Communism were laid, Individualism would grow stronger than ever in opposition to this. Whenever a uniform system prevails, Anarchists, if they have their ideas at heart, will go ahead of it and never permit themselves to become fossilised upholders of a given system, be it that of the purest Communism.

Will they, then, be always dissatisfied, always struggling, never enjoying rest? They might feel at ease in a state of society where all economic possibilities had full scope, and then their energy might be applied to peaceful emulation and no longer to continuous struggle and demolition. This desirable state of things could be prepared from now, if it were once for all frankly understood among Anarchists that both Communism and Individualism are equally important, equally permanent; and that the exclusive predominance of either of them would be the greatest misfortune that could befall mankind. From isolation we take refuge in solidarity, from too much society we seek relief in isolation: both solidarity and isolation are, each at the right moment, freedom and help to us. All human life vibrates between these two poles in endless varieties of oscillations.

Let me imagine myself for a moment living in a free society. I should certainly have different occupations, manual and mental, requiring strength or skill. It would be very monotonous if the three or four groups with whom I would work (for I hope there will be no Syndicates then!) would be organized on exactly the same lines; I rather think that different degrees or forms of Communism will prevail in them. But might I not become tired of this, and wish for a spell of relative isolation, of Individualism? So I might turn to one of the many possible forms of "equal exchange" Individualism. Perhaps people will do one thing when they are young and another thing when they grow older. Those who are but indifferent workers may continue with their groups; those who are efficient will lose patience at always working with beginners and will go ahead by themselves, unless a very altruist disposition makes it a pleasure to them to act as teachers or advisers to younger people. I also think that at the beginning I should adopt Communism with friends and Individualism with strangers, and shape my future life according to experience. Thus, a free and easy change from one variety of Communism to another, thence to any variety of Individualism, and so on, would be the most obvious and elementary thing in a really free society; and if any group of people tried to check this, to make one system predominant, they would be as bitterly fought as revolutionists fight the present system.

Why, then, was Anarchism cut up into the two hostile sections of Communists and Individualists? I believe the ordinary factor of human shortcomings, from which nobody is exempt, accounts for this. It is quite natural that Communism should appeal more to some, Individualism to others. So each section would work out their economic hypothesis with full ardour and conviction, and by-and-by, strengthened in their belief by opposition, consider it the ''only'' solution, and remain faithful to it in the face of all. Hence the Individualist theories for about a century, the Collectivist and Communist theories for about fifty years, acquired a degree of settledness, certitude, apparent permanency, which they never ought to have assumed, for stagnation—this is the word—is the death of progress. Hardly any effort was made in favor of dropping the differences of schools; thus both had full freedom to grow, to become generalized, if they could. With what result?

Neither of them could vanquish the other. Wherever Communists are, Individualists will originate from their very midst; whilst no Individualist wave can overthrow the Communist strongholds. Whilst here aversion or enmity exists between people who are so near each other, we see Communist Anarchism almost effacing itself before Syndicalism, no longer scorning compromise by accepting more or less the Syndicalist solution as an inevitable stepping-stone. On the other hand, we see Individualists almost relapse into bourgeois fallacies—all this at a time when the misdeeds of authority, the growth of State encroachments, present a better occasion and a wider field than ever for real and outspoken Anarchist propaganda.

It has come to this, that at the French Communist Anarchist Congress held in Paris last year Individualism was regularly stigmatised and placed outside the pale of Anarchism by a formal resolution. If ever an international Anarchist Congress was held on these lines, endorsing a similar attitude, I should say good-bye to all hopes placed in this kind of sectarian Anarchism.

By this I intend neither to defend nor to combat Communism or Individualism. Personally, I see much good in Communism; but the idea of seeing it generalized makes me protest. I should not like to pledge my own future beforehand, much less that of anybody else. The Question remains entirely open for me; experience will show which of the extreme and of the many intermediate possibilities will be the best on each occasion, at each time. Anarchism is too dear to me that I should care to see it tied to an economic hypothesis, however plausible it may look to-day. Unique solutions will never do, and whilst everybody is free to believe in and to propagate his own cherished ideas, he ought not to feel it right to spread them except in the form of the merest hypothesis, and every one knows that the literature of Communist and Individualist Anarchism is far from keeping within these limits; we have all sinned in this respect.

In the above I have used the terms "Communist" and "Individualist" in a general way, wishing to show the useless and disastrous character of sectional exclusiveness among Anarchists. If any Individualists have said or done absurd things (are Communists impeccable?), to show these up would not mean to refute me. All I want is to see all those who revolt against authority work on lines of general solidarity instead of being divided into little chapels because each one is convinced he possesses a correct ‘’economic’’ solution of the social problem. To fight authority in the capitalist system and in the coming system of State Socialism, or Syndicalism, or of both, or all the three combined, an immense wave of real Anarchist feeling is wanted, before ever the question of economic remedies comes in. Only recognize this, and a large sphere of solidarity will be created, which will make Communist Anarchism stand stronger and shine brighter before the world than it does now.

{{Spacer}}

P. S.—Since writing the above I have found an early French Anarchist pamphlet, from which I translate the following:

"Thus, those who feel so inclined will unite for common life, duties, and work, whilst those to whom the slightest act of submission would give umbrage will remain individually independent. The real principle [of Anarchism} is this far from demanding integral Communism. But it is evident that for the benefit of certain kinds of work many producers will unite, enjoying the advantages of co-operation. But I say once more, Communism will never be a fundamental [meaning unique and obligatory] principle, on account of the diversity of our intellectual faculties, of our needs, and of our will."

This quotation (the words in brackets are mine) is taken from p. 72 of what may be one of the scarcest Anarchist publications, on which my eye lit on a bookstall ten days after writing the above article: "Philosophie de l'Insoumission ou Pardon a Cain," par Felix P. (New York, 1854, iv. 74 pp., 12mo)—that is, "Philosophy of Non-Submission," the author's term for Anarchy. I do not know who Felix P was; apparently one of the few French Socialists, like Dejacque, Bellegarrigue, Coeurderoy, and Claude Pelletier, whom the lessons of 1848 and other experiences caused to make a bold step forward and arrive at Anarchism by various ways and independent of Proudhon. In the passage quoted he put things into a nutshell, leaving an even balance between the claims of Communism and Individualism. This is exactly what I feel in 1914, sixty years after. The personal predilections of everybody would remain unchanged and unhurt, but exclusivism would be banished, the two vital principles of life allied instead of looking askance at each other.

[Mother Earth. 9, 5 (July 1914) 170-175.]

[[Category:Works by Max Nettlau]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Victims of Morality

2010-08-10T06:31:56Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

VICTIMS OF MORALITY

By Emma Goldman.

NOT so very long ago I attended a meeting addressed by Anthony Comstock, who has for forty
years been the guardian of American morals. A
more incoherent, ignorant ramble I have never heard
from any platform.

The question that presented itself to me, listening to
the commonplace, bigotted talk of the man, was, How
could anyone so limited and unintelligent wield the power
of censor and dictator over a supposedly democratic nation? True, Comstock has the law to back him. Forty
years ago, when Puritanism was even more rampant than
to-day, completely shutting out the light of reason and
progress, Comstock succeeded, through shady machination and political wire pulling, to introduce a bill which
gave him complete control over the Post Office Department—a control which has proved disastrous to the
freedom of the press, as well as the right of privacy of
the American citizen.

Since then, Comstock has broken into the private
chambers of people, has confiscated personal correspondence, as well as works of art, and has established a system of espionage and graft which would put Russia to
shame. Yet the law does not explain the power of
Anthony Comstock. There is something else, more terrible than the law. It is the narrow puritanic spirit, as
represented in the sterile minds of the Young-Men-and-Old-Maid's Christian Union, Temperance Union, Sabbath Union, Purity League, etc. A spirit which is absolutely blind to the simplest manifestations of life;
hence stands for stagnation and decay. As in anti-bellum days, these old fossils lament the terrible immorality of our time. Science, art, literature, the drama,
are at the mercy of bigotted censorship and legal procedure, with the result that America, with all her boastful claims to progress and liberty is still steeped in the
densest provincialism.

The smallest dominion in Europe can boast of an art
free from the fetters of morality, an art that has the
courage to portray the great social problems of our time. With the sharp edge of critical analysis, it cuts into every social ulcer, every wrong, demanding fundamental
changes and the transvaluation of accepted values.

Satire, wit, humor, as well as the most intensely serious
modes of expression, are being employed to lay bare our
conventional social and moral lies. In America we
would seek in vain for such a medium, since even the
attempt at it is made impossible by the rigid regime, by
the moral dictator and his clique.

The nearest approach, however, are our muckrakers,
who have no doubt rendered great service along economic
and social lines. Whether the muckrakers have or have
not helped to change conditions, at least they have torn
the mask from the lying face of our smug and self-satisfied society.

Unfortunately, the Lie of Morality still stalks about
in fine feathers, since no one dares to come within hailing distance of that holy of holies. Yet it is safe to say
that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth,
so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of
the people, as the superstition of Morality.

The most pathetic, and in a way discouraging, aspect
of the situation is a certain element of liberals, and even
of radicals, men and women apparently free from religious and social spooks. But before the monster of
Morality they are as prostrate as the most pious of their
kind—which is an additional proof to the extent to which
the morality worm has eaten into the system of its
victims and how far-going and thorough the measures
must be which are to drive it out again.

Needless to say, society is obsessed by more than one
morality. Indeed, every institution of to-day has its own
moral standard. Nor could they ever have maintained
themselves, were it not for religion, which acts as a
shield, and for morality, which acts as the mask. This
explains the interest of the exploiting rich in religion
and morality. The rich preach, foster, and finance both,
as an investment that pays good returns. Through the
medium of religion they have paralyzed the mind of the
people, just as morality has enslaved the spirit. In
other words, religion and morality are a much better
whip to keep people in submission, than even the club
and the gun.

To illustrate: The Property Morality declares that
that institution is sacred. Woe to anyone that dares to
question the sanctity of property, or sins against it! Yet
everyone knows that Property is robbery; that it represents the accumulated efforts of millions, who themselves
are propertyless. And what is more terrible, the more
poverty stricken the victim of Property Morality is, the
greater his respect and awe for that master. Thus we
hear advanced people, even so-called class-conscious
workingmen, decry as immoral such methods as sabotage
and direct action, because they aim at Property.
Verily, if the victims themselves are so blinded by the
Property Morality, what need one expect from the masters? It therefore seems high time to bring home the
fact that until the workers will lose respect for the instrument of their material enslavement, they need hope
for no relief.

<div align=center><nowiki>* * *</nowiki></div>

However, it is with the effect of Morality upon women
that I am here mostly concerned. So disastrous, so
paralyzing has this effect been, that some even of the
most advanced among my sisters never thoroughly outgrow it.

It is Morality which condemns woman to the position
of a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder
of hapless children.

First, as to the celibate, the famished and withered
human plant. When still a young, beautiful flower, she
falls in love with a respectable young man. But Morality decrees that unless he can marry the girl, she must
never know the raptures of love, the ecstasy of passion,
which reaches its culminating expression in the sex embrace. The respectable young man is willing to marry,
but the Property Morality, the Family and Social Moralities decree that he must first make his pile, must save
up enough to establish a home and be able to provide for
a family. The young people must wait, often many long,
weary years.

Meanwhile the respectable young man, excited through
the daily association and contact with his sweetheart,
seeks an outlet for his nature in return for money. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he will be infected,
and when he is materially able to marry, he will infect his wife and possible offspring. And the young flower,
with every fiber aglow with the fire of life, with all her
being crying out for love and passion? She has no
outlet. She developes headaches, insomnia, hysteria;
grows embittered, quarrelsome, and soon becomes a
faded, withered, joyless being, a nuisance to herself and
everyone else. No wonder Stirner preferred the grisette
to the maiden grown gray with virtue.

There is nothing more pathetic, nothing more terrible,
than this gray-grown victim of a gray-grown Morality.
This applies even with greater force to the masses of
professional middle-class girls, than to those of the people. Through economic necessity the latter are thrust
into life's jungle at an early age; they grow up with
their male companions in the factory and shop, or at
play and dance. The result is a more normal, expression
of their physical instincts. Then too, the young men and
women of the people are not so hide-bound by externalities, and often follow the call of love and passion regardless of ceremony and tradition.

But the overwrought and oversexed middle class girl,
hedged in her narrow confines with family and social
traditions, guarded by a thousand eyes, afraid of her
own shadow—the yearning of her inmost being for the
man or the child, must turn to cats, dogs, canary birds,
or the Bible Class. Such is the cruel dictum of Morality,
which is daily shutting out love, light, and joy from the
lives of innumerable victims.

Now, as to the prostitute. In spite of laws, ordinances, persecution, and prisons; in spite of segregation,
registration, vice crusades, and other similar devices, the
prostitute is the real specter of our age. She sweeps
across the plains like a fire burning into every nook of
life, devastating, destroying.

After all, she is paying back, in a very small measure,
the curse and horrors society has strewn in her path.
She, weary with the tramp of ages, harassed and driven
from pillar to post, at the mercy of all, is yet the Nemesis
of modern times, the avenging angel, ruthlessly wielding
the sword of fire. For has she not the man in her
power? And, through him, the home, the child, the race.
Thus she slays, and is herself the most brutally slain. What has made her? Whence does she come? Morality, the morality which is merciless in its attitude to
women. Once she dared to be herself, to be true to her
nature, to life, there is no return: the woman is thrust
out from the pale and protection of society. The prostitute becomes the victim of Morality, even as the withered
old maid is its victim. But the prostitute is victimized
by still other forces, foremost among them the Property
Morality, which compels woman to sell herself as a sex
commodity for a dollar per, out of wedlock, or for
fifteen dollars a week, in the sacred fold of matrimony.
The latter is no doubt safer, more respected, more recognized, but of the two forms of prostitution the girl of
the street is the least hypocritical, the least debased,
since her trade lacks the pious mask of hypocrisy; and
yet she is hounded, fleeced, outraged, and shunned, by
the very powers that have made her: the financier, the
priest, the moralist, the judge, the jailor, and the detective, not to forget her sheltered, respectably virtuous
sister, who is the most relentless and brutal in her persecution of the prostitute.

Morality and its victim, the mother—what a terrible
picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more
criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood? The woman, physically and mentally unfit to be
a mother, yet condemned to breed; the woman, economically taxed to the very last spark of energy, yet
forced to breed; the woman, tied to a man she loathes,
whose very sight fills her with horror, yet made to
breed; the woman, worn and used-up from the process
of procreation, yet coerced to breed, more, ever more.
What a hideous thing, this much-lauded motherhood!
No wonder thousands of women risk mutilation, and
prefer even death to this curse of the cruel imposition of
the spook of Morality. Five thousand are yearly sacrificed upon the altar of this monster, that will not stand
for prevention but would cure abortions. Five thousand
soldiers in the battle for their physical and spiritual
freedom, and as many thousands more who are crippled
and mutilated rather than bring forth life in a society
based on decay and destruction.

Is it because the modern woman wants to shirk responsibility, or that she lacks love for her offspring, that drives her to the most drastic and dangerous means to
avoid bearing children? Only shallow, bigoted minds
can bring such an accusation. Else they would know
that the modern woman has become race conscious,
sensitive to the needs and rights of the child, as the unit
of the race, and that therefore the modern woman has
a sense of responsibility and humanity, which was quite
foreign to her grandmother.

With the economic war raging all around her, with
strife, misery, crime, disease, and insanity staring her in
the face, with numberless little children ground into gold
dust, how can the self and race-conscious woman become a mother? Morality can not answer this question.
It can only dictate, coerce, or condemn—and how many
women are strong enough to face this condemnation, to
defy the moral dicta? Few, indeed. Hence they fill the
factories, the reformatories, the homes for feeble minded,
the prisons, the insane asylums, or they die in the attempt to prevent child-birth. Oh, Motherhood, what
crimes are committed in thy name! What hosts are laid
at your feet, Morality, destroyer of life!

Fortunately, the Dawn is emerging from the chaos
and darkness. Woman is awakening, she is throwing
off the nightmare of Morality; she will no longer be
bound. In her love for the man she is not concerned in
the contents of his pocketbook, but in the wealth of his
nature, which alone is the fountain of life and of joy.
Nor does she need the sanction of the State. Her love
is sanction enough for her. Thus she can abandon herself to the man of her choice, as the flowers abandon
themselves to dew and light, in freedom, beauty, and
ecstasy.

Through her re-born consciousness as a unit, a personality, a race builder, she will become a mother only
if she desires the child, and if she can give to the child,
even before its birth, all that her nature and intellect can
yield: harmony, health, comfort, beauty, and, above all,
understanding, reverence, and love, which is the only
fertile soil for new life, a new being.

Morality has no terrors for her who has risen beyond
good and evil. And though Morality may continue to
devour its victims, it is utterly powerless in the face of
the modern spirit, that shines in all its glory upon the
brow of man and woman, liberated and unafraid.

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

The White Slave Traffic

2010-08-10T06:21:13Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC OUR reformers have suddenly made a great discovery: the white slave traffic. The papers are full of these "unheard of conditions" in our midst, and the l…'

THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC

OUR reformers have suddenly made a great discovery: the white slave traffic. The papers are full of these "unheard of conditions" in our midst, and the lawmakers are already planning a new set of laws to check the horror.

How is it that an institution, known almost to every child, should have been discovered so suddenly? How is it that this evil, known to all sociologists, should now be made such an important issue?

It is significant that whenever the public mind is to diverted from a great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency, gambling, saloons, etc. And what is the result of such crusades? Gambling is increasing, saloons are doing a lively business through back entrances, prostitution is at its height, and the system of pimps and cadets is but aggravated.

To assume that the recent investigation of the white slave traffic by George Kibbe Turner and others (and by the way, a very superficial investigation), has discovered anything new is, to say the least, very foolish. Prostitution was, and is a widespread evil, yet mankind goes on its business, perfectly indifferent to the sufferings and distress of the victims of prostitution. As indifferent, indeed, as mankind has so far remained to our industrial system, of to economic prostitution.

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested,--for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day. The "righteous" cry against the white slave traffic is such a toy. It serves to amuse the people for a little while, and it will help to create a few more fat political jobs--parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives, etc.

What really is the cause of the trade in women? Not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well. Exploitation, of course: the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on underpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With Mrs. Warren these girls feel, "Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day?"

Naturally our reformers say nothing about this cause. They know it well enough, but it doesn't pay to say anything about it. It is much more profitable to play the Pharisee, to pretend an outraged morality, than to go to the bottom of things.

However, there is one commendable exception among the young writers: Reginald Wright Kauffman, whose work The House of Bondage is the first earnest attempt to treat the social evil--not from a sentimental Philistine viewpoint. A journalist of wide experience, Mr. Kauffman proves that our industrial system leaves most women no alternative except prostitution. The women portrayed in The House of Bondage belong to the working class. Had the author portrayed the life of women in other spheres, he would have been confronted with the same state of affairs.

Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.

Just at present our good people are shocked by the disclosures that in New York City alone one out of every ten women works in a factory, that the average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and that the majority of female wage workers face many months of idleness which leaves the average wage about $280 a year. In view of these economic horrors, is it to be wondered at that prostitution and the white slave trade have become such dominant factors?

Lest the preceding figures be considered an exaggeration, it is well to examine what some authorities on prostitution have to say:

"A prolific cause of female depravity can be found in the several tables, showing the description of the employment pursued, and the wages received, by the women previous to their fall, and it will be a question for the political economist to decide how far mere business consideration should be an apology --on the part of employers for a reduction in their rates of remuneration, and whether the savings of a small percentage on wages is not more than counterbalanced by the enormous amount of taxation enforced on the public at large to defray the expenses incurred on account of a system of vice, which is the direct result, in many cases, of insufficient compensation of honest labor."

Our present-day reformers would do well to look into Dr. Sanger's book. There they will find that out of 2,000 cases under his observation, but few came from the middle classes, from well-ordered conditions, or pleasant homes. By far the largest majority were working girls and working women; some driven into prostitution through sheer want, others because of a cruel, wretched life at home, others again because of thwarted and crippled physical natures (of which I shall speak later on). Also it will do the maintainers of purity and morality good to learn that out of two thousand cases, 490 were married women, women who lived with their husbands. Evidently there was not much of a guaranty for their "safety and purity" in the sanctity of marriage.

Dr. Alfred Blaschko, in Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century, is even more emphatic in characterizing economic conditions as one of the most vital factors of prostitution. "Although prostitution has existed in all ages, it was left to the nineteenth century to develop it into a gigantic social institution. The development of industry with vast masses of people in the competitive market, the growth and congestion of large cities, the insecurity and uncertainty of employment, has given prostitution an impetus never dreamed of at any period in human history."

And again Havelock Ellis, while not so absolute in dealing with the economic cause, is nevertheless compelled to admit that it is indirectly and directly the main cause. Thus he finds that a large percentage of prostitutes is recruited from the servant class, although the latter have less care and greater security. On the other hand, Mr. Ellis does not deny that the daily routine, the drudgery, the monotony of the servant girl's lot, and especially the fact that she may never partake of the companionship and joy of a home, is no mean factor in forcing her to seek recreation and forgetfulness in the gaiety and glimmer of prostitution. In other words, the servant girl, being treated as a drudge, never having the right to herself, and worn out by the caprices of her mistress, can find an outlet, like the factory or shopgirl, only in prostitution.

The most amusing side of the question now before the public is the indignation of our "good, respectable people," especially the various Christian gentlemen, who are always to be found in the front ranks of every crusade. Is it that they are absolutely ignorant of the history of religion, and especially of the Christian religion? Or is it that they hope to blind the present generation to the part played in the past by the Church in relation to prostitution? Whatever their reason, they should be the last to cry out against the unfortunate victims of today, since it is known to every intelligent student that prostitution is of religious origin, maintained and fostered for many centuries, not as a shame, but as a virtue, hailed as such by the Gods themselves.

"It would seem that the origin of prostitution is to be found primarily in a religious custom, religion, the great conserver of social tradition, preserving in a transformed shape a primitive freedom that was passing out of the general social life. The typical example is that recorded by Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ, at the Temple of Mylitta, the Babylonian Venus, where every woman, once in her life, had to come and give herself to the first stranger, who threw a coin in her lap, to worship the goddess. Very similar customs existed in other parts of western Asia, in North Africa, in Cyprus, and other islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and also in Greece, where the temple of Aphrodite on the fort at Corinth possessed over a thousand hierodules, dedicated to the service of the goddess.

"The theory that religious prostitution developed, as a general rule, out of the belief that the generative activity of human beings possessed a mysterious and sacred influence in promoting the fertility of Nature, is maintained by all authoritative writers on the subject. Gradually, however, and when prostitution became an organized institution under priestly influence, religious prostitution developed utilitarian sides, thus helping to increase public revenue.

"The rise of Christianity to political power produced little change in policy. The leading fathers of the Church tolerated prostitution. Brothels under municipal protection are found in the thirteenth century. They constituted a sort of public service, the directors of them being considered almost as public servants."

To this must be added the following from Dr. Sanger's work:

"Pope Clement II. issued a bull that prostitutes would be tolerated if they pay a certain amount of their earnings to the Church.

"Pope Sixtus IV. was more practical; from one single brothel, which he himself had built, he received an income of 20,000 ducats."

In modern times the Church is a little more careful in that direction. At least she does not openly demand tribute from prostitutes. She finds it much more profitable to go in for real estate, like Trinity Church, for instance, to rent out death traps at an exorbitant price to those who live off and by prostitution.

Much as I should like to, my space will not admit speaking of prostitution in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and during the Middle Ages. The conditions in the latter period are particularly interesting, inasmuch as prostitution was organized into guilds, presided over by a Brothel Queen. These guilds employed strikes as a medium of improving their condition and keeping a standard price. Certainly that is more practical a method than the one used by the modern wage slave in society.

Never, however, did prostitution reach its present depraved and criminal position, because at no time in past ages was prostitution persecuted and hounded as it is to-day, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, where Phariseeism is at its height, where each one is busy hiding the skeletons in his own home by pointing to the sore of the other fellow.

But I must not lose sight of the present issue, the white slave traffic. I have already spoken of the economic cause, but I think a cause much deeper and by far of greater importance is the complete ignorance on sex matters. It is a conceded fact that woman has been reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex. Everything dealing with that subject is suppressed, and people who attempt to bring light into this terrible darkness are persecuted and thrown into prison. Yet it is nevertheless true that so long as a girl is not to know how to take care of herself, not to know the function of the most important part of her life, we need not be surprised if she becomes an easy prey to prostitution or any other form of a relationship which degrades her to the position of an object for mere sex gratification.

It is due to this ignorance that the entire life and nature of the girl is thwarted and crippled. We have long ago taken it as a self-evident fact that the boy may follow the call of the wild, that is to say that the boy may, as soon as his sex nature asserts itself, satisfy that nature, but our moralists are scandalized at the very thought that the nature of a girl should assert itself. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it to many.

Having been looked upon as a mere sex-commodity, the woman's honor, decency, morality, and usefulness have become a part of her sex life. Thus society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good and noble in a human being. This double standard of morality has played no little part in the creation and perpetuation of prostitution. It involves the keeping of the young in absolute ignorance on sex matters, which alleged "innocence", together with an overwrought and stifled sex nature, helps to bring about a state of affairs that our Puritans are so anxious to avoid or prevent. This state of affairs finds a masterly portrayal in Zola's "Fecundity."

Girls, mere children, work in crowded, overheated rooms ten to twelve hours daily at a machine, which tends to keep them in a constant-over-excited sex state. Many of these girls haven't any home or comforts of any kind; therefore the street or some place of cheap amusement is the only means of forgetting their daily routine. This naturally brings them into close proximity with the other sex. It is hard to say which of the two factors brings the girl's over-sexed condition to a climax, but it certainly is the most natural thing that a climax should follow. That is the first step toward prostitution. Nor is the girl to be held responsible for it. On the contrary, it is altogether the fault of society, the fault of our lack of understanding, of lack of appreciation of life in the making; especially is it the criminal fault of our moralists, who condemn a girl for all eternity because she has gone from "the path of virtue"; that is, because her first sex experience has taken place without the sanction of the Church or State.

The girl finds herself a complete outcast, with the doors of home and society closed in her face. Her entire training and tradition are such that the girl herself feels depraved and fallen, and therefore has no ground to stand upon, or any hold that will lift her up, instead of throwing her down. Thus society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

Much stress is laid on white slaves being imported into America. How would America ever retain her virtue if she didn't have Europe to help her out? I will not deny that this may be the case in some instances, any more than I will deny that there are emissaries of Germany and other countries luring economic slaves into America, but I absolutely deny that prostitution is recruited, to any appreciable extent, from Europe. It may be true that the majority of prostitutes of New York City are foreigners, but that is only because the majority of the population is foreign. The moment we go to any other American city, to Chicago or the middle West, we shall find that the number of foreign prostitutes is by far a minority.

Equally exaggerated is the belief that the majority of street girls in this city were engaged in this business before they came to America. Most of the girls speak excellent English, they are Americanized in habits and appearance, -- a thing absolutely impossible unless they have lived in this country many years. That is, they were driven into prostitution by American conditions, by the thoroughly American custom for excessive display of finery and clothes which, of course, necessitates money, money that can not be earned in shops or factories. The equanimity of the moralists is not disturbed by the respectable woman gratifying her clothesophobia by marrying for money; why are they so outraged if the poor girl sells herself for the same reason? The only difference lies in the amount received, and of course in the seal society either gives or withholds.

I am sure that no one will accuse me of nationalist tendencies. I am glad to say that I have developed out of them, as out of many other prejudices. If, therefore, I resent the statement that Jewish prostitutes are imported, it is not because of any Judaistic sympathies, but because of the fact inherent in the lives of these people. No one but the most superficial will claim that the Jewish girls migrate to strange lands unless they have some tie or relation that brings them there. The Jewish girl is not adventurous. Until recent years, she had never left home, not even so far as the next village or town, unless it were to visit some relative. Is it then credible that Jewish girls would leave their parents or families, travel thousands of miles to strange lands, through the influence and promises of strange forces? Go to any of the large incoming steamers and see for yourself if these girls do not come either with their parents, brothers, aunts, or other kinsfolk. There may be exceptions, of course, but to state that a large number of Jewish girls are imported for prostitution, or any other purpose, is simply not to know the Jewish psychology.

On the other hand, it speaks of very little business ability on the part of importers of the white slaves, if they assume that the girls from the peasant regions of Poland, Bohemia, or Hungary in their native peasant crude state and attire would make a profitable business investment. These poor ignorant girls, in their undeveloped state, with their shawls about their heads, look much too unattractive to even the most stupid man. It therefore follows that before they can be made fit for business, they, too, must be Americanized, which would require not merely a week or a month, but considerable time. They must at least learn the rudiments of English, but more than anything else they must learn American shrewdness, in order to protect themselves against the many uniformed cadets, who prey on them and fleece them at every step.

To ascribe the increase of prostitution to alleged importation, to the growth of the cadet system, or similar causes, is highly superficial. I have already referred to the former. As to the cadet system, abhorrent as it is, we must not ignore the fact that it is essentially a phase of modern prostitution, -- a phase accentuated by suppression and graft, resulting from sporadic crusades against the social evil.

The origin of the cadets, as an institution, can be traced to the Lexow investigation in New York City, in 1894. Thanks to that moral spasm, keepers of brothels, as well as unfortunate victims of the street, were turned over to the tender mercies of the police. The inevitable consequence of exorbitant bribes and the penitentiary followed.

While comparatively protected in the brothels, where they represented a certain value, the unfortunate girls now found themselves on the street, absolutely at the mercy of the graft-greedy police. Desperate, needing protection and longing for affection, these girls naturally proved an easy prey for cadets, themselves the result of the spirit of our commercial age. Thus the cadet system was the direct outgrowth of police persecution, graft, and attempted suppression of prostitution. It were sheer folly to confute this modern phase of the social evil with the causes of the latter.

The serious student of this problem realizes that legislative enactments, stringent laws, and similar methods can not possibly eradicate, nor even ameliorate this evil. Those best familiar with the subject agree on this vital point. Dr. Alfred Blaschko, an eminent authority, convincingly proves in his "Prostitution im 19. Jahrhundert" that governmental suppression and moral crusades accomplish nothing save driving the evil into secret channels, multiplying its dangers to the community. In this claim he is supported by such thorough students as Havelock Ellis, Dr. H. Ploss, and others.

Mere suppression and barbaric enactment can serve but to embitter and further degrade the unfortunate victims of ignorance and stupidity. The latter has reached its highest expression in the proposed law to make humane treatment of prostitutes a crime, punishing anyone sheltering a prostitute with five years imprisonment and $10,000 fine. Such an attitude merely exposes the terrible lack of understanding of the true causes of prostitution, as a social factor, as well as manifesting the Puritanic spirit of the Scarlet Letter days.

An educated public opinion, freed from the legal and moral hounding of the prostitute, can alone help to ameliorate present conditions. Willful shutting of eyes and ignoring of the evil, as an actual social factor of modern life, can but aggravate matters. We must rise above our foolish notions of "better than thou," and learn to recognize in the prostitute a product of social conditions. Such a realization will sweep away the attitude of hypocrisy and insure a greater understanding and more humane treatment. As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values--especially the moral ones--coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.

{{DEFAULTSORT:White Slave Traffic}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Was My Life Worth Living?

2010-08-09T07:09:20Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Was My Life Worth Living? {{small-caps|It is strange what time does to political causes. A generation ago it seemed to many American conservatives as if the opinions which Emma …'

Was My Life Worth Living?

{{small-caps|It is strange what time does to political causes. A generation ago it seemed to many American conservatives as if the opinions which Emma Goldman was expressing might sweep the world. Now she fights almost alone for what seems to be a lost cause; contemporary radicals are overwhelmingly opposed to her; more than that, her devotion to liberty and her detestation of government interference might be regarded as placing her anomalously in the same part of the political spectrum as the gentlemen of the Liberty League, only in a more extreme position at its edge. Yet in this article, which might be regarded as her last will and testament, she sticks to her guns. Needless to say, her opinions are not ours. We offer them as an exhibit of valiant consistency, of really rugged individualism unaltered by opposition or by advancing age.—The Editors.}}

I.

How much a personal philosophy is a matter of temperament and how much it results from experience is a moot question. Naturally we arrive at conclusions in the light of our experience, through the application of a process we call reasoning to the facts observed in the events of our lives. The child is susceptible to fantasy. At the same time he sees life more truly in some respects than his elders do as he becomes conscious of his surroundings. He has not yet become absorbed by the customs and prejudices which make up the largest part of what passes for thinking. Each child responds differently to his environment. Some become rebels, refusing to be dazzled by social superstitions. They are outraged by every injustice perpetrated upon them or upon others. They grow ever more sensitive to the suffering round them and the restriction registering every convention and taboo imposed upon them.

I evidently belong to the first category. Since my earliest recollection of my youth in Russia I have rebelled against orthodoxy in every form. I could never bear to witness harshness whether I was outraged over the official brutality practiced on the peasants in our neighborhood. I wept bitter tears when the young men were conscripted into the army and torn from homes and hearths. I resented the treatment of our servants, who did the hardest work and yet had to put up with wretched sleeping quarters and the leavings of our table. I was indignant when I discovered that love between young people of Jewish and Gentile origin was considered the crime of crimes, and the birth of an illegitimate child the most depraved immorality.

On coming to America I had the same hopes as have most European immigrants and the same disillusionment, though the latter affected me more keenly and more deeply. The immigrant without money and without connections is not permitted to cherish the comforting illusion that America is a benevolent uncle who assumes a tender and impartial guardianship of nephews and nieces. I soon learned that in a republic there are myriad ways by which the strong, the cunning, the rich can seize power and hold it. I saw the many work for small wages which kept them always on the borderline of want for the few who made huge profits. I saw the courts, the halls of legislation, the press, and the schools—in fact every avenue of education and protection—effectively used as an instrument for the safeguarding of a minority, while the masses were denied every right. I found that the politicians knew how to befog every issue, how to control public opinion and manipulate votes to their own advantage and to that of their financial and industrial allies. This was the picture of democracy I soon discovered on my arrival in the United States. Fundamentally there have been few changes since that time.

This situation, which was a matter of daily experience, was brought home to me with a force that tore away shams and made reality stand out vividly and clearly by an event which occurred shortly after my coming to America. It was the so-called Haymarket riot, which resulted in the trial and conviction of eight men, among them five Anarchists. Their crime was an all-embracing love for the fellow-men and their determination to emancipate the oppressed and disinherited masses. In no way had the State of Illinois succeeded in proving their connection with the bomb that had been thrown at an open-air meeting in Haymarket Square in Chicago. It was their Anarchism which resulted in their conviction and execution on the 11th of November, 1887. This judicial crime left an indelible mark on my mind and heart and sent me forth to acquaint myself with the ideal for which these men had died so heroically. I dedicated myself to their cause.

It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of our response to the event and our capacity to enter into the lives of others that help us to make their lives and experiences our own. In my own case my convictions have derived and developed from events in the lives of others as well as from my own experience. What I have seen meted out to others by authority and repression, economic and political, transcends anything I myself may have endured.

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order that man may believe and obey without protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment.

It has often been suggested to me that the Constitution of the United States is a sufficient safeguard for the freedom of its citizens. It is obvious that even the freedom it pretends to guarantee is very limited. I have not been impressed with the adequacy of the safeguard. The nations of the world, with centuries of international law behind them, have never hesitated to engage in mass destruction when solemnly pledged to keep the peace; and the legal documents in America have not prevented the United States from doing the same. Those in authority have and always will abuse their power. And the instances when they do not do so are as rare as roses growing on icebergs. Far from the Constitution playing any liberating part in the lives of the American people, it has robbed them of the capacity to rely on their own resources or do their own thinking. Americans are so easily hoodwinked by the sanctity of law and authority. In fact, the pattern of life has become standardized, routinized, and mechanized like canned food and Sunday sermons. The hundred-percenter easily swallows syndicated information and factory-made ideas and beliefs. He thrives on the wisdom given him over the radio and cheap magazines by corporations whose philanthropic aim is selling America out. He accepts the standards of conduct and art in the same breath with the advertising of chewing gum, toothpaste, and shoe polish. Even songs are turned out like buttons or automobile tires—all cast from the same mold.

II

Yet I do not despair of American life. On the contrary, I feel that the freshness of the American approach and the untapped stores of intellectual and emotional energy resident in the country offer much promise for the future. The War has left in its wake a confused generation. The madness and brutality they had seen, the needless cruelty and waste which had almost wrecked the world made them doubt the values their elders had given them. Some, knowing nothing of the world’s past, attempted to create new forms of life and art from the air. Others experimented with decadence and despair. Many of them, even in revolt, were pathetic. They were thrust back into submission and futility because they were lacking in an ideal and were further hampered by a sense of sin and the burden of dead ideas in which they could no longer believe.

Of late there has been a new spirit manifested in the youth which is growing up with the depression. This spirit is more purposeful though still confused. It wants to create a new world, but is not clear as to how it wants to go about it. For that reason the young generation asks for saviors. It tends to believe in dictators and to hail each new aspirant for that honor as a messiah. It wants cut and dried systems of salvation with a wise minority to direct society on some one-way road to utopia. It has not yet realized that it must save itself. The young generation has not yet learned that the problems confronting them can be solved only by themselves and will have to be settled on the basis of social and economic freedom in co-operation with the struggling masses for the right to the table and joy of life.

As I have already stated, my objection to authority in whatever form has been derived from a much larger social view, rather than from anything I myself may have suffered from it. Government has, of course, interfered with my full expression, as it has with others. Certainly the powers have not spared me. Raids on my lectures during my thirty-five years’ activity in the United States were a common occurrence, followed by innumerable arrests and three convictions to terms of imprisonment. This was followed by the annulment of my citizenship and my deportation. The hand of authority was forever interfering with my life. If I have none the less expressed myself, it was in spite of every curtailment and difficulty put in my path and not because of them. In that I was by no means alone. The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre, one of America’s great Anarchists, Moses Harman, the pioneer of woman’s emancipation from sexual bondage, Horace Traubel, sweet singer of liberty, and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot. I, too, feel enriched beyond measure. But that is due to the discovery of Anarchism, which more than anything else has strengthened my conviction that authority stultifies human development, while full freedom assures it.

I consider Anarchism the most beautiful and practical philosophy that has yet been thought of in its application to individual expression and the relation it establishes between the individual and society. Moreover, I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. It is my conviction that dictatorship, whether to the right or to the left, can never work—that it never has worked, and that time will prove this again, as it has been proved before. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes more apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated. Considered from this point, a recrudescence of Anarchist ideas in the near future is very probable. When this occurs and takes effect, I believe that humanity will at last leave the maze in which it is now lost and will start on the path to sane living and regeneration through freedom.

There are many who deny the possibility of such regeneration on the ground that human nature cannot change. Those who insist that human nature remains the same at all times have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They certainly have not the faintest idea of the tremendous strides that have been made in sociology and psychology, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that human nature is plastic and can be changed. Human nature is by no means a fixed quantity. Rather, it is fluid and responsive to new conditions. If, for instance, the so-called instinct of self-preservation were as fundamental as it is supposed to be, wars would have been eliminated long ago, as would all dangerous and hazardous occupations.

Right here I want to point out that there would not be such great changes required as is commonly supposed to insure the success of a new social order, as conceived by Anarchists. I feel that our present equipment would be adequate if the artificial oppressions and inequalities and the organized force and violence supporting them were removed.

Again it is argued that if human nature can be changed, would not the love of liberty be trained out of the human heart? Love of freedom is a universal trait, and no tyranny has thus far succeeded in eradicating it. Some of the modern dictators might try it, and in fact are trying it with every means of cruelty at their command. Even if they should last long enough to carry on such a project—which is hardly conceivable—there are other difficulties. For one thing, the people whom the dictators are attempting to train would have to be cut off from every tradition in their history that might suggest to them the benefits of freedom. They would also have to isolate them from contact with any other people from whom they could get libertarian ideas. The very fact, however, that a person has a consciousness of self, of being different from others, creates a desire to act freely. The craving for liberty and self-expression is a very fundamental and dominant trait.

As is usual when people are trying to get rid of uncomfortable facts, I have often encountered the statement that the average man does not want liberty; that the love for it exists in very few; that the American people, for instance, simply do not care for it. That the American people are not wholly lacking in the desire for freedom was proved by their resistance to the late Prohibition Law, which was so effective that even the politicians finally responded to popular demand and repealed the amendment. If the American masses had been as determined in dealing with more important issues, much more might have been accomplished. It is true, however, that the American people are just beginning to be ready for advanced ideas. This is due to the historical evolution of the country. The rise of capitalism and a very powerful state are, after all, recent in the United States. Many still foolishly believe themselves back in the pioneer tradition when success was easy, opportunities more plentiful than now, and the economic position of the individual was not likely to become static and hopeless.

It is true, none the less, that the average American is still steeped in these traditions, convinced that prosperity will yet return. But because a number of people lack individuality and the capacity for independent thinking I cannot admit that for this reason society must have a special nursery to regenerate them. I would insist that liberty, real liberty, a freer and more flexible society, is the only medium for the development of the best potentialities of the individual.

I will grant that some individuals grow to great stature in revolt against existing conditions. I am only too aware of the fact that my own development was largely in revolt. But I consider it absurd to argue from this fact that social evils should be perpetrated to make revolt against them necessary. Such an argument would be a repetition of the old religious idea of purification. For one thing it is lacking in imagination to suppose that one who shows qualities above the ordinary could have developed only in one way. The person who under this system has developed along the lines of revolt might readily in a different social situation have developed as an artist, scientist, or in any other creative and intellectual capacity.

III

Now I do not claim that the triumph of my ideas would eliminate all possible problems from the life of man for all time. What I do believe is that the removal of the present artificial obstacles to progress would clear the ground for new conquests and joy of life. Nature and our own complexes are apt to continue to provide us with enough pain and struggle. Why then maintain the needless suffering imposed by our present social structure, on the mythical grounds that our characters are thus strengthened, when broken hearts and crushed lives about us every day give the lie to such a notion?

Most of the worry about the softening of human character under freedom comes from prosperous people. It would be difficult to convince the starving man that plenty to eat would ruin his character. As for individual development in the society to which I look forward, I feel that with freedom and abundance unguessed springs of individual initiative would be released. Human curiosity and interest in the world could be trusted to develop individuals in every conceivable line of effort.

Of course those steeped in the present find it impossible to realize that gain as an incentive could be replaced by another force that would motivate people to give the best that is in them. To be sure, profit and gain are strong factors in our present system. They have to be. Even the rich feel a sense of insecurity. That is, they want to protect what they have and to strengthen themselves. The gain and profit motives, however, are tied up with more fundamental motives. When a man provides himself with clothes and shelter, if he is the money-maker type, he continues to work to establish his status—to give himself prestige of the sort admired in the eyes of his fellow-men. Under different and more just conditions of life these more fundamental motives could be put to special uses, and the profit motive, which is only their manifestation, will pass away. Even to-day the scientist, inventor, poet, and artist are not primarily moved by the consideration of gain or profit. The urge to create is the first and most impelling force in their lives. If this urge is lacking in the mass of workers it is not at all surprising, for their occupation is deadly routine. Without any relation to their lives or needs, their work is done in the most appalling surroundings, at the behest of those who have the power of life and death over the masses. Why then should they be impelled to give of themselves more than is absolutely necessary to eke out their miserable existence?

In art, science, literature, and in departments of life which we believe to be somewhat removed from our daily living we are hospitable to research, experiment, and innovation. Yet, so great is our traditional reverence for authority that an irrational fear arises in most people when experiment is suggested to them. Surely there is even greater reason for experiment in the social field than in the scientific. It is to be hoped, therefore, that humanity or some portion of it will be given the opportunity in the not too distant future to try its fortune living and developing under an application of freedom corresponding to the early stages of an anarchistic society. The belief in freedom assumes that human beings can co-operate. They do it even now to a surprising extent, or organized society would be impossible. If the devices by which men can harm one another, such as private property, are removed and if the worship of authority can be discarded, co-operation will be spontaneous and inevitable, and the individual will find it his highest calling to contribute to the enrichment of social well-being.

Anarchism alone stresses the importance of the individual, his possibilities and needs in a free society. Instead of telling him that he must fall down and worship before institutions, live and die for abstractions, break his heart and stunt his life for taboos, Anarchism insists that the center of gravity in society is the individual—that he must think for himself, act freely, and live fully. The aim of Anarchism is that every individual in the world shall be able to do so. If he is to develop freely and fully, he must be relieved from the interference and oppression of others. Freedom is, therefore, the cornerstone of the Anarchist philosophy. Of course, this has nothing in common with a much boasted “rugged individualism.” Such predatory individualism is really flabby, not rugged. At the least danger to its safety it runs to cover of the state and wails for protection of armies, navies, or whatever devices for strangulation it has at its command. Their “rugged individualism” is simply one of the many pretenses the ruling class makes to unbridled business and political extortion.

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

The fact that the Anarchist movement for which I have striven so long is to a certain extent in abeyance and overshadowed by philosophies of authority and coercion affects me with concern, but not with despair. It seems to me a point of special significance that many countries decline to admit Anarchists. All governments hold the view that while parties of the right and left may advocate social changes, still they cling to the idea of government and authority. Anarchism alone breaks with both and propagates uncompromising rebellion. In the long run, therefore, it is Anarchism which is considered deadlier to the present regime than all other social theories that are now clamoring for power.

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

[Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Vol. CLXX, December 1934]

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]

Anarchism: What It Really Stands For

2010-08-09T07:05:39Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Anarchism: What It Really Stands For :Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood, :Thou art the grisly terror of our age. :“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude, :“Art…'

Anarchism: What It Really Stands For

:Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood,
:Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
:“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude,
:“Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.”
:O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven
:The truth that lies behind a word to find,
:To them the word’s right meaning was not given.
:They shall continue blind among the blind.
:But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
:Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
:I give thee to the future! Thine secure
:When each at least unto himself shall waken.
:Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill?
:I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see!
:I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
:Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!
::JOHN HENRY MACKAY

The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict’s garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on.

Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.

To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for. The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. “Why?” “Because.” Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man. What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.

The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,—a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.

Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.

ANARCHISM:—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.

The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of EVERY PHASE of life,—individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.

A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,—the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.

The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.

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, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a 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.

“The one thing of value in the world,” says Emerson, “is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates.” In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul. Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Property, the dominion of man’s needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, “Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!” The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

“Property is robbery,” said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes 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. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.

It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.” A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,—the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, 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.

Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,—the dominion of human conduct.

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man’s needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. “All government in essence,” says Emerson, “is tyranny.” It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: “Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring 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.” Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that “the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.”

Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes. Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities,—the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement. The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

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.

Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that “it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force.” This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist. Unfortunately there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions. 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. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, “Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature.”

Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only “order” that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government—laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,—is strenuously engaged in “harmonizing” the most antagonistic elements in society.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin: “Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end.”

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flat-headed parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.

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. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.

As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.

“All voting,” says Thoreau, “is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.” A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.

What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.

Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? 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.

It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. 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.

The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man.

Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for “men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through.”

Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King’s coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man’s right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor’s power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]

The Psychology of Political Violence

2010-08-09T06:58:22Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE EMMA GOLDMAN TO ANALYZE the psychology of political violence is not only extremely difficult, but also very dangerous. If such acts are tr…'

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

EMMA GOLDMAN

TO ANALYZE the psychology of political violence is not only extremely difficult, but also very dangerous. If such acts are treated with understanding, one is immediately accused of eulogizing them. If, on the other hand, human sympathy is expressed with the Attentäter one risks being considered a possible accomplice. Yet it is only intelligence and sympathy that can bring us closer to the source of human suffering, and teach us the ultimate way out of it.

The primitive man, ignorant of natural forces, dreaded their approach, hiding from the perils they threatened. As man learned to understand Nature’s phenomena, he realized that though these may destroy life and cause great loss, they also bring relief. To the earnest student it must be apparent that the accumulated forces in our social and economic life, culminating in a political act of violence, are similar to the terrors of the atmosphere, manifested in storm and lightning.

To thoroughly appreciate the truth of this view, one must feel intensely the indignity of our social wrongs; one’s very being must throb with the pain, the sorrow, the despair millions of people are daily made to endure. Indeed, unless we have become a part of humanity, we cannot even faintly understand the just indignation that accumulates in a human soul, the burning, surging passion that makes the storm inevitable.

The ignorant mass looks upon the man who makes a violent protest against our social and economic iniquities as upon a wild beast, a cruel, heartless monster, whose joy it is to destroy life and bathe in blood; or at best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone assume that these men had advised violence, or even approved of the acts? Certainly not. Theirs was the attitude of the social student, of the man who knows that beyond every violent act there is a vital cause.

Björnstjerne Björnson, in the second part of Beyond Human Power, emphasizes the fact that it is among the Anarchists that we must look for the modern martyrs who pay for their faith with their blood, and who welcome death with a smile, because they believe, as truly as Christ did, that their martyrdom will redeem humanity.

Francois Coppe, the French novelist, thus expresses himself regarding the psychology of the Attentäter:

“The reading of the details of Vaillant’s execution left me in a thoughtful mood. I imagined him expanding his chest under the ropes, marching with firm step, stiffening his will, concentrating all his energy, and, with eyes fixed upon the knife, hurling finally at society his cry of malediction. And, in spite of me, another spectacle rose suddenly before my mind. I saw a group of men and women pressing against each other in the middle of the oblong arena of the circus, under the gaze of thousands of eyes, while from all the steps of the immense amphitheatre went up the terrible cry, Ad leones! and, below, the opening cages of the wild beasts.

“I did not believe, the execution would take place. In the first place, no victim had been struck with death, and it had long been the custom not to punish an abortive crime with the last degree of severity. Then, this crime, however terrible in intention, was disinterested, born of an abstract idea. The man’s past, his abandoned childhood, his life of hardship, pleaded also in his favor. In the independent press generous voices were raised in his behalf, very loud and eloquent. ‘A purely literary current of opinion’ some have said, with no little scorn. It is, on the contrary, an honor to the men of art and thought to have expressed once more their disgust at the scaffold.”

Again Zola, in Germinal and Paris, describes the tenderness and kindness, the deep sympathy with human suffering, of these men who close the chapter of their lives with a violent outbreak against our system.

Last, but not least, the man who probably better than anyone else understands the psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire Professional, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of Anarchist, whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every Anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanor, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.

“There is a truism that the man in the street seems always to forget, when he is abusing the Anarchists, or whatever party happens to be his bete noire for the moment, as the cause of some outrage just perpetrated. This indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they felt to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent recoil from violence, whether aggressive or repressive; they are the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature for breathing space and life. And their cause lies not in any special conviction, but in the depths of that human nature itself. The whole course of history, political and social, is strewn with evidence of this fact. To go no further, take the three most notorious examples of political parties goaded into violence during the last fifty years: the Mazzinians in Italy, the Fenians in Ireland, and the Terrorists in Russia. Were these people Anarchists? No. Did they all three even hold the same political opinions? No. The Mazzinians were Republicans, the Fenians political separatists, the Russians Social Democrats or Constitutionalists. But all were driven by desperate circumstances into this terrible form of revolt. And when we turn from parties to individuals who have acted in like manner, we stand appalled by the number of human beings goaded and driven by sheer desperation into conduct obviously violently opposed to their social instincts.

“Now that Anarchism has become a living force in society, such deeds have been sometimes committed by Anarchists, as well as by others. For no new faith, even the most essentially peaceable and humane the mind of man has yet accepted, but at its first coming has brought upon earth not peace, but a sword; not because of anything violent or anti-social in the doctrine itself; simply because of the ferment any new and creative idea excites in men’s minds, whether they accept or reject it. And a conception of Anarchism, which, on one hand, threatens every vested interest, and, on the other, holds out a vision of a free and noble life to be won by a struggle against existing wrongs, is certain to rouse the fiercest opposition, and bring the whole repressive force of ancient evil into violent contact with the tumultuous outburst of a new hope.

“Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse of what work and life might and ought to be, finds the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until new ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries to spread them, brings him into difficulties with his employers. How many thousands of Socialists, and above all Anarchists, have lost work and even the chance of work, solely on the ground of their opinions. It is only the specially gifted craftsman, who, if he be a zealous propagandist, can hope to retain permanent employment. And what happens to a man with his brain working actively with a ferment of new ideas, with a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men, with the knowledge that his suffering and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings,—what happens to such a man when he sees those dear to him starving, when he himself is starved? Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, outraged and despoiled in their persons and in those of their fellow sufferers. And are we, who ourselves are not in this horrible predicament, to stand by and coldly condemn these piteous victims of the Furies and Fates? Are we to decry as miscreants these human beings who act with heroic self-devotion, sacrificing their lives in protest, where less social and less energetic natures would lie down and grovel in abject submission to injustice and wrong? Are we to join the ignorant and brutal outcry which stigmatizes such men as monsters of wickedness, gratuitously running amuck in a harmonious and innocently peaceful society? No! We hate murder with a hatred that may seem absurdly exaggerated to apologists for Matabele massacres, to callous acquiescers in hangings and bombardments, but we decline in such cases of homicide, or attempted homicide, as those of which we are treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice of flinging the whole responsibility of the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. The guilt of these homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, helps to keep up social conditions that drive human beings to despair. The man who flings his whole life into the attempt, at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs of his fellow men, is a saint compared to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his protest destroy other lives besides his own. Let him who is without sin in society cast the first stone at such an one.”

That every act of political violence should nowadays be attributed to Anarchists is not at all surprising. Yet it is a fact known to almost everyone familiar with the Anarchist movement that a great number of acts, for which Anarchists had to suffer, either originated with the capitalist press or were instigated, if not directly perpetrated, by the police.

For a number of years acts of violence had been committed in Spain, for which the Anarchists were held responsible, hounded like wild beasts, and thrown into prison. Later it was disclosed that the perpetrators of these acts were not Anarchists, but members of the police department. The scandal became so widespread that the conservative Spanish papers demanded the apprehension and punishment of the gang-leader, Juan Rull, who was subsequently condemned to death and executed. The sensational evidence, brought to light during the trial, forced Police Inspector Momento to exonerate completely the Anarchists from any connection with the acts committed during a long period. This resulted in the dismissal of a number of police officials, among them Inspector Tressols, who, in revenge, disclosed the fact that behind the gang of police bomb throwers were others of far higher position, who provided them with funds and protected them.

This is one of the many striking examples of how Anarchist conspiracies are manufactured.

That the American police can perjure themselves with the same ease, that they are just as merciless, just as brutal and cunning as their European colleagues, has been proven on more than one occasion. We need only recall the tragedy of the eleventh of November, 1887, known as the Haymarket Riot.

No one who is at all familiar with the case can possibly doubt that the Anarchists, judicially murdered in Chicago, died as victims of a lying, bloodthirsty press and of a cruel police conspiracy. Has not Judge Gary himself said: “Not because you have caused the Haymarket bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on trial.”

The impartial and thorough analysis by Governor Altgeld of that blotch on the American escutcheon verified the brutal frankness of Judge Gary. It was this that induced Altgeld to pardon the three Anarchists, thereby earning the lasting esteem of every liberty-loving man and woman in the world.

When we approach the tragedy of September sixth, 1901, we are confronted by one of the most striking examples of how little social theories are responsible for an act of political violence. “Leon Czolgosz, an Anarchist, incited to commit the act by Emma Goldman.” To be sure, has she not incited violence even before her birth, and will she not continue to do so beyond death? Everything is possible with the Anarchists.

Today, even, nine years after the tragedy, after it was proven a hundred times that Emma Goldman had nothing to do with the event, that no evidence whatsoever exists to indicate that Czolgosz ever called himself an Anarchist, we are confronted with the same lie, fabricated by the police and perpetuated by the press. No living soul ever heard Czolgosz make that statement, nor is there a single written word to prove that the boy ever breathed the accusation. Nothing but ignorance and insane hysteria, which have never yet been able to solve the simplest problem of cause and effect.

The President of a free Republic killed! What else can be the cause, except that the Attentäter must have been insane, or that he was incited to the. act.

A free Republic! How a myth will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive,, to dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its monstrous absurdities. A free Republic! And yet within a little over thirty years a small band of parasites have successfully robbed the American people, and trampled upon the fundamental principles, laid down by the fathers of this country, guaranteeing to every man, woman, and child “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For thirty years they have been increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging the army of the unemployed, the hungry, homeless, and friendless portion of humanity, who are tramping the country from east to west, from north to south, in a vain search for work. For many years the home has been left to the care of the little ones, while the parents are exhausting their life and strength for a mere pittance. “For thirty years the sturdy sons of America have been sacrificed on the battlefield of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt factory surroundings. For long and weary years this process of undermining the nation’s health, vigor, and pride, without much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been going on. Maddened by success and victory, the money powers of this “free land of ours” became more and more audacious in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with the rotten and decayed European tyrannies for supremacy of power.

In vain did a lying press repudiate Leon Czolgosz as a foreigner. The boy was a product of our own free American soil, that lulled him to sleep with,

:My country, ‘tis of thee,
:Sweet land of liberty.

Who can tell how many times this American child had gloried in the celebration of the Fourth of July, or of Decoration Day, when he faithfully honored the Nation’s dead? Who knows but that he, too, was willing to “fight for his country and die for her liberty,” until it dawned upon him that those he belonged to have no country, because they have been robbed of all that they have produced; until he realized that the liberty and independence of his youthful dreams were but a farce. Poor Leon Czolgosz, your crime consisted of too sensitive a social consciousness. Unlike your idealless and brainless American brothers, your ideals soared above the belly and the bank account. No wonder you impressed the one human being among all the infuriated mob at your trial— a newspaper woman—as a visionary, totally oblivious to your surroundings. Your large, dreamy eyes must have beheld a new and glorious dawn.

Now, to a recent instance of police-manufactured Anarchist plots. In that bloodstained city Chicago, the life of Chief of Police Shippy was attempted by a young man named Averbuch. Immediately the cry was sent to the four corners of the world that Averbuch was an Anarchist, and that the Anarchists were responsible for the act. Everyone who was at all known to entertain Anarchist ideas was closely watched, a number of people arrested, the library of an Anarchist group confiscated, and all meetings made impossible. It goes without saying that, as on various previous occasions, I must needs be held responsible for the act. Evidently the American police credit me with occult powers. I did not know Averbuch; in fact, had never before heard his name, and the only way I could have possibly “conspired” with him was in my astral body. But, then, the police are not concerned with logic or justice. What they seek is a target, to mask their absolute ignorance of the cause, of the psychology of a political act. Was Averbuch an Anarchist? There is no positive proof of it. He had been but three months in the country, did not know the language, and, as far as I could ascertain, was quite unknown to the Anarchists of Chicago.

What led to his act? Averbuch, like most young Russian immigrants, undoubtedly believed in the mythical liberty of America. He received his first baptism by the policeman’s club during the brutal dispersement of the unemployed parade. He further experienced American equality and opportunity in the vain efforts to find an economic master. In short, a three months’ sojourn in the glorious land brought him face to face with the fact that the disinherited are in the same position the world over. In his native land he probably learned that necessity knows no law —there was no difference between a Russian and an American policeman.

The question to the intelligent social student is not whether the acts of Czolgosz or Averbuch were practical, any more than whether the thunderstorm is practical. The thing that will inevitably impress itself on the thinking and feeling man and woman is that the sight of brutal clubbing of innocent victims in a so-called free Republic, and the degrading, souldestroying economic struggle, furnish the spark that kindles the dynamic force in the overwrought, outraged souls of men like Czolgosz or Averbuch. No amount of persecution, of hounding, of repression, can stay this social phenomenon.

But, it is often asked, have not acknowledged Anarchists committed acts of violence? Certainly they have, always however ready to shoulder the responsibility. My contention is that they were impelled, not by the teachings of Anarchism, but by the tremendous pressure of conditions, making life unbearable to their sensitive natures. Obviously, Anarchism, or any other social theory, making man a conscious social unit, will act as a leaven for rebellion. This is not a mere assertion, but a fact verified by all experience. A close examination of the circumstances bearing upon this question will further clarify my position.

Let us consider some of the most important Anarchist acts within the last two decades. Strange as it may seem, one of the most significant deeds of political violence occurred here in America, in connection with the Homestead strike of 1892.

During that memorable time the Carnegie Steel Company organized a conspiracy to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Henry Clay Frick, then Chairman of the Company, was intrusted with that democratic task. He lost no time in carrying out the policy of breaking the Union, the policy which he had so successfully practiced during his reign of terror in the coke regions. Secretly, and while peace negotiations were being purposely prolonged, Frick supervised the military preparations, the fortification of the Homestead Steel Works, the erection of a high board fence, capped with barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters. And then, in the dead of night, he attempted to smuggle his army of hired Pinkerton thugs into Homestead, which act precipitated the terrible carnage of the steel workers. Not content with the death of eleven victims, killed in the Pinkerton skirmish, Henry Clay Frick, good Christian and free American, straightway began the hounding down of the helpless wives and orphans, by ordering them out of the wretched Company houses.

The whole country was aroused over these inhuman outrages. Hundreds of voices were raised in protest, calling on Frick to desist, not to go too far. Yes, hundreds of people protested,—as one objects to annoying flies. Only one there was who actively responded to the outrage at Homestead,—Alexander Berkman. Yes, he was an Anarchist. He gloried in that fact, because it was the only force that made the discord between his spiritual longing and the world without at all bearable. Yet not Anarchism, as such, but the brutal slaughter of the eleven steel workers was the urge for Alexander Berkman’s act, his attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick.

The record of European acts of political violence affords numerous and striking instances of the influence of environment upon sensitive human beings.

The court speech of Vaillant, who, in 1894, exploded a bomb in the Paris Chamber of Deputies, strikes the true keynote of the psychology of such acts:

“Gentlemen, in a few minutes you are to deal your blow, but in receiving your verdict I shall have at least the satisfaction of having wounded the existing society, that cursed society in which one may see a single man spending, uselessly, enough to feed thousands of families; an infamous society which permits a few individuals to monopolize all the social wealth, while there are hundreds of thousands of unfortunates who have not even the bread that is not refused to dogs, and while entire families are committing suicide for want of the necessities of life.

“Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their appeals. It seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth century, toward the precipice which will engulf them, , for woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving, woe to those who, believing themselves of superior essence, assume the right to exploit those beneath them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason; they rise like a hurricane, and pass away like a torrent. Then we see bleeding heads impaled on pikes.

“Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes of individuals. Those of one class, not realizing what they are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with the little that is given them in exchange for their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study, and who, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers of the popular claims.

“Gentlemen, I am one of these last. Wherever I have gone, I have seen unfortunates bent beneath the yoke of capital. Everywhere I have seen the same wounds causing tears of blood to flow, even in the remoter parts of the inhabited districts of South America, where I had the right to believe that he who was weary of the pains of civilization might rest in the shade of the palm trees and there study nature. Well, there even, more than elsewhere, I have seen capital come, like a vampire, to suck the last drop of blood of the unfortunate pariahs.

“Then I came back to France, where it was reserved for me to see my family suffer atrociously. This was the last drop in the cup of my sorrow. Tired of leading this life of suffering and cowardice, I carried this bomb to those who are primarily responsible for social misery.

“I am reproached with the wounds of those who were hit by my projectiles. Permit me to point out in passing that, if the bourgeois had not massacred or caused massacres during the Revolution, it is probable that they would still be under the yoke of the nobility. On the other hand, figure up the dead and wounded of Tonquin, Madagascar, Dahomey, adding thereto the thousands, yes, millions of unfortunates who die in the factories, the mines, and wherever the grinding power of capital is felt. Add also those who die of hunger, and all this with the assent of our Deputies. Beside all this, of how little weight are the reproaches now brought against me!

“It is true that one does not efface the other; but, after all, are we not acting on the defensive when we respond to the blows which we receive from above? I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to have confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people’s claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered our voices by imprisonment, the rope, rifle volleys. Make no mistake; the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry of the rebel Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which vindicates its rights, and which will soon add acts to words. For, be sure of it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers will not halt; just as, in the last century, all the governmental forces could not prevent the Diderots and the Voltaires from spreading emancipating ideas among the people, so all the existing governmental forces will not prevent the Reclus, the Darwins, the Spencers, the Ibsens, the Mirbeaus, from spreading the ideas of justice and liberty which will annihilate the prejudices that hold the mass in ignorance. And these ideas, welcomed by the unfortunate, will flower in acts of revolt as they have done in me, until the day when the disappearance of authority shall permit all men to organize freely according to their choice, when everyone shall be able to enjoy the product of his labor, and when those moral maladies called prejudices shall vanish, permitting human beings to live in harmony, having no other desire than to study the sciences and love their fellows.

“I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner,—a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons,—such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. Hail to him who labors, by no matter what means, for this transformation! It is this idea that has guided me in my duel with authority, but as in this duel I have only wounded my adversary, it is now its turn to strike me.

“Now, gentlemen, to me it matters little what penalty you may inflict, for, looking at this assembly with the eyes of reason, I can .not help smiling to see you, atoms lost in matter, and reasoning only because you possess a prolongation of the spinal marrow, assume the right to judge one of your fellows.

“Ah! gentlemen, how little a thing is your assembly and your verdict in the history of humanity; and human history, in its turn, is likewise a very little thing in the whirlwind which bears it through immensity, and which is destined to disappear, or at least to be transformed, in order to begin again the same history and the same facts, a veritably perpetual play of cosmic forces renewing and transferring themselves forever.”

Will anyone say that Vaillant was an ignorant, vicious man, or a lunatic? Was not his mind singularly clear and analytic? No wonder that the best intellectual forces of France spoke in his behalf, and signed the petition to President Carnot, asking him to commute Vaillant’s death sentence.

Carnot would listen to no entreaty; he insisted on more than a pound of flesh, he wanted Vaillant’s life, and then—the inevitable happened: President Carnot was killed. On the handle of the stiletto used by the Attentäter was engraved, significantly,

::VAILLANT!

Santa Caserio was an Anarchist. He could have gotten away, saved himself; but he remained, he stood the consequences.

His reasons for the act are set forth in so simple, dignified, and childlike manner that one is reminded of the touching tribute paid Caserio by his teacher of the little village school, Ada Negri, the Italian poet, who spoke’ of him as a sweet, tender plant, of too fine and sensitive texture to stand the cruel strain of the world.

“Gentlemen of the Jury! I do not propose to make a defense, but only an explanation of my deed.

“Since my early youth I began to learn that present society is badly organized, so badly that every day many wretched men commit suicide, leaving women and children in the most terrible distress.” Workers, by thousands, seek for work and can not find it. Poor families beg for food and shiver with cold; they suffer the greatest misery; the little ones ask their miserable mothers for food, and the mothers cannot give it to them, because they have nothing. The few things which the home contained have already been sold or pawned. All they can do is beg alms; often they are arrested as vagabonds.

“I went away from my native place because I was frequently moved to tears at seeing little girls of eight or ten years obliged to work fifteen hours a day for the paltry pay of twenty centimes. Young women of eighteen or twenty also work fifteen hours daily, for a mockery of remuneration. And that happens not only to my fellow countrymen, but to all the workers, who sweat the whole day long for a crust of bread, while their labor produces wealth in abundance. The workers are obliged to live under the most wretched conditions, and their food consists of a little bread, a few spoonfuls of rice, and water; so by the time they are thirty or forty years old, they are exhausted, and go to die in the hospitals. Besides, in consequence of bad food and overwork, these unhappy creatures are, by hundreds, devoured by pellagra—a disease that, in my country, attacks, as the physicians say, those who are badly fed and lead a life of toil and privation.

“I have observed that there are a great many people who are hungry, and many children who suffer, whilst bread and clothes abound in the towns. I saw many and large shops full of clothing and woolen stuffs, and I also saw warehouses full of wheat and Indian corn, suitable for those who are in want. And, on the other hand, I saw thousands of people who do not work, who produce nothing and live on the labor of others; who spend every day thousands of francs for their amusement; who debauch the daughters of the workers; who own dwellings of forty or fifty rooms; twenty or thirty horses, many servants; in a word, all the pleasures of life.

“I believed in God; but when I saw so great an inequality between men, I acknowledged that it was not God who created man, but man who created God. And I discovered that those who want their property to be respected, have an interest in preaching the existence of paradise and hell, and in keeping the people in ignorance.

“Not long ago, Vaillant threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies, to protest against the present system of society. He killed no one, only wounded some persons; yet bourgeois justice sentenced him to death. And not satisfied with the condemnation of the guilty man, they began to pursue the Anarchists, and arrest not only those who had known Vaillant, but even those who had merely been present at any Anarchist lecture.

“The government did not think of their wives and children. It did not consider that the men kept in prison were not the only ones who suffered, and that their little ones cried for bread. Bourgeois justice did not trouble itself about these innocent ones, who do not yet know what society is. It is no fault of theirs that their fathers are in prison; they only want to eat.

“The government went on searching private houses, opening private letters, forbidding lectures and meetings, and practicing the most infamous oppressions against us. Even now, hundreds of Anarchists are arrested for having written an article in a newspaper, or for having expressed an opinion in public.

“Gentlemen of the Jury, you are representatives of bourgeois society. If you want my head, take it; but do not believe that in so doing you will stop the Anarchist propaganda. Take care, for men reap what they have sown.”

During a religious procession in 1896, at Barcelona, a bomb was thrown. Immediately three hundred men and women were arrested. Some were Anarchists, but the majority were trade-unionists and Socialists. They were thrown into that terrible bastille Montjuich, and subjected to most horrible tortures. After a number had been killed, or had gone insane, their cases were taken up by the liberal press of Europe, resulting in the release of a few survivors.

The man primarily responsible for this revival of the Inquisition was Canovas del Castillo, Prime Minister of Spain. It was he who ordered the torturing of the victims, their flesh burned, their bones crushed, their tongues cut out. Practiced in the art of brutality during his regime in Cuba, Canovas remained absolutely deaf to the appeals and protests of the awakened civilized conscience.

In 1897 Canovas del Castillo was shot to death by a young Italian, Angiolillo. The latter was an editor in his native* land, and his bold utterances soon attracted the attention of the authorities. Persecution began, and Angiolillo fled from Italy to Spain, thence to France and Belgium, finally settling in England. While there he found employment as a compositor, and immediately became the friend of all his colleagues. One of the latter thus described Angiolillo: “His appearance suggested the journalist rather than the disciple of Guttenberg. His delicate hands, moreover, betrayed the fact that he had not grown up at the ‘case.’ With his handsome frank face, his soft dark hair, his alert expression, he looked the very type of the vivacious Southerner. Angiolillo spoke Italian, Spanish, and French, but no English; the little French I knew was not sufficient to carry on a prolonged conversation. However, Angiolillo soon began to acquire the English idiom; he learned rapidly, playfully, and it was not long until he became very popular with his fellow compositors. His distinguished and yet modest manner, and his consideration towards his colleagues, won him the hearts of all the boys.”

Angiolillo soon became familiar with the detailed accounts in the press. He read of the great wave of human sympathy with the helpless victims at Montjuich. On Trafalgar Square he saw with his own eyes the results of those atrocities, when the few Spaniards, who escaped Castillo’s clutches, came to seek asylum in England. There, at the great meeting, these men opened their shirts and showed the horrible scars of burned flesh. Angiolillo saw, and the effect surpassed a thousand theories; the impetus was beyond words, beyond arguments, beyond himself even.

Senor Antonio Canovas del Castillo, Prime Minister of Spain, sojourned at Santa Agueda. As usual in such cases, all strangers were kept away from his exalted presence. One exception was made, however, in the case of a distinguished looking, elegantly dressed Italian—the representative, it was understood, of an important journal. The distinguished gentleman was—Angiolillo.

Senor Canovas, about to leave his house, stepped on the veranda. Suddenly Angiolillo confronted him. A shot rang out, and Canovas was a corpse.

The wife of the Prime Minister rushed upon the scene. “Murderer! Murderer!” she cried, pointing at Angiolillo. The latter bowed. “Pardon, Madame,” he said, “I respect you as a lady, but I regret that you were the wife of that man.”

Calmly Angiolillo faced death. Death in its most terrible form—for the man whose soul was as a child’s.

He was garroted. His body lay, sun-kissed, till the day hid in twilight. And the people came, and pointing the finger of terror and fear, they said: “There—the criminal—the cruel murderer.”

How stupid, how cruel is ignorance! It misunderstands always, condemns always.

A remarkable parallel to the case of Angiolillo is to be found in the act of Gaetano Bresci, whose Attentat upon King Umberto made an American city famous.

Bresci came to this country, this land of opportunity, where one has but to try to meet with golden success. Yes, he too would try to succeed. He would work hard and faithfully. Work had no terrors for him, if it would only help him to independence, manhood, self-respect.

Thus full of hope and enthusiasm he settled in Paterson, New Jersey, and there found a lucrative job at six dollars per week in one of the weaving mills of the town. Six whole dollars per week was, no doubt, a fortune for Italy, but not enough to breathe on in the new country. He loved his little home. He was a good husband and devoted father to his bamb’ma Bianca, whom he adored. He worked and worked for a number of years. He actually managed to save one hundred dollars out of his six dollars per week.

Bresci had an ideal. Foolish, I know, for a workingman to have an ideal,—the Anarchist paper published in Paterson, La Questione Sociale.

Every week, though tired from work, he would help to set up the paper. Until late hours he would assist, and when the little pioneer had exhausted all resources and his comrades were in despair, Bresci brought cheer and hope, one hundred dollars, the entire savings of years. That would keep the paper afloat.

In his native land people were starving. The crops had been poor, and the peasants saw themselves face to face with famine. They appealed to their good King Umberto; he would help. And he did. The wives of the peasants who had gone to the palace of the King, held up in mute silence their emaciated infants. Surely that would move him. And then the soldiers fired and killed those poor fools.

Bresci, at work in the weaving mill at Paterson, read of the horrible massacre. His mental eye beheld the defenceless women and innocent infants of his native land, slaughtered right before the good King. His soul recoiled in horror. At night he heard the groans of the wounded. Some may have been his comrades, his own flesh. Why, why these foul murders?

The little meeting of the Italian Anarchist group in Paterson ended almost in a fight. Bresci had demanded his hundred dollars. His comrades begged, implored him to give them a respite. The paper would go down if they were to return him his loan. But Bresci insisted on its return.

How cruel and stupid is ignorance. Bresci got the money, but lost the good will, the confidence of his comrades. They would have nothing more to do with one whose greed was greater than his ideals.

On the twenty-ninth of July, 1900, King Umberto was shot at Monzo. The young Italian weaver of Paterson, Gaetano Bresci, had taken the life of the good King.

Paterson was placed under police surveillance, everyone known as an Anarchist hounded and persecuted, and the act of Bresci ascribed to the teachings of Anarchism. As if the teachings of Anarchism in its extremest form could equal the force of those slain women and infants, who had pilgrimed to the King for aid. As if any spoken word, ever so eloquent, could burn into a human soul with such white heat as the lifeblood trickling drop by drop from those dying forms. The ordinary man is rarely moved either by word or deed; and those whose social kinship is the greatest living force need no appeal to respond—even as does steel to the magnet —to the wrongs and horrors of society.

If a social theory is a strong factor inducing acts of political violence, how are we to account for the recent violent outbreaks in India, where Anarchism has hardly been born. More than any other old philosophy, Hindu teachings have exalted passive resistance, the drifting of life, the Nirvana, as the highest spiritual ideal. Yet the social unrest in India is daily growing, and has only recently resulted in an act of political violence, the killing of Sir Curzon Wyllie by the Hindu Madar Sol Dhingra.

If such a phenomenon can occur in a country socially and individually permeated for centuries with the spirit of passivity, can one question the tremendous, revolutionizing effect on human character exerted by great social iniquities? Can one doubt the logic, the justice of these words:

“Repression, tyranny, and indiscriminate punishment of innocent men have been the watchwords of the government of the alien domination in India ever since we began the commercial boycott of English goods. The tiger qualities of the British are much in evidence now in India. They think that by the strength of the sword they will keep down India! It is this arrogance that has brought about the bomb, and the more they tyrannize over a helpless and unarmed people, the more terrorism will grow. We may deprecate terrorism as outlandish and foreign to our culture, but it is inevitable as long as this tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it. It is the only resource for a helpless and unarmed people when brought to the verge of despair. It is never criminal on their part. The crime lies with the tyrant.”

Even conservative scientists are beginning to realize that heredity is not the sole factor moulding human character. Climate, food, occupation; nay, color, light, and sound must be considered in the study of human psychology.

If that be true, how much more correct is the contention that great social abuses will and must influence different minds and temperaments in a different way. And how utterly fallacious the stereotyped notion that the teachings of Anarchism, or certain exponents of these teachings, are responsible for the acts of political violence.

Anarchism, more than any other social theory, values human life above things. All Anarchists agree with Tolstoy in this fundamental truth: if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life. That, however, nowise indicates that Anarchism teaches submission. How can it, when it knows that all suffering, all misery, all ills, result from the evil of submission?

Has not some American ancestor said, many years ago, that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God? And he was not an Anarchist even. I would say that resistance to tyranny is man’s highest ideal. So long as tyranny exists, in whatever form, man’s deepest aspiration must resist it as inevitably as man must breathe.

Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.

High strung, like a violin string, they weep and moan for life, so relentless, so cruel, so terribly in human. In a desperate moment the string breaks. Untuned ears hear nothing but discord. But those who feel the agonized cry understand its harmony; they hear in it the fulfillment of the most compelling moment of human nature.

Such is the psychology of political violence.

[[Category:Works of Emma Goldman]]

The Truth About the Bolsheviki

2010-08-09T06:27:22Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'The Truth About the Bolsheviki by Emma Goldman Originally published by Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1918. Dedicated as my last contribution before going to…'

The Truth About the Bolsheviki
by Emma Goldman
Originally published by Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1918.

Dedicated

as my last contribution before going to Jefferson City, Mo., prison for two years, to the Boylsheviki in Russia in appreciation of their glorious work and their insiration in awakening Boylshevism in America.

MOTHER EARTH PUBLISHING ASS'N
4 JONES STREET, NEW YORK

And yet it is of the utmost importance that the people in America should understand the true meaning of the Boylsheviki, their origin, and the historic background which makes their position and their challenge to the world so significant to the masses.

Boylsheviki is the plural term for those revolutionists in Russia who represent the interests of the largest social groups, and who insist upon the maximum social and economic demands for those groups.

At a Social Democratic Comgress, held in 1903, the extreme revolutionists, impatient of the ever- growing tendency of compromise and reform in the party, organized the Boylsheviki wing as opposed to those known as the Mensheviki, or the group content to move slowly, gaining reform step by step. Nikolai Lenin, and later Trotsky, were the prime factors in the separation, and have since worked incessantly to build up the Boylsheviki party along straight revolutionary lines, but nevertheless in keeping with Marxian theoretical reasoning.

Then came the miracle of miracles, the Russian Revolution of 1917, which to the politicians in and out of the different Socialist groups meant the overthrow of the Tsar and the establishment of a liberal or quasi-Socialist government. Lenin and trotsky, with their followers, saw deeper into the nature of the revolution, and, seeing, they had the wisdom to respond --- not so much to their own theoretical predilections but to compelling needs of the awakened Russian people themselves.

Thus the Russian Revolution is a miracle in more than one respect. Among other extraordinary paradoxes it presents the phenomenon of the Marxian Social Democrats, Lenin and Trotsky, adopting Anarchist Revolutionary tactics, while the Anarchists Kropotkin, Tcherkessov, Tchaikovsky are denying these tactics and falling into Marxian reasoning, which they had during all their lives repudiated as "German metaphysics."

The Russian Revolutin is indeed a miracle. It demonstrates every day how insignificant all theories are in comparison with the actuality of the revolutionary awakening of the people.

The Boylsheviki of 1903, though revolutionists, adhered to the Marxian doctrine concerning the industrialization of Russia and the historic mission of the bourgeoisie as a necessary evolutionary process before the Russian masses coulld come into their own. The Boylsheviki of 1918 no longer believe in the predestined function of the bourgeoisie. They have been swept forward upon the waves of the Revolution to the point of view held by the Anarchists since Bakunin; namely, that once the masses become conscious of their economic power, they make their own history and need not be bound by the traditions and processes of a dead past, which --- like secret treaties --- are made at the round table and not dictated by life itself.

In other words, the Boylsheviki now represent not only a limited group of theorists but a Russia reborn and virile. Never would Lenin and Trotsky have attained their present importance had they merely voiced cut-and-dried theoretical formulae. They have their ears close to the heart-beat of the Russian people, who, while yet inarticulate, know how to register their demands much more powerfully through action. That, however, does not lessen the importance of Lenin, Trotsky and the other heroic figures who hold the world in awe by their personality, their prophetic vision and their intense revolutionary spirit.

It is not so long ago that Trotsky and Lenin were denounced as German agents, working for the Kaiser. Only those who are still influenced by newspaper lies, who know nothing about the two men, believe such accusations. Incidentally it is well to bear in mind that there is nothing quite so contemptible or cheap as to call a man a "German agent" because he refuses to believe in the high-sounding phrase "to make the world safe for Democracy," with Democracy whipped in Tulsa, lynched in Butte, shut up in prison, and otherwise outraged and banished from our shores.

Lenin and Trotsky need no defense. Yet it is well to call the attention of the credulous ones, whose daily papers "cannot tell a lie," that when Trotsky was in America he lived in a cheap apartment house, and was so poor that be had hardly enough to live on. To be sure, he was offered a comfortable position on one of the successful Jewish Socialist dailies, on condition that he learn to compromise and curb his revolutionary zeal. Trotsky preferred poverty and the right to retain his self-respect. When be decided to return to Russia, at the very beginning of the Revolution, a private subscription had to be taken up by his friends to cover his fare --- so much did Trotsky earn as a "German agent."

As to Lenin, his whole life has been one long, endless struggle for Russia. In fact, he comes to his revolutionary ideals through heritage. His own brother was executed by order of the Tsar. Thus Lenin has a personal as well as a universal reason to hate autocracy and to dedicate his life to the liberation of Russia. What absurdity it is to accuse a man like that of sympathy with German imperialism! But even the loud- mouthed accusers of Lenin and Trorsky have been shamed into silence by the powerful personalities and the incorruptible integrity of these great figures of the Revolution.

In one respect it is not at all surprising that there should be so little understanding in America for the Boylsheviki. The Russian Revolution still remains an enigma to the American mind. Without a trace of feeling for his own revolutionary traditions, and ever prostrate before the majesty of the State, the average American has been trained to believe that Revolution has no justification in his own country and that in "darkest Russia" it was only for the purpose of getting rid of the Tsar, provided it was done in a gentlemanly manner and with respectful apologies to the autocrat. And, further, that the moment a stable government like ours is established, the Russian people ought to "get behind the president."

Imagine, then, the surprise when the Russian people, after driving out the Tsar, destroyed the throne itself, and sent the "liberal" Miliakovs and Lvovs, and even the Socialist Kerensky, in the drection the Tsar had gone. And then, to cap the climax, come the Boylsheviki, who declare against both king and master. That is too much for the democratic mind of the American.

Fortunately for Russia, her people have never enjoyed the blessings of Democracy, with its institutionalized, legalized, classified values of education and culture; all of which are "machine made and ravel out the moment one begins at the first knot."

The Russians are a literal people with an unspoled, uncorrupted mind. Revolution to them has never meant mere political scene shifting, the overthrow of one autocrat for another. The Russian people have been taught for nearly a hundred years --- not in stuffy schools by sterile teachers and stale text books, but by their great revolutionary martyrs, the noblest spirits the world has ever known --- that Revolution means a fundamental social and economic change, something which has its roots in the needs and hopes of the people and which must not end until the disinherited of the earth come into their own. In a word, the Russian people saw in the overthrow of the autocracy the beginning and not the finale of the Revolution.

More than the tyranny of the Tsar, the muzhik hated the tyranny of the tax collector sent by the landed proprietor to rob him of his last cow or horse, and finally of the land itself, or to flog him and drag him off to prison when he could not pay his taxes. What was it to the muzhik that the Tsar had been driven from his throne, if his direct enemy, the Barin (master) still continued posession of the key to life --- the land? Matushka Zemlya (Mother Earth) is the pet name which the Russian language alone has for the soil. To the Russian the soil is everything, life and joy giver, the nourisher, the beloved Matushka (Little Mother).

The Russian Revolution can mean nothing to him unless it sets the land fee and joins to the dethroned Tsar his partner, the dethroned land-owner, the capitalist. That explains the historic background of the Boysheviki, their social and economis justification. They are powerful only because they represent the people. The moment they cease to do that, they will go, as the Provisional Government and Kerensky had to go. For never will the Russian people be content, or Boylshecism cease, until the land and the means of life become the heritage of the children of Russia. They have for the first time in certuries determined that they shall be heard, and that their voices shall reach the heart of, not of the governing classes --- they know these have no heart --- but the heats of the peoples of the world, including the people of the Unitesd States. Therein lies the deep import and significance of the Russian Revolution as symoblolized by the Boylsheviki.

Starting from the historic premise that all wars are capitalist wars, and that the masses can have no interest whatever in strengthening the imperialistic designs of their exploiters, it is perfectly consistent for the Boylsheviki to insist upon peace and to demand that there shall be neither indemnities nor annexations involved in that peace.

To begin with, Russia has been bled in a war ordered by the bloody Tsar. Why should they continue to sacrifice their strong manhood, which could be employed to better purpose for the reconstruction of Russia? To make the world safe for democracy? What a farce! Did not the so-called Democracies forfeit the sympathies of the Russian people when they tied their Goddess to the knout of the Russian autocracy? How dare they complain of Russia that she is longing for peace now that she has successfully thrown off her back the weight of centuries of oppresion!

Are the allies really sincere in their boast of Democracy? Why, then, did they fail to recognize the Russian Revolution even before the "terrible Boylsheviki" had taken charge of its direction? England, the the famous liberator of small nations, with India and Ireland in her clutches, would have none of the Revolution. France, the would-be cradle of liberty, repudiated the Russian Delegate to her Conference. To be sure, America recognized Revolutionary Russia, but only because she fondly hoped that Miliukov or Kerensky would remain in power. Under such circumstances why would Russia help continue the war?

Yet it is not for this reason that the Boylsheviki insist upon peace. It is because nothing vital or constructive can be built up during war, and the Russian people are eager to build up, to create, to found a new, a free, a rich Russia. For that they need peace; and, above all other considerations, the Boylsheviki want to help the other peoples of the earth toward peace --- the peoples who, like themselves, never wanted war.

Already the Boylsheviki have taught the world the lesson that peace negotiations must be initiated by the peoples themselves. Peace cannot be declared in the name of those who make wars and gain by them. That is one of the most: significant contributions to world progress that the Boylsheviki have made. Furthermore, they maintain that negotiations for peace must be made openly, frankly and with the full consent of the peoples represented. They will have none of the secret diplomatic intrigue that betrays the peoples, leading them to irretrievable disaster.

On this basis the Boylsheviki invited the other powers to participate in the General Peace Conference held at Brest-Litovsk. Their suggestion was met with scorn. The democratic boast of the Allies, when put to the test, was found sadly wanting. The treachery of the Allies in forsaking the Russian people itself warrants the Boylsheviki in making a separate peace. They stand guiltless when they declare for a separate peace after their repudiation by the Allies.

Abandoned, the Boylsheviki are no less strong. It was Trotsky who expressed the moral. influence of the Boylsheviki in the seeming paradox, "Our weakness will be our strength." Weak in the instruments of an autocracy, the Boylsheviki are strengthened by a common Revolutionary purpose. The moral opinion of the world will be more deeply influenced by a simple-hearted Russian's desire to act honestly at the peace table, than by all the connivance, evasion and hypocrisy of highly cultured diplomats.

The Boylsheviki demand that the obligations and indemnities incurred by the other governing classes should be repudiated. Why should they live up to the obligations of the Tsar? The people have not incurred those obligations; they have not pledged themselves to the other warring countries; they were no more consulted whether they should be slaughtered than the people of America were consulted. Why should they bear the brunt of punishment for an autocrat's crimes? Why should they saddle their children and their children's children with war loans and indemnities? They say that arrangements or contracts made by the enemies of the people must be lived up to by the enemies of the people, but not by the people themselves. If the Tsar pledged himself to other countries, the other countries should import him and make him responsible for what he pledged. But the people who were not consulted in the first place, who fought and bled and sacrificed their lives for three and a half years, --- they say that they will only pay the debts incurred by themselves, with their knowledge, with their understanding, and for a purpose of which they have approved. These are the only war debts, war loans and war indemnities they intend to pay.

The Boylsheviki have no imperialistic designs. They have libertarian plans, and those that understand the principles of liberty do not want to annex other peoples and other countries. Indeed, the true libertarian does not want even to annex other individuals, for he knows that so long as a single nation, people or individual is enslaved, he too is in danger.

That is why the Boylsheviki demand a peace without annexations and without indemnities. They do not feel ethically called upon to live up to the obligations incurred by the Tsar, the Kaiser or other imperialistic gentlemen.

The Boylsheviki are accused of betraying the Allies. Were the Russian people asked whether they wanted to join the Allies? The Boylsheviki, as Communists, as men who adhere with all the passion and intensity of their beings to the principle of Internationalism, declare: "Our allies are not the governments of England, France, Italy or America; our allies are the English, French, Italian, American and German peoples. They are our only allies, and these allies we will never betray; these allies we will never deceive. We want to serve our allies, but our allies are the peoples of the world, not the governing classes, not the diplomats, not the prime ministers, not the gentlemen who make war." That is the position of the Boylsheviki to this present moment. They have demonstrated this within the last few weeks, when they saw that the German peace terms implied the enslavement and dependency of other peoples. They said, "We want peace, but in asking for peace for ourselves we do so because we feel certain that our peace will induce other peoples of the world to demand and make peace, whether the governing classes want it or not."

Trotsky, in a letter to the "Citizen Ambassador" of Persia, said: "The Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 was directed against the liberty and independence of the Persian people, and is, therefore, null and void for all time. Moreover, we denounce all agreements preceding and following the said agreement which may restrict the rights of the Persian people to a free and independent existence."

The Boylsheviki are accused of taking possession of the land. This is a terrible charge if you believe in private property. It is considered the greatest crime of all to offend against private possessions. Human slaughter may be justified, but the sanctity of private possessions is inviolate. Fortunately, the Boylsheviki have learned from the past. They know that past revolutions failed because the masses did not take possession of the means of life.

The Boylsheviki have done another terrible thing --- they have taken possession of the banks. The Boylsheviki remembered that during the Paris Commune, when women and children were starving on the streets, the Communards foolishly sent their comrades to protect the Bank of France, and that afterwards the French Government used the bank's funds to pay Bismark in return for the 500,000 German war prisoners who marched into Paris and drowned the Commune in the blood of 30,000 French workers.

At that time, in 1871, the French bourgeoisie had not the slightest objection to the use of German guns to slaughter the French people. The "end justifies the means,' which the bourgeoisie would not hesitate --- now and then --- to use for the maintenance of its own supremacy.

The Boylsheviki are ardent students of history. They know that the ruling classes would prefer even the Tsar or the Kaiser to the Revolution. They know that if the bourgeoisie could retain the wealth stolen from the people in the form of land and money, they would bribe the devil himself to save them from the Revolution, and the people, starved and destitute, might succumb to the cruel bargain.

That is why the Boylsheviki took possession of the banks and are urging the peasants to confiscate the land. They have no desire to turn the banks and land, the raw material and the products of Labor's toil over to the state. They want to place all the natural resources and the wealth of the country in the hands of the people for common holding and common use, because the Russian people are by instinct and tradition communists, and have neither need nor desire for the competitive system.

The Boylsheviki are translating into reality the very things many people have been dreaming about, hoping for, planning and discussing in private and public. They are building a new social order which is to come out of the chaos and conflicts now confronting them.

Why is it that many Russian revolutionists are opposed to the Boylsheviki? Some of the finest types of men and women in Russia, such as our beloved Babushka Breshkovskaia, Peter Kroptkin, and others, are antagonistic to the Boylsheviki. It is because these good people have been lured by the glamor of political liberalism as represented by Republican France, Constitutional England and Democratic America. Alas, they have yet to realize that the line of demarcation between liberalism and autocracy is purely imaginary, the sole difference being that the people under autocracy know that they are enslaved, and love liberty to such an extent that they would fight and die for it, while the people in a democracy imagine that they are free and are content in their bondage.

The Russian revolutionists who are opposed to the Boylsheviki will soon come to appreciate that the Boylsheviki represent the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being.

It might be asked, what would the Boylsheviki do if they were opposed by all the other governments? It is not at all unlikely that if the Boylsheviki attain to complete economic and social power in Russia, the combined governments might make common cause with German Imperialism in order to crush the Boylsheviki. It can be sefely predicted that the imperialistic elements will join the bourgeoisie to defeat the Russian Revoulution.

The Boylsheviki are alive to these dangers and are using the most effective measures to combat them. Their influence on the proletariat of Germany and Austria has been immeasurable. Returning German prisoners of war are carrying the message of Boylshevism into trench and barracks, in to the fields and factories, awakening the people to the only power that can crush autocracy. The educational work of the Boylsheviki among the German people is beginning to have its effect. Certainly it has already accomplished a hundred-fold more than all the pratings of the Allies about the necessity of spreading revolt in the Central Empires.

Even though the Boylsheviki should fail in actually carrying out their wonderful dream, their conception and universal peace, their attempt to ally themselvs with all the oppressed peoples of the world, their demand that the land be given to the peasants and that the workers who produce the wealth of the world should enjoy the things they produce --- the very fact of them being and demanding must exert such influence upon the rest of the world that human beings can never again be quite so commonplace, so contented and ordinary as they were before the boylsheviki made their appearance upon the horizon of human life.

This is the part the Boylsheviki are plaing in our lives, in the lives of the German, the French and all the other peoples of teh earth. We can never be the same, because at all times, in moments of despair, in moments of pessimism, in moments when we believe everything crushed, we shall turn toward Russia and there behold the Great Hope risen, incarnate, breaking up the blackness that has filled our hearts with the hatred of our brothers, paralyzed our minds and chained our limbs, bent our backs and emasculated our wills.

The Boylsheviki have come to challenge the world. It can nevermore rest in its old sordid indolence. It must accept the challenge. It has already accepted it in Germany, in Austria and Romania, in France and Italy, aye, even in America. Like sudden sunlight Boylshevism is spreading over the entire world, illuminating the great Vision and warming it into being --- the New Life of human brotherhood and social well-being.

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]

The Individual, Society and the State

2010-08-09T06:25:45Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'The Individual, Society and the State by Emma Goldman [First published: by the Free Society Forum, Chicago, Illinois in 1940.] The minds of men are in confusion, for the ve…'

The Individual, Society and the State

by Emma Goldman

[First published: by the Free Society Forum, Chicago, Illinois in 1940.]

The minds of men are in confusion, for the very foundations of our civilization seem to be tottering. People are losing faith in the existing institutions, and the more intelligent realize that capitalist industrialism is defeating the very purpose it is supposed to serve.

The world is at a loss for a way out. Parliamentarism and democracy are on the decline. Salvation is being sought in Fascism and other forms of “strong” government.

The struggle of opposing ideas now going on in the world involves social problems urgently demanding a solution. The welfare of the individual and the fate of human society depend on the right answer to those questions The crisis, unemployment, war, disarmament, international relations, etc., are among those problems.

The State, government with its functions and powers, is now the subject of vital interest to every thinking man. Political developments in all civilized countries have brought the questions home. Shall we have a strong government? Are democracy and parliamentary government to be preferred, or is Fascism of one kind or another, dictatorship - monarchical, bourgeois or proletarian - the solution of the ills and difficulties that beset society today?

In other words, shall we cure the evils of democracy by more democracy, or shall we cut the Gordian knot of popular government with the sword of dictatorship?

My answer is neither the one nor the other. I am against dictatorship and Fascism as I am opposed to parliamentary regimes and so-called political democracy.

Nazism has been justly called an attack on civilization. This characterization applies with equal force to every form of dictatorship; indeed, to every kind of suppression and coercive authority. For what is civilization in the true sense? All progress has been essentially an enlargement of the liberties of the individual with a corresponding decrease of the authority wielded over him by external forces. This holds good in the realm of physical as well as of political and economic existence. In the physical world man has progressed to the extent in which he has subdued the forces of nature and made them useful to himself. Primitive man made a step on the road to progress when he first produced fire and thus triumphed over darkness, when he chained the wind or harnessed water.

What role did authority or government play in human endeavor for betterment, in invention and discovery? None whatever, or at least none that was helpful. It has always been the individual that has accomplished every miracle in that sphere, usually in spite of the prohibition, persecution and interference by authority, human and divine.

Similarly, in the political sphere, the road of progress lay in getting away more and more from the authority of the tribal chief or of the clan, of prince and king, of government, of the State. Economically, progress has meant greater well-being of ever larger numbers. Culturally, it has signified the result of all the other achievements - greater independence, political, mental and psychic.

Regarded from this angle, the problems of man’s relation to the State assumes an entirely different significance. It is no more a question of whether dictatorship is preferable to democracy, or Italian Fascism superior to Hitlerism. A larger and far more vital question poses itself: Is political government, is the State beneficial to mankind, and how does it affect the individual in the social scheme of things?

The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship. Man’s greatest battles have been waged against man-made obstacles and artificial handicaps imposed upon him to paralyze his growth and development. Human thought has always been falsified by tradition and custom, and perverted false education in the interests of those who held power and enjoyed privileges. In other words, by the State and the ruling classes. This constant incessant conflict has been the history of mankind.

Individuality may be described as the consciousness of the individual as to what he is and how he lives. It is inherent in every human being and is a thing of growth. The State and social institutions come and go, but individuality remains and persists. The very essence of individuality is expression; the sense of dignity and independence is the soil wherein it thrives. Individuality is not the impersonal and mechanistic thing that the State treats as an “individual". The individual is not merely the result of heredity and environment, of cause and effect. He is that and a great deal more, a great deal else. The living man cannot be defined; he is the fountain-head of all life and all values; he is not a part of this or of that; he is a whole, an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole.

Individuality is not to be confused with the various ideas and concepts of Individualism; much less with that “rugged individualism” which is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as “education.” That corrupt and perverse “individualism” is the strait-jacket of individuality. It has converted life into a degrading race for externals, for possession, for social prestige and supremacy. Its highest wisdom is “the devil take the hindmost.”

This “rugged individualism” has inevitably resulted in the greatest modern slavery, the crassest class distinctions, driving millions to the breadline. “Rugged individualism” has meant all the “individualism” for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking “supermen.” America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as “unAmerican” and evil in the name of that same individualism.

There was a time when the State was unknown. In his natural condition man existed without any State or organized government. People lived as families in small communities; They tilled the soil and practiced the arts and crafts. The individual, and later the family, was the unit of social life where each was free and the equal of his neighbor. Human society then was not a State but an association; a voluntary association for mutual protection and benefit. The elders and more experienced members were the guides and advisers of the people. They helped to manage the affairs of life, not to rule and dominate the individual.

Political government and the State were a much later development, growing out of the desire of the stronger to take advantage of the weaker, of the few against the many. The State, ecclesiastical and secular, served to give an appearance of legality and right to the wrong done by the few to the many. That appearance of right was necessary the easier to rule the people, because no government can exist without the consent of the people, consent open, tacit or assumed. Constitutionalism and democracy are the modern forms of that alleged consent; the consent being inoculated and indoctrinated by what is called “education,” at home, in the church, and in every other phase of life.

That consent is the belief in authority, in the necessity for it. At its base is the doctrine that man is evil, vicious, and too incompetent to know what is good for him. On this all government and oppression is built. God and the State exist and are supported by this dogma.

Yet the State is nothing but a name. It is an abstraction. Like other similar conceptions - nation, race, humanity - it has no organic reality. To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

The State is a term for the legislative and administrative machinery whereby certain business of the people is transacted, and badly so. There is nothing sacred, holy or mysterious about it. The State has no more conscience or moral mission than a commercial company for working a coal mine or running a railroad.

The State has no more existence than gods and devils have. They are equally the reflex and creation of man, for man, the individual, is the only reality. The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness of his ignorance and fear.

Life begins and ends with man, the individual. Without him there is no race, no humanity, no State. No, not even “society” is possible without man. It is the individual who lives, breathes and suffers. His development, his advance, has been a continuous struggle against the fetishes of his own creation and particularly so against the “State.”

In former days religious authority fashioned political life in the image of the Church. The authority of the State, the “rights” of rulers came from on high; power, like faith, was divine. Philosophers have written thick volumes to prove the sanctity of the State; some have even clad it with infallibility and with god-like attributes Some have talked themselves into the insane notion that the State is “superhuman,” the supreme reality, “the absolute.”

Enquiry was condemned as blasphemy. Servitude was the highest virtue. By such precepts and training certain things came to be regarded as self-evident, as sacred of their truth ,but [sic] because of constant and persistent repetition.

All progress has been essentially an unmasking of “divinity” and “mystery,” of alleged sacred, eternal “truth"; it has been a gradual elimination of the abstract and the substitution in its place of the real, the concrete. In short, of facts against fancy, of knowledge against ignorance, of light against darkness.

That slow and arduous liberation of the individual was not accomplished by the aid of the State. On the contrary, it was by continuous conflict, by a life-and death struggle with the State, that even the smallest vestige of independence and freedom has been won. It has cost mankind much time and blood to secure what little it has gained so far from kings, tsars and governments

The great heroic figure of that long Golgotha has been Man. It has always been the individual, often alone and singly, at other times in unity and co-operation with others of his kind, who has fought and bled in the age-long battle against suppression and oppression, against the powers that enslave and degrade him.

More than that and more significant: It was man, the individual, whose soul first rebelled against injustice and degradation; it was the individual who first conceived the idea of resistance to the conditions under which he chafed. In short, it is always the individual who is the parent of the liberating thought as well as of the deed.

This refers not only to political struggles, but to the entire gamut of human life and effort, in all ages and climes. It has always been the individual, the man of strong mind and will to liberty, who paved the way for every human advance, for every step toward a freer and better world; in science, philosophy and art, as well as in industry, whose genius rose to the heights, conceiving the “impossible,” visualizing its realization and imbuing others with his enthusiasm to work and strive for it. Socially speaking, it was always the prophet, the seer, the idealist, who dreamed of a world more to his heart’s desire and who served as the beacon light on the road to greater achievement.

The State, every government whatever its form, character or color - be it absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic, Fascist, Nazi or Bolshevik - is by its very nature conservative, static, intolerant of change and opposed to it. Whatever changes it undergoes are always the result of pressure exerted upon it, pressure strong enough to compel the ruling powers to submit peaceably or otherwise, generally “otherwise” - that is, by revolution. Moreover, the inherent conservatism of government, of authority of any kind, unavoidably becomes reactionary. For two reasons: first, because it is in the nature of government not only to retain the power it has, but also to strengthen, widen and perpetuate it, nationally as well as internationally. The stronger authority grows, the greater the State and its power, the less it can tolerate a similar authority or political power along side of itself. The psychology of government demands that its influence and prestige constantly grow, at home and abroad, and it exploits every opportunity to increase it. This tendency is motivated by the financial and commercial interests back of the government, represented and served by it. The fundamental raison d’etre of every government to which, incidentally, historians of former days wilfully shut their eyes, has become too obvious now even for professors to ignore.

The other factor which impels governments to become even more conservative and reactionary is their inherent distrust of the individual and fear of individuality. Our political and social scheme cannot afford to tolerate the individual and his constant quest for innovation. In “self-defense” the State therefore suppresses, persecutes, punishes and even deprives the individual of life. It is aided in this by every institution that stands for the preservation of the existing order. It resorts to every form of violence and force, and its efforts are supported by the “moral indignation” of the majority against the heretic, the social dissenter and the political rebel - the majority for centuries drilled in State worship, trained in discipline and obedience and subdued by the awe of authority in the home, the school, the church and the press.

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

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very “uniqueness,” “separateness” and “differentiation” make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established.

In the true sense one’s native land, with its back ground of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home. A certain atmosphere of “belonging,” the consciousness of being “at one” with the people and environment, is more essential to one’s feeling of home. This holds good in relation to one’s family, the smaller local circle, as well as the larger phase of the life and activities commonly called one’s country. The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings than in his native land.

In pre-war time the individual could at least escape national and family boredom. The whole world was open to his longings and his quests. Now the world has become a prison, and life continual solitary confinement. Especially is this true since the advent of dictatorship, right and left.

Friedrich Nietzsche called the State a cold monster. What would he have called the hideous beast in the garb of modern dictatorship? Not that government had ever allowed much scope to the individual; but the champions of the new State ideology do not grant even that much. “The individual is nothing,” they declare, “it is the collectivity which counts.” Nothing less than the complete surrender of the individual will satisfy the insatiable appetite of the new deity.

Strangely enough, the loudest advocates of this new gospel are to be found among the British and American intelligentsia. Just now they are enamored with the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In theory only, to be sure. In practice, they still prefer the few liberties in their own respective countries. They go to Russia for a short visit or as salesmen of the “revolution,” but they feel safer and more comfortable at home.

Perhaps it is not only lack of courage which keeps these good Britishers and Americans in their native lands rather than in the millennium come. Subconsciously there may lurk the feeling that individuality remains the most fundamental fact of all human association, suppressed and persecuted yet never defeated, and in the long run the victor.

The “genius of man,” which is but another name for personality and individuality, bores its way through all the caverns of dogma, through the thick walls of tradition and custom, defying all taboos, setting authority at naught, facing contumely and the scaffold - ultimately to be blessed as prophet and martyr by succeeding generations. But for the “genius of man,” that inherent, persistent quality of individuality, we would be still roaming the primeval forests.

Peter Kropotkin has shown what wonderful results this unique force of man’s individuality has achieved when strengthened by co-operation with other individualities. The one-sided and entirely inadequate Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence received its biological and sociological completion from the great Anarchist scientist and thinker. In his profound work, Mutual Aid Kropotkin shows that in the animal kingdom, as well as in human society, co-operation - as opposed to internecine strife and struggle - has worked for the survival and evolution of the species. He demonstrated that only mutual aid and voluntary co-operation - not the omnipotent, all-devastating State - can create the basis for a free individual and associational life.

At present the individual is the pawn of the zealots of dictatorship and the equally obsessed zealots of “rugged individualism.” The excuse of the former is its claim of a new objective. The latter does not even make a pretense of anything new. As a matter of fact “rugged individualism” has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Under its guidance the brute struggle for physical existence is still kept up. Strange as it may seem, and utterly absurd as it is, the struggle for physical survival goes merrily on though the necessity for it has entirely disappeared. Indeed, the struggle is being continued apparently because there is no necessity for it. Does not so-called overproduction prove it? Is not the world-wide economic crisis an eloquent demonstration that the struggle for existence is being maintained by the blindness of “rugged individualism” at the risk of its own destruction?

One of the insane characteristics of this struggle is the complete negation of the relation of the producer to the things he produces. The average worker has no inner point of contact with the industry he is employed in, and he is a stranger to the process of production of which he is a mechanical part. Like any other cog of the machine, he is replaceable at any time by other similar depersonalized human beings.

The intellectual proletarian, though he foolishly thinks himself a free agent, is not much better off. He, too, has a little choice or self-direction, in his particular metier as his brother who works with his hands. Material considerations and desire for greater social prestige are usually the deciding factors in the vocation of the intellectual. Added to it is the tendency to follow in the footsteps of family tradition, and become doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, etc. The groove requires less effort and personality. In consequence nearly everybody is out of place in our present scheme of things. The masses plod on, partly because their senses have been dulled by the deadly routine of work and because they must eke out an existence. This applies with even greater force to the political fabric of today. There is no place in its texture for free choice of independent thought and activity. There is a place only for voting and tax-paying puppets.

The interests of the State and those of the individual differ fundamentally and are antagonistic. The State and the political and economic institutions it supports can exist only by fashioning the individual to their particular purpose; training him to respect “law and order;” teaching him obedience, submission and unquestioning faith in the wisdom and justice of government; above all, loyal service and complete self-sacrifice when the State commands it, as in war. The State puts itself and its interests even above the claims of religion and of God. It punishes religious or conscientious scruples against individuality because there is no individuality without liberty, and liberty is the greatest menace to authority.

The struggle of the individual against these tremendous odds is the more difficult - too often dangerous to life and limb - because it is not truth or falsehood which serves as the criterion of the opposition he meets. It is not the validity or usefulness of his thought or activity which rouses against him the forces of the State and of “public opinion.” The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.

Man’s true liberation, individual and collective, lies in his emancipation from authority and from the belief in it. All human evolution has been a struggle in that direction and for that object. It is not invention and mechanics which constitute development. The ability to travel at the rate of 100 miles an hour is no evidence of being civilized. True civilization is to be measured by the individual, the unit of all social life; by his individuality and the extent to which it is free to have its being to grow and expand unhindered by invasive and coercive authority.

Socially speaking, the criterion of civilization and culture is the degree of liberty and economic opportunity which the individual enjoys; of social and international unity and co-operation unrestricted by man-made laws and other artificial obstacles; by the absence of privileged castes and by the reality of liberty and human dignity; in short, by the true emancipation of the individual.

Political absolutism has been abolished because men have realized in the course of time that absolute power is evil and destructive. But the same thing is true of all power, whether it be the power of privilege, of money, of the priest, of the politician or of so-called democracy. In its effect on individuality it matters little what the particular character of coercion is - whether it be as black as Fascism, as yellow as Nazism or as pretentiously red as Bolshevism. It is power that corrupts and degrades both master and slave and it makes no difference whether the power is wielded by an autocrat, by parliament or Soviets. More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

The long process of history has taught man that division and strife mean death, and that unity and cooperation advance his cause, multiply his strength and further his welfare. The spirit of government has always worked against the social application of this vital lesson, except where it served the State and aided its own particular interests. It is this anti-progressive and anti-social spirit of the State and of the privileged castes back of it which has been responsible for the bitter struggle between man and man. The individual and ever larger groups of individuals are beginning to see beneath the surface of the established order of things. No longer are they so blinded as in the past by the glare and tinsel of the State idea, and of the “blessings” of “rugged individualism.” Man is reaching out for the wider scope of human relations which liberty alone can give. For true liberty is not a mere scrap of paper called “constitution,” “legal right” or “law.” It is not an abstraction derived from the non-reality known as “the State.” It is not the negative thing of being free from something, because with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.

That sort of liberty is not a gift: it is the natural right of man, of every human being. It cannot be given: it cannot be conferred by any law or government. The need of it, the longing for it, is inherent in the individual. Disobedience to every form of coercion is the instinctive expression of it. Rebellion and revolution are the more or less conscious attempt to achieve it. Those manifestations, individual and social, are fundamentally expressions of the values of man. That those values may be nurtured, the community must realize that its greatest and most lasting asset is the unit - the individual.

In religion, as in politics, people speak of abstractions and believe they are dealing with realities. But when it does come to the real and the concrete, most people seem to lose vital touch with it. It may well be because reality alone is too matter-of-fact, too cold to enthuse the human soul. It can be aroused to enthusiasm only by things out of the commonplace, out of the ordinary. In other words, the Ideal is the spark that fires the imagination and hearts of men. Some ideal is needed to rouse man out of the inertia and humdrum of his existence and turn the abject slave into an heroic figure.

Right here, of course, comes the Marxist objector who has outmarxed Marx himself. To such a one, man is a mere puppet in the hands of that metaphysical Almighty called economic determinism or, more vulgarly, the class struggle. Man’s will, individual and collective, his psychic life and mental orientation count for almost nothing with our Marxist and do not affect his conception of human history.

No intelligent student will deny the importance of the economic factor in the social growth and development of mankind. But only narrow and wilful dogmatism can persist in remaining blind to the important role played by an idea as conceived by the imagination and aspirations of the individual.

It were vain and unprofitable to attempt to balance one factor as against another in human experience. No one single factor in the complex of individual or social behavior can be designated as the factor of decisive quality. We know too little, and may never know enough, of human psychology to weigh and measure the relative values of this or that factor in determining man’s conduct. To form such dogmas in their social connotation is nothing short of bigotry; yet, perhaps, it has its uses, for the very attempt to do so proved the persistence of the human will and confutes the Marxists.

Fortunately even some Marxists are beginning to see that all is not well with the Marxian creed. After all, Marx was but human - all too human - hence by no means infallible. The practical application of economic determinism in Russia is helping to clear the minds of the more intelligent Marxists. This can be seen in the transvaluation of Marxian values going on in Socialist and even Communist ranks in some European countries. They are slowly realising that their theory has overlooked the human element, den Menschen, as a Socialist paper put it. Important as the economic factor is, it is not enough. The rejuvenation of mankind needs the inspiration and energising force of an ideal.

Such an ideal I see in Anarchism. To be sure, not in the popular misrepresentations of Anarchism spread by the worshippers of the State and authority. I mean the philosophy of a new social order based on the released energies of the individual and the free association of liberated individuals.

Of all social theories Anarchism alone steadfastly proclaims that society exists for man, not man for society. The sole legitimate purpose of society is to serve the needs and advance the aspiration of the individual. Only by doing so can it justify its existence and be an aid to progress and culture.

The political parties and men savagely scrambling for power will scorn me as hopelessly out of tune with our time. I cheerfully admit the charge. I find comfort in the assurance that their hysteria lacks enduring quality. Their hosanna is but of the hour.

Man’s yearning for liberation from all authority and power will never be soothed by their cracked song. Man’s quest for freedom from every shackle is eternal. It must and will go on.

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]

Down With the Anarchists!

2010-08-09T06:23:28Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Down With the Anarchists! Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman ==Down With the Anarchists!== We must get rid of the Anarchists! They are a menace to society. Does not Hearst say so…'

Down With the Anarchists!

Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman

==Down With the Anarchists!==
We must get rid of the Anarchists! They are a menace to society. Does not Hearst say so? Do not the M. & M. and the gentlemen of the Chamber of Commerce, who have also declared war on Labor, assure us that the Anarchists are dangerous and that they are responsible for all our troubles? Does not every skinner of Labor and every grafting politician shout against the Anarchists? Isn't that enough to prove that the Anarchists are dangerous?

But why are all the money bags and their hirelings so unanimous in condemning the Anarchists? Generally they disagree on many questions and they bitterly fight each other in their business and social life. But on TWO questions they are always in accord.

Smash the Labor Unions!<br />
Hang the Anarchists!

WHY? Because the Labor Unions are cutting the bosses' profits by constantly demanding higher wages. And the Anarchists want to abolish the boss altogether.

Now, what is the matter with the Anarchists? What do you really know about them, except the lies and misrepresentations of their enemies --- who are also the enemies of the workers and opposed to every advancement of Labor? If you stop to think of it, you really know nothing of the Anarchists and their teachings. Your masters and their press have taken good care that you shouldn't learn the truth about them. Why?" Because as long as they can keep you busy shouting against the Anarchists, they are safe in their saddle on the backs of the people.

That's the whole secret.

What do the Anarchist really want? When you know that, you will be able to decide for yourself whether the Anarchists are your enemies or your friends.

The Anarchists say that it is not necessary to have murder and crime, poverty and corruption in the world. They say that we are cursed with these evils because a handful of people have monopolized the earth and all the wealth of the country. But who produces that wealth? Who builds the railroads, who digs the coal, who works in the fields and factories? You can answer that question for yourself. It is the toilers who do all the work and who produce all that we have in the world.

The Anarchists say: The products of Labor should belong to the producers. The industries should be carried on to minister to the needs of the people instead of for profit, as at present. Abolishing monopoly in land and in the sources of production, and making the opportunity for production accessible to all, would do away with capitalism and introduce free and equal distribution. That, in turn, would do away with laws and government, as there would be no need for them, government serving only to conserve the institutions of today and to protect the masters in their exploitation of the people. It would abolish war and crime, because the incentive to either would be lacking. It would be a society of real freedom, without coercion or violence, based on the voluntary communal arrangement of "To each according to his needs; from each according to his ability."

That is what the Anarchists teach. Suppose they are all wrong. Are you going to prove it by hanging them? If they are wrong, the people will not accept their ideas, and therefore there can be no danger from them. But, if they are right, it would be good for us to find it out. In any case it is a question of learning what these Anarchists really want. Let the people hear them.

But how about violence? you say. Don't the Anarchist preach and practice violence and murder?

They don't. On the contrary, the Anarchists hold life as the most sacred thing. That's why they want to change the present order of things where everyone's hand is against his brother, and where war, wholesale slaughter in the pursuit of the dollar, bloodshed in the field, factory and workshop is the order of the day. The poverty, misery and bitter industrial warfare, the crimes, suicides and murder committed every day of the year in this country will convince any man of intelligence that in present society we have plenty of Law, but mighty little order or peace.

Anarchism means OPPOSITION to violence, by whomever committed, even if it be by the government. The government has no more right to murder than the individual. Anarchism is therefore opposition to violence as well as to government forcibly imposed on man.

The Anarchists value human life. In fact, no one values it more. Why, then, are the Anarchists always blamed for every act of violence? Because your rulers and exploiters want to keep you prejudiced against the Anarchists, so you will never find out what the Anarchist really want, and the masters will remain safe in their monopoly of life.

Now, what are facts about violence? Crimes of every kind happen every day. Are the Anarchists responsible for them? Or is it not rather misery and desperation that drive people to commit such acts? Does a millionaire go out on the street and knock you down with a gaspipe to rob you of a few dollars? O, no. He builds a factory and robs his workers in a way that is much safer, more profitable and within the law.

Who, then, commits acts of violence? The desperate man, of course. He to whom no other resort seems open. Violence is committed by all kinds of people. Such violence is mostly for the purpose of theft or robbery. But there are also cases where it is done for social reasons. such impersonal acts of violence have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals to wrongs from their fellow-men, which they felt to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent RECOIL from violence, whether aggressive or repressive; they are the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature for breathing space and life. And their CAUSE LIES NOT IN ANY SPECIAL CONVICTION, BUT IN HUMAN NATURE ITSELF. The whole course of history, political and social, is strewn with evidence of this fact. To go no further, take the Revolutionists of Russia, the Fenians and Sinn Feiners of Ireland, the Republicans of Italy. Were those people Anarchists? No. Did they all hold the same political opinions? No. But all were driven by desperate circumstances into this terrible form of revolt.

Anarchists, as well as others, have sometimes committed acts of violence. Do you hold the Republican Party responsible for every act committed by a Republican? Or the Democratic Party, or the Presbyterian or Methodist Church responsible for acts of individual members? It would be stupid to do so.

Under miserable conditions of life, any vision of the possibility of better things makes the present misery more intolerable, and spurs those who suffer to the most energetic struggles to improve their lot, and if these struggles only immediately result in sharper misery, the outcome is sheer desperation. In our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse of what work and life might and ought to be, finds the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until new ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries to spread them brings him into difficulties with his employers. How many thousands of rebel workers, of Socialists, of Industrialists and Syndicalists, but above all of Anarchists, have lost work and even the chance of work, solely on the ground of their opinions? It is only the specially gifted craftsman who, if he be a zealous propagandist, can hope to retain permanent employment. And what happens to a man with his brain working actively with a ferment of new ideas, with a vision before his eyes of a new hope dawning for toiling and agonizing men, with the knowledge that his suffering and that of his fellows in misery is not caused by the cruelty of fate, but by the injustice of other human beings---what happens to such a man when he sees those dear to him starving, when he himself is starved? Some natures in such a plight, and those by no means the least social or the least sensitive, will become violent, and will even feel that their violence is social and not anti-social, that in striking when and how they can, they are striking, not for themselves, but for human nature, out-raged and despoiled in their persons and those of their fellow sufferers. And are we, who ourselves are not in this horrible predicament, to stand by and coldly condemn these piteous victims of the Furies and Fates? Are we to decry as miscreants these human beings who act with heroic self-devotion, often sacrificing their lives in protest, where less social and less energetic natures would lie down and grovel in abject submission to injustice and wrong? Are we to join the ignorant and brutal outcry which stigmatizes such men as monsters of wickedness, gratuitously running amuck in a harmonious and innocently peaceful society? NO! We hate murder with a hatred that may seem absurdly exaggereated to apologists for war, industrial slaughter and Ludlow massacres, to callous acquiescers in governmental and plutocratic violence, but we decline in such cases of homicide as those of which we are treating, to be guilty of the cruel injustice of flinging the whole responsibility of the deed upon the immediate perpetrator. The guilt of thes homicides lies upon every man and woman who, intentionally or by cold indifference, helps to keep up social condidtions that drive human beings to despair. The man who flings his whole life into the attempt, often at the cost of his own life, to protest against the wrongs of his fellow-men, is a saint compared to the active and passive upholders of cruelty and injustice, even if his protest destroy other lives besides his own. Let him who is without sin in society cast the first stone at such a one.

THE BLAST GROUP<br />
GROUP FREEDOM<br />
ITALIAN ANARCHIST GROUP VOLONTA<br />
UNION OF RUSSIAN WORKERS

PER} EMMA GOLDMAN<br />
ALEXANDER BERKMAN

----
It is up to you, as an intelligent man or woman, to familiarize yourself with Anarchism, the philosophy of a freer and happier life. Send for literature or free sample copies to

'''THE BLAST''',<br />
Revolutionary Labor Paper,<br />
569 Dolores Street, San Francisco, Cal.<br />

'''[[Mother Earth|MOTHER EARTH]] PUB. ASS'N.'''<br />
20 E.125th St.<br />
New York City

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]

The Philosophy of Atheism

2010-08-09T06:18:34Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'The Philosophy of Atheism by Emma Goldman To give an adequate exposition of the Philosophy of Atheism, it would be necessary to go into the historical changes of the belief in …'

The Philosophy of Atheism

by Emma Goldman

To give an adequate exposition of the Philosophy of Atheism, it would be necessary to go into the historical changes of the belief in a Deity, from its earliest beginning to the present day. But that is not within the scope of the present paper. However, it is not out of place to mention, in passing, that the concept God, Supernatural Power, Spirit, Deity, or in whatever other term the essence of Theism may have found expression, has become more indefinite and obscure in the course of time and progress. In other words, the God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in- proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

God, today, no longer represents the same forces as in the beginning of His existence; neither does He direct human destiny with the same Iron hand as of yore. Rather does the God idea express a sort of spiritualistic stimulus to satisfy the fads and fancies of every shade of human weakness. In the course of human development the God idea has been forced to adapt itself to every phase of human affairs, which is perfectly consistent with the origin of the idea itself.

The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

Very aptly, the world-renowned atheist and anarchist, Michael Bakunin, says in his great work God and the State: "All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but the mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovered his own image, but enlarged and reversed -- that is divinized. The history of religions, of the birth, grandeur, and the decline of the gods who had succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed it to their gods, after having exaggerated and enlarged it beyond measure, after the manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy. . . . With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice."

Thus the God idea, revived, readjusted, and enlarged or narrowed, according to the necessity of the time, has dominated humanity and will continue to do so until man will raise his head to the sunlit day, unafraid and with an awakened will to himself. In proportion as man learns to realize himself and mold his own destiny theism becomes superfluous. How far man will be able to find his relation to his fellows will depend entirely upon how much he can outgrow his dependence upon God.

Already there are indications that theism, which is the theory of speculation, is being replaced by Atheism, the science of demonstration; the one hangs in the metaphysical clouds of the Beyond, while the other has its roots firmly in the soil. It is the earth, not heaven, which man must rescue if he is truly to be saved.

The decline of theism is a most interesting spectacle, especially as manifested in the anxiety of the theists, whatever their particular brand. They realize, much to their distress, that the masses are growing daily more atheistic, more anti-religious; that they are quite willing to leave the Great Beyond and its heavenly domain to the angels and sparrows; because more and more the masses are becoming engrossed in the problems of their immediate existence.

How to bring the masses back to the God idea, the spirit, the First Cause, etc. - that is the most pressing question to all theists. Metaphysical as all these questions seem to be, they yet have a very marked physical background. Inasmuch as religion, "Divine Truth," rewards and punishments are the trade-marks of the largest, the most corrupt and pernicious, the most powerful and lucrative industry in the world, not excepting the industry of manufacturing guns and munitions. It is the industry of befogging the human mind and stifling the human heart. Necessity knows no law; hence the majority of theists are compelled to take up every subject, even if it has no bearing upon a deity or revelation or the Great Beyond. Perhaps they sense the fact that humanity is growing weary of the hundred and one brands of God.

How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness. Perhaps that explains the efforts fostered in all religious publications to combine variegated religious philosophies and conflicting theistic theories into one denominational trust. More and more, the various concepts "of the only tree God, the only pure spirit, -- the only true religion" are tolerantly glossed over in the frantic effort to establish a common ground to rescue the modern mass from the "pernicious" influence of atheistic ideas.

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe. To accomplish this end, the crudest and vulgarest methods are being used. Religious endeavor meetings and revivals with Billy Sunday as their champion -methods which must outrage every refined sense, and which in their effect upon the ignorant and curious often tend to create a mild state of insanity not infrequently coupled with eroto-mania. All these frantic efforts find approval and support from the earthly powers; from the Russian despot to the American President; from Rockefeller and Wanamaker down to the pettiest business man. They blow that capital invested in Billy Sunday, the Y.M.C.A., Christian Science, and various other religious institutions will return enormous profits from the subdued, tamed, and dull masses.

Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell; reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment. The truth is that theism would have lost its footing long before this but for the combined support of Mammon and power. How thoroughly bankrupt it really is, is being demonstrated in the trenches and battlefields of Europe today.

Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindus; Jahveh continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

The burden of all song and praise "unto the Highest" has been that God stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth.

The philosophy of Atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it philosophy, is static and fixed. Even the mere attempt to pierce these mysteries represents, from the theistic point of view, non-belief in the all-embracing omnipotence, and even a denial of the wisdom of the divine powers outside of man. Fortunately, however, the human mind never was, and never can be, bound by fixities. Hence it is forging ahead in its restless march towards knowledge and life. The human mind is realizing "that the universe is not the result of a creative fiat by some divine intelligence, out of nothing, producing a masterpiece chaotic in perfect operation," but that it is the product of chaotic forces operating through aeons of time, of clashes and cataclysms, of repulsion and attraction crystallizing through the principle of selection into what the theists call, "the universe guided into order and beauty." As Joseph McCabe well points out in his Existence of God: "a law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts -- a 'bundle of facts.' Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the 'law' because they act in that way."

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

It may seem a wild paradox, and yet it is pathetically true, that this real, visible world and our life should have been so long under the influence of metaphysical speculation, rather than of physical demonstrable forces. Under the lash of the theistic idea, this earth has served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man's capacity for immolation to the will of God. But the moment man attempted to ascertain the nature of that will, he was told that it was utterly futile for "finite human intelligence" to get beyond the all-powerful infinite will. Under the terrific weight of this omnipotence, man has been bowed into the dust -- a will less creature, broken and sweating in the dark. The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond. Again and again the light of reason has dispelled the theistic nightmare, but poverty, misery and fear have recreated the phantoms -- though whether old or new, whatever their external form, they differed little in their essence. Atheism, on the other hand, in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahministic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth.

Only after the triumph of the Atheistic philosophy in the minds and hearts of man will freedom and beauty be realized. Beauty as a gift from heaven has proved useless. It will, however, become the essence and impetus of life when man learns to see in the earth the only heaven fit for man. Atheism is already helping to free man from his dependence upon punishment and reward as the heavenly bargain- counter for the poor in spirit.

Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self- righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not, conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself. To what heights the philosophy of Atheism may yet attain, no one can prophesy. But this much can already be predicted: only by its regenerating fire will human relations be purged from the horrors of the past

Thoughtful people are beginning to realize that moral precepts, imposed upon humanity through religious terror, have become stereotyped and have therefore lost all vitality. A glance at life today, at its disintegrating character, its conflicting interests with their hatreds, crimes, and greed, suffices to prove the sterility of theistic morality.

Man must get back to himself before he can learn his relation to his fellows. Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the night and its horrors.

Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.

[Originally published in Mother Earth, Vol. X, no. 12, February 1916.]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Philosophy of Atheism}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter

2010-08-09T06:17:01Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter

by Emma Goldman

EVER since the beginning of the European conflagration, the whole human race almost has fallen into the deathly grip of the war anesthesis, overcome by the mad teaming fumes of a blood soaked chloroform, which has obscured its vision and paralyzed its heart. Indeed, with the exception of some savage tribes, who know nothing of Christian religion or of brotherly love, and who also know nothing of dreadnaughts, submarines, munition manufacture and war loans, the rest of the race is under this terrible narcosis. The human mind seems to be conscious of but one thing, murderous speculation. Our whole civilization, our entire culture is concentrated in the mad demand for the most perfected weapons of slaughter.

Ammunition! Ammunition! O, Lord, thou who rulest heaven and earth, thou God of love, of mercy and of justice, provide us with enough ammunition to destroy our enemy. Such is the prayer which is ascending daily to the Christian heaven. Just like cattle, panic-stricken in the face of fire, throw themselves into the very flames, so all of the European people have fallen over each other into the devouring flames of the furies of war, and America, pushed to the very brink by unscrupulous politicians, by ranting demagogues, and by military sharks, is preparing for the same terrible feat.

In the face of this approaching disaster, it behooves men and women not yet overcome by the war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated upon them.

America is essentially the melting pot. No national unit composing it, is in a position to boast of superior race purity, particular historic mission, or higher culture. Yet the jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, "America for Americans," "America first, last, and all the time." This cry has caught the popular fancy from one end of the country to another. In order to maintain America, military preparedness must be engaged in at once. A billion dollars of the people's sweat and blood is to be expended for dreadnaughts and submarines for the army and the navy, all to protect this precious America.

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

With the cunning methods used by the scheming diplomats and military cliques of Germany to saddle the masses with Prussian militarism, the American military ring with its Roosevelts, its Garrisons, its Daniels, and lastly its Wilsons, are moving the very heavens to place the militaristic heel upon the necks of the American people, and, if successful, will hurl America into the storm of blood and tears now devastating the countries of Europe.

Forty years ago Germany proclaimed the slogan: "Germany above everything. Germany for the Germans, first, last and always. We want peace; therefore we must prepare for war. Only a well armed and thoroughly prepared nation can maintain peace, can command respect, can be sure of its national integrity." And Germany continued to prepare, thereby forcing the other nations to do the same. The terrible European war is only the culminating fruition of the hydra-headed gospel, military preparedness.

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munitions and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussians the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, would build up and American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be, and that because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

Like a plague, the mad spirit is sweeping the country, infesting the clearest heads and staunchest hearts with the deathly germ of militarism. National security leagues, with cannon as their emblem of protection, naval leagues with women in their lead have sprung up all over the country, women who boast of representing the gentler sex, women who in pain and danger bring forth life and yet are ready to dedicate it to the Moloch War. Americanization societies with well known liberals as members, they who but yesterday decried the patriotic clap-trap of to-day, are now lending themselves to befog the minds of the people and to help build up the same destructive institutions in America which they are directly and indirectly helping to pull down in Germany--militarism, the destroyer of youth, the raper of women, the annihilator of the best in the race, the very mower of life.

Even Woodrow Wilson, who not so long ago indulged in the phrase "A nation too proud to fight," who in the beginning of the war ordered prayers for peace, who in his proclamations spoke of the necessity of watchful waiting, even he has been whipped into line. He has now joined his worthy colleagues in the jingo movement, echoing their clamor for preparedness and their howl of "America for Americans." The difference between Wilson and Roosevelt is this: Roosevelt, a born bully, uses the club; Wilson, the historian, the college professor, wears the smooth polished university mask, but underneath it he, like Roosevelt, has but one aim, to serve the big interests, to add to those who are growing phenominally rich by the manufacture of military supplies.

Woodrow Wilson, in his address before the Daughters of the American Revolution, gave his case away when he said, "I would rather be beaten than ostracized." To stand out against the Bethlehem, du Pont, Baldwin, Remington, Winchester metallic cartridges and the rest of the armament ring means political ostracism and death. Wilson knows that, therefore he betrays his original position, goes back on the bombast of "too proud to fight" and howls as loudly as any other cheap politician for preparedness and national glory, the silly pledge the navy league women intend to impose upon every school child: "I pledge myself to do all in my power to further the interests of my country, to uphold its institutions and to maintain the honor of its name and its flag. As I owe everything in life to my country, I consecrate my heart, mind and body to its service and promise to work for its advancement and security in times of peace and to shrink from no sacrifices or privation in its cause should I be called upon to act in its defence for the freedom, peace and happiness of our people."

To uphold the institutions of our country--that's it--the institutions which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as well as of the foreigner, and turn it into wealth and power; the institutions which rob the alien of whatever originality he brings with him and in return gives him cheap Americanism, whose glory consists in mediocrity and arrogance.

The very proclaimers of "America first" have long before this betrayed the fundamental principles of real Americanism, of the kind of Americanism that Jefferson had in mind when he said that the best government is that which governs least; the kind of America that David Thoreau worked for when he proclaimed that the best government is the one that doesn't govern at all; or the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and oppressed people in coming to these shores would give character, quality and meaning to the country. That is not the America of the politician and munition speculators. Their America is powerfully portrayed in the idea of a young New York Sculptor; a hard cruel hand with long, lean, merciless fingers, crushing in over the heart of the immigrant, squeezing out its blood in order to coin dollars out of it and give the foreigner instead blighted hopes and stulted aspirations.

No doubt Woodrow Wilson has reason to defend these institutions. But what an ideal to hold out to the young generation! How is a military drilled and trained people to defend freedom, peace and happiness? This is what Major General O'Ryan has to say of an efficiently trained generation: "The soldier must be so trained that he becomes a mere automation; he must be so trained that it will destroy his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine. The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand."

This was not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian; not by Treitschke or Bernhardi, but by an American Major General. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born men; you must have slaves, automatons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else.

It has been reported that among the speakers before the Navy League was Samuel Gompers. If that is true, it signalizes the greatest outrage upon labor at the hands of its own leaders. Preparedness is not directed only against the external enemy; it aims much more at the internal enemy. It concerns that element of labor which has learned not to hope for anything from our institutions, that awakened part of the working people which has realized that the war of classes underlies all wars among nations, and that if war is justified at all it is the war against economic dependence and political slavery, the two dominant issues involved in the struggle of the classes.

Already militarism has been acting its bloody part in every economic conflict, with the approval and support of the state. Where was the protest of Washington when "our men, women and children" were killed in Ludlow? Where was that high sounding outraged protest contained in the note to Germany? Or is there any difference in killing "our men, women and children" in Ludlow or on the high seas? Yes, indeed. The men, women and children at Ludlow were working people, belonging to the disinherited of the earth, foreigners who had to be given a taste of the glories of Americanism, while the passengers of the Lusitania represented wealth and station--therein lies the difference.

Preparedness, therefore, will only add to the power of the privileged few and help them to subdue, to enslave and crush labor. Surely Gompers must know that, and if he joins the howl of the military clique, he must stand condemned as a traitor to the cause of labor.

Just as it is with all the other institutions in our confused life, which were supposedly created for the good of the people and have accomplished the very reverse, so it will be with preparedness. Supposedly, America is to prepare for peace; but in reality it will be the cause of war. It always has been thus--all through bloodstained history, and it will continue until nation will refuse to fight against nation, and until the people of the world will stop preparing for slaughter. Preparedness is like the seed of a poisonous plant; placed in the soil, it will bear poisonous fruit. The European mass destruction is the fruit of that poisonous seed. It is imperative that the American workers realize this before they are driven by the jingoes into the madness that is forever haunted by the spectre of danger and invasion; they must know that to prepare for peace means to invite war, means to unloose the furies of death over land and seas.

That which has driven the masses of Europe into the trenches and to the battlefields is not their inner longing for war; it must be traced to the cut-throat competition for military equipment, for more efficient armies, for larger warships, for more powerful cannon. You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions. We have but to examine into the nature of militarism to realize the truism of this contention.

Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue. Almost nothing is spent on education, art, literature and science compared with the amount devoted to militarism in times of peace, while in times of war everything else is set at naught; all life stagnates, all effort is curtailed; the very sweat and blood of the masses are used to feed this insatiable monster--militarism. Under such circumstances, it must become more arrogant, more aggressive, more bloated with its own importance. If for no other reason, it is out of surplus energy that militarism must act to remain alive; therefore it will seek an enemy or create one artificially. In this civilized purpose and method, militarism is sustained by the state, protected by the laws of the land, is fostered by the home and the school, and glorified by public opinion. In other words, the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.

But the most dominant factor of military preparedness and the one which inevitably leads to war, is the creation of group interests, which consciously and deliberately work for the increase of armament whose purposes are furthered by creating the war hysteria. This group interest embraces all those engaged in the manufacture and sale of munition and in military equipment for personal gain and profit. For instance, the family Krupp, which owns the largest cannon munition plant in the world; its sinister influence in Germany, and in fact in many other countries, extends to the press, the school, the church and to statesmen of highest rank. Shortly before the war, Carl Liebknecht, the one brave public man in Germany now, brought to the attention of the Reichstag that the family Krupp had in its employ officials of the highest military position, not only in Germany, but in France and in other countries. Everywhere its emissaries have been at work, systematically inciting national hatreds and antagonisms. The same investigation brought to light an international war supply trust who cares not a hang for patriotism, or for love of the people, but who uses both to incite war and to pocket millions of profits out of the terrible bargain.

It is not at all unlikely that the history of the present war will trace its origin to this international murder trust. But is it always necessary for one generation to wade through oceans of blood and heap up mountains of human sacrifice that the next generation may learn a grain of truth from it all? Can we of to-day not profit by the cause which led to the European war, can we not learn that it was preparedness, thorough and efficient preparedness on the part of Germany and the other countries for military aggrandizement and material gain; above all can we not realize that preparedness in America must and will lead to the same result, the same barbarity, the same senseless sacrifice of life? Is America to follow suit, is it to be turned over to the American Krupps, the American military cliques? It almost seems so when one hears the jingo howls of the press, the blood and thunder tirades of bully Roosevelt, the sentimental twaddle of our college-bred President.

The more reason for those who still have a spark of libertarianism and humanity left to cry out against this great crime, against the outrage now being prepared and imposed upon the American people. It is not enough to claim being neutral; a neutrality which sheds crocodile tears with one eye and keeps the other riveted upon the profits from war supplies and war loans, is not neutrality. It is a hypocritical cloak to cover, the countries' crimes. Nor is it enough to join the bourgeois pacifists, who proclaim peace among the nations, while helping to perpetuate the war among the classes, a war which in reality, is at the bottom of all other wars.

It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities. Those who appreciate the urgent need of co-operating in great struggles must oppose military preparedness imposed by the state and capitalism for the destruction of the masses. They must organize the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state. Industrial and economic preparedness is what the workers need. That alone leads to revolution at the bottom as against mass destruction from on top. That alone leads to true internationalism of labor against Kaiserdom, Kingdom, diplomacies, military cliques and bureaucracy. That alone will give the people the means to take their children out of the slums, out of the sweat shops and the cotton mills. That alone will enable them to inculcate in the coming generation a new ideal of brotherhood, to rear them in play and song and beauty; to bring up men and women, not automatons. That alone will enable woman to become the real mother of the race, who will give to the world creative men, and not soldiers who destroy. That alone leads to economic and social freedom, and does away with all wars, all crimes, and all injustice.

[Originally published in Mother Earth, Vol. X, no. 10, December 1915; also published as a pamphlet.]

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

The Failure of Christianity

2010-08-09T06:14:25Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'The Failure of Christianity by Emma Goldman The counterfeiters and poisoners of ideas, in their attempt to obscure the line between truth and falsehood, find a valuable ally in…'

The Failure of Christianity

by Emma Goldman

The counterfeiters and poisoners of ideas, in their attempt to obscure the line between truth and falsehood, find a valuable ally in the conservatism of language.

Conceptions and words that have long ago lost their original meaning continue through centuries to dominate mankind. Especially is this true if these conceptions have become a common-place, if they have been instilled in our beings from our infancy as great and irrefutable verities. The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create.

Our age has given birth to two intellectual giants, who have undertaken to transvalue the dead social and moral values of the past, especially those contained in Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner have hurled blow upon blow against the portals of Christianity, because they saw in it a pernicious slave morality, the denial of life, the destroyer of all the elements that make for strength and character. True, Nietzsche has opposed the slave-morality idea inherent in Christianity in behalf of a master morality for the privileged few. But I venture to suggest that his master idea had nothing to do with the vulgarity of station, caste, or wealth. Rather did it mean the masterful in human possibilities, the masterful in man that would help him to overcome old traditions and worn-out values, so that he may learn to become the creator of new and beautiful things.

Both Nietzsche and Stirner saw in Christianity the leveler of the human race, the breaker of man's will to dare and to do. They saw in every movement built on Christian morality and ethics attempts not at the emancipation from slavery, but for the perpetuation thereof. Hence they opposed these movements with might and main.

Whether I do or do not entirely agree with these iconoclasts, I believe, with them, that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day. Indeed, never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage, if not for the assistance of Christianity. The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.

No doubt I will be told that, though religion is a poison and institutionalized Christianity the greatest enemy of progress and freedom, there is some good in Christianity "itself." What about the teachings of Christ and - early Christianity, I may be asked; do they not stand for the spirit of humanity, for right and justice?

It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that induced me to choose this subject, to enable me to demonstrate that the abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.

I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives that even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every [in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.

Here I must revert to the counterfeiters of ideas and words. So many otherwise earnest haters of slavery and injustice confuse, in a most distressing manner, the teachings of Christ with the great struggles for social and economic emancipation. The two are irrevocably and forever opposed to each other. The one necessitates courage, daring, defiance, and strength. The other preaches the gospel of non-resistance, of slavish acquiescence in the will of others; it is the complete disregard of character and self- reliance, and therefore destructive of liberty and well-being.

Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society, whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of dependence and misery, must turn his back on Christianity, on the old as well as the present form of the same.

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.

The poor are to own heaven, and the rich will go to hell. That may account for the desperate efforts of the rich to make hay while the sun shines, to get as much out of the earth as they can: to wallow in wealth and superfluity, to tighten their iron hold on the blessed slaves, to rob them of their birthright, to degrade and outrage them every minute of the day. Who can blame the rich if they revenge themselves on the poor, for now is their time, and the merciful Christian God alone knows how ably and completely the rich are doing it.

And the poor? They cling to the promise of the Christian heaven, as the home for old age, the sanitarium for crippled bodies and weak minds. They endure and submit, they suffer and wait, until every bit of self-respect has been knocked out of them, until their bodies become emaciated and withered, and their spirit broken from the wait, the weary endless wait for the Christian heaven.

Christ made his appearance as the leader of the people, the redeemer of the Jews from Roman dominion; but the moment he began his work, he proved that he had no interest in the earth, in the pressing immediate needs of the poor and the disinherited of his time. what he preached was a sentimental mysticism, obscure and confused ideas lacking originality and vigor.

When the Jews, according to the gospels, withdrew from Jesus, when they turned him over to the cross, they may have been bitterly disappointed in him who promised them so much and gave them so little. He promised joy and bliss in another world, while the people were starving, suffering, and enduring before his very eyes.

It may also be that the sympathy of the Romans, especially of Pilate, was given Christ because they regarded him as perfectly harmless to their power and sway. The philosopher Pilate may have considered Christ's "eternal truths" as pretty anaemic and lifeless, compared with the array of strength and force they attempted to combat. The Romans, strong and unflinching as they were, must have laughed in their sleeves over the man who talked repentance and patience, instead of calling to arms against the despoilers and oppressors of his people.

The public career of Christ begins with the edict, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that was supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people suffered and endured enough; had they not earned their right to deliverance by their suffering? Take the Sermon on the Mount, for instance. What is it but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of things?

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful and beautiful come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world. Every one knows that nothing good ever came or can come of the poor in spirit; surely never liberty, justice, or equality.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from it.

Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the "redeemer" of the people.

"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."

But did not Christ exclude the possibility of righteousness when he said, "The poor ye have always with you"? But, then, Christ was great on dicta, no matter if they were utterly opposed to each other. This is nowhere demonstrated so strikingly as in his command, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

The interpreters claim that Christ had to make these concessions to the powers of his time. If that be true, this single compromise was sufficient to prove, down to this very day, a most ruthless weapon in the hands of the oppressor, a fearful lash and relentless tax-gatherer, to the impoverishment, the enslavement, and degradation of the very people for whom Christ is supposed to have died. And when we are assured that "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled," are we told the how? How? Christ never takes the trouble to explain that. Righteousness does not come from the stars, nor because Christ willed it so. Righteousness grows out of liberty, of social and economic opportunity and equality. But how can the meek, the poor in spirit, ever establish such a state of affairs?

"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven."

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder.

Good and bad, punishment and reward, sin and penance, heaven and hell, as the moving spirit of the Christ-gospel have been the stumbling-block in the world's work. It contains everything in the way of orders and commands, but entirely lacks the very things we need most.

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.

How much more ennobling, how much more beneficial is the extreme individualism of Stirner and Nietzsche than the sick-room atmosphere of the Christian faith. If they repudiate altruism as an evil, it is because of the example contained in Christianity, which set a premium on parasitism and inertia, gave birth to all manner of social disorders that are to be cured with the preachment of love and sympathy.

Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.

"Think not that I come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."

Precisely. Christ was a reformer, ever ready to patch up, to fulfill, to carry on the old order of things; never to destroy and rebuild. That may account for the fellow- feeling all reformers have for him.

Indeed, the whole history of the State, Capitalism, and the Church proves that they have perpetuated themselves because of the idea "I come not to destroy the law." This is the key to authority and oppression. Naturally so, for did not Christ praise poverty as a virtue; did he not propagate non-resistance to evil? Why should not poverty and evil continue to rule the world?

Much as I am opposed to every religion, much as I think them an imposition upon, and crime against, reason and progress, I yet feel that no other religion has done so much harm or has helped so much in the enslavement of man as the religion of Christ.

Witness Christ before his accusers. What lack of dignity, what lack of faith in himself and in his own ideas! So weak and helpless was this "Saviour of Men" that he must needs the whole human family to pay for him, unto all eternity, because he "hath died for them." Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.

Thousands of martyrs have perished, yet few, if any, of them have proved so helpless as the great Christian God. Thousands have gone to their death with greater fortitude, with more courage, with deeper faith in their ideas than the Nazarene. Nor did they expect eternal gratitude from their fellow-men because of what they endured for them.

Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed. Compared with the delicate, frail Spiridonova who underwent the most terrible tortures, the most horrible indignities, without losing faith in herself or her cause, Jesus is a veritable nonentity. They stood their ground and faced their executioners with unffinching determination, and though they, too, died for the people, they asked nothing in return for their great sacrifice.

Verily, we need redemption from the slavery, the deadening weakness, and humiliating dependency of Christian morality.

The teachings of Christ and of his followers have failed because they lacked the vitality to lift the burdens from the shoulders of the race; they have failed because the very essence of that doctrine is contrary to the spirit of life, exposed to the manifestations of nature, to the strength and beauty of passion.

Never can Christianity, under whatever mask it may appear-be it New Liberalism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, New Thought, or a thousand and one other forms of hysteria and neurasthenia-bring us relief from the terrible pressure of conditions, the weight of poverty, the horrors of our iniquitous system. Christianity is the conspiracy of ignorance against reason, of darkness against light, of submission and slavery against independence and freedom; of the denial of strength and beauty, against the affirmation of the joy and glory of life.

[Originally published in Mother Earth, Vol. VIII, no. 2, April 1913.]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Failure of Christianity}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Ross Winn's Obituary

2010-08-09T06:11:11Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Ross Winn's Obituary by Emma Goldman The inexorable master, Death, has again visited the Anarchist ranks. This time its victim was Ross Winn, one of the most earnest and able A…'

Ross Winn's Obituary

by Emma Goldman

The inexorable master, Death, has again visited the Anarchist ranks. This time its victim was Ross Winn, one of the most earnest and able American Anarchists.

Never has the power of the Ideal been demonstrated with greater force than in the life and work of this man, Ross Winn. For nothing short of a great Ideal, a burning, impelling, all absorbing ideal could make possible the task that our dead comrade so lovingly performed during a quarter of a century.

Born in Texas forty-one years ago, of farmer parents, young Winn was expected to follow the path of his fathers. But the boy had other dreams, dreams extending far beyond his immediates. His were dreams of the world, of humanity, of the struggle for liberty.

He was possessed by a passionate longing to learn the printing trade, and by that means to carry a message to mankind. His father, however, was opposed to such 'foolish notions', but Ross could not be daunted either at the age of sixteen nor during the rest of his life. He worked as a farm hand, picked cotton, and out of his meagre earnings he bought for himself a small hand press. It was at the time when plutocracy, drunk with power, was about to put to death the men whose ideas became the beacon light in the life of Ross Winn: the Chicago Anarchists. Verily, Spies was prophetic: 'The voices in the grave will speak louder than those you strangle today.'

Voltairine de Cleyre and Ross Winn - two native children of America - heard the strangled voices and, and forthwith set themselves to keep alive the work for which our brave comrades had been put to death.

Ross Winn immediately made himself conversant with the philosophy of Anarchism, which found in him a powerful, uncompromising and daring exponent. Soon after the death of our Chicago comrades he revived the Alarm, founded by Albert Parsons, and later published by Dyer D. Lum.

Always harassed by poverty, this later caused his illness and untimely death; our comrade was often compelled to discontinue his publishing work. But never for very long. Thus we find him again at the helm in 1594, issuing a little paper called The Co-operative Commonwealth; then again in 1898, the Coming Era; in 1899, Winn's Freelance. Pressed by economic adverse conditions, Ross Winn this time was forced to suspend his publication, contributing, however, meanwhile for the Free Society published for many years before his family. But in 1901 Winn resumed his own paper, Winn's Firebrand, which he subsequently called the Advance, and later the Red Phalanx.

Always his supreme passion was a paper, to arouse, inspire, and educate the people to a higher conception of human worth. So intense was that passion that we find him preparing copy on the very last day before his death, for the August issue of his paper.

I met our comrade in Chicago in 1901, and was deeply impressed with his fervour and complete abandonment to the cause - so unlike most American revolutionists, who love their ease and comfort too well to risk them for their ideals.

Ross Winn was of the John Brown, Albert Parsons, and Voltairine de Cleyre type. He lived and worked only for his ideal, and would have gone to the gallows with the same fortitude. But fate decreed that he should die a hundred deaths.

Three years ago our comrade fell victim to the disease of the poor- tuberculosis. He had little faith in doctors and tried nature instead. Unfortunately one cannot live on nature alone, especially when one has a wife and child. And so Ross Winn had to return to civilisation. In Mount Juliet, Tenn., assisted by his devoted companion Gussie Winn, and cheered by their child Ross Jr., he eked out a miserable existence, and kept up his propaganda.

Last year, however, his condition made work impossible. But he was too proud to ask assistance from his comrades even. It was though his wife that we learned of their terrible plight, immediately some money was raised which might have kept him in comfort for a while. But the only thing that meant comfort for Winn was the spreading of his beloved ideas And so he spent sixty dollars - a fortune to a little family- on a new printing outfit, and the Advance was again started.

It was this that helped more than medicine or nature to prolong the life of our tireless comrade. And then the end came. In the early morning hours of August 8 the inexorable master, Death stilled the fervent, burning tears of Ross Winn. Only the faithful Gussie and their boy were with him. The good Christian neighbours had no use for the heretic. Poor fools! How could they fathom the beauty and love that permeated the man whom they feared in life and shunned in death!

He is beyond them now, but not so his child, who next to his ideals he loved most, and whom he hoped to save from Christian kindness and patriotic beneficiency. Ross Winn is beyond it all, but we are still here, not only to continue his work with the same ardour and devotion as he, but also to bring his boy, even in a small measure, the comradeship and care of his father. At the death of Ross Winn, nine dollars was all that was left to his family.

Their need is great and immediate. I therefore earnestly urge that a fund be raised at once to assist the faithful comrade and child of Ross Winn. Contributions can be sent direct to: Gussie Winn, Route 3 Mt. Juliet, Tenn., USA or to Mother Earth.

It is only through the manifestation of solidarity that we can prove the living force of the ideas and ideals for which Ross Winn lived, worked and struggled.

[Originally published in The Anarchist 27, September of 1912.]

[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]

The Social Aspects of Birth Control

2010-08-09T06:04:55Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'The Social Aspects of Birth Control By Emma Goldman IT HAS been suggested that to create one genius nature uses all of her resources and takes a hundred years for her difficult…'

The Social Aspects of Birth Control

By Emma Goldman

IT HAS been suggested that to create one genius nature uses all of her resources and takes a hundred
years for her difficult task. If that be true, it takes
nature even longer to create a great idea. After all, in
creating a genius nature concentrates on one personality
whereas an idea must eventually become the heritage of
the race and must needs be more difficult to mould.

It is just one hundred and fifty years ago when a great
man conceived a great idea, Robert Thomas Malthus, the
father of Birth Control. That it should have taken so
long a time for the human race to realize the greatness
of that idea, is only one more proof of the sluggishness
of the human mind. It is not possible to go into a detailed discussion of the merits of Malthus' contention, to
wit, that the earth is not fertile or rich enough to supply
the needs of an excessive race. Certainly if we will
look across to the trenches and battlefields of Europe we
will find that in a measure his premise was correct. But
I feel confident that if Malthus would live to-day he
would agree with all social students and revolutionists
that if the masses of people continue to be poor and the
rich grow ever richer, it is not because the earth is lacking in fertility and richness to supply the need even of
an excessive race, but because the earth is monopolized
in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many.

Capitalism, which was in its baby's shoes during Malthus' time has since grown into a huge insatiable monster.
It roars through its whistle and machine, "Send your
children on to me, I will twist their bones; I will sap
their blood, I will rob them of their bloom," for capitalism has an insatiable appetite.

And through its destructive machinery, militarism, capitalism proclaims, "Send your sons on to me, I will drill
and discipline them until all humanity has been ground
out of them; until they become automatons ready to
shoot and kill at the behest of their masters." Capitalism
cannot do without militarism and since the masses of
people furnish the material to be destroyed in the trenches
and on the battlefield, capitalism must have a large race.

In so called good times, capitalism swallows masses of
people to throw them out again in times of "industrial
depression." This superfluous human mass, which is
swelling the ranks of the unemployed and which represents the greatest menace in modern times, is called by
our bourgeois political economists the labor margin.
They will have it that under no circumstances must the
labor margin diminish, else the sacred institution known
as capitalistic civilization will be undermined. And so the
political economists, together with all sponsors of the capitalistic regime, are in favor of a large and excessive race and are therefore opposed to Birth Control.

Nevertheless Malthus' theory contains much more
truth than fiction. In its modern aspect it rests no longer
upon speculation, but on other factors which are related
to and interwoven with the tremendous social changes
going on everywhere.

First, there is the scientific aspect, the contention on the
part of the most eminent men of science who tell us that
an overworked and underfed vitality cannot reproduce
healthy progeny. Beside the contention of scientists, we
are confronted with the terrible fact which is now even
recognized by benighted people, namely, that an indiscriminate and incessant breeding on the part of the over-worked and underfed masses has resulted in an increase
of defective, crippled and unfortunate children. So
alarming is this fact, that it has awakened social reformers to the necessity of a mental clearing house where
the cause and effect of the increase of crippled, deaf,
dumb and blind children may be ascertained. Knowing
as we do that reformers accept the truth when it has become apparent to the dullest in society, there need be no
discussion any longer in regard to the results of indiscriminate breeding.

Secondly, there is the mental awakening of woman,
that plays no small part in behalf of Birth Control. For
ages she has carried her burdens. Has done her duty
a thousand fold more than the soldier on the battlefield.
After all, the soldier's business is to take life. For that
he is paid by the State, eulogized by political charlatans
and upheld by public hysteria. But woman's function is
to give life, yet neither the state nor politicians nor public opinion have ever made the slightest provision in return for the life woman has given.

For ages she has been on her knees before the altar of
duty as imposed by God, by Capitalism, by the State, and
by Morality. To-day she has awakened from her age-long sleep. She has shaken herself free from the nightmare of the past; she has turned her face towards the
light and its proclaiming in a clarion voice that she will
no longer be a party to the crime of bringing hapless
children into the world only to be ground into dust by
the wheel of capitalism and to be torn into shreds in
trenches and battlefields. And who is to say her nay?
After all it is woman who is risking her health and sacrificing her youth in the reproduction of the race. Surely
she ought to be in a position to decide how many children she should bring into the world, whether they should
be brought into the world by the man she loves and be-
cause she wants the child, or should be born in hatred
and loathing.

Furthermore, it is conceded by earnest physicians that
constant reproduction on the part of women has resulted
in what the laity terms, "female troubles": a lucrative
condition for unscrupulous medical men. But what possible reason has woman to exhaust her system in ever-
lasting child bearing?

It is precisely for this reason that women should have
the knowledge that would enable her to recuperate during a period of from three to five years between each
pregnancy, which alone would give her physical and mental well-being and the opportunity to take better care of
the children already in existence.

But it is not woman alone who is beginning to realize
the importance of Birth Control. Men, too, especially
working men, have learned to see in large families a
millstone around their necks, deliberately imposed upon
them by the reactionary forces in society because a large
family paralyzes the brain and benumbs the muscles of
the masses of working men. Nothing so binds the
workers to the block as a brood of children and that is
exactly what the opponents of Birth Control want.
Wretched as the earnings of a man with a large family
are, he cannot risk even that little, so he continues in the
rut, compromises and cringes before his master, just to earn barely enough to feed the many little mouths. He
dare not join a revolutionary organization; he dare not go
on strike; he dare not express an opinion. Masses of
workers have awakened to the necessity of Birth Control
as a means of freeing themselves from the terrible yoke
and still more as a means of being able to do something
for those already in existence by preventing more children from coming into the world.

Last, but not least, a change in the relation of the
sexes, though not embracing very large numbers
of people, is still making itself felt among a very considerable minority. In the past and to a large extent
with the average man to-day. woman continues to be a
mere object, a means to an end; largely a physical means
and end. But there are men who want more than that
from woman; who have come to realize that if every
male were emancipated from the superstitions of the past
nothing would yet be changed in the social structure so
long as woman had not taken her place with him in the
great social struggle. Slowly but surely these men have
learned that if a woman wastes her substance in eternal
pregnancies, confinements and diaper washing, she has
little time left for anything else. Least of all has she
time for the questions which absorb and stir the father
of her children. Out of physical exhaustion and nervous
stress she becomes the obstacle in the man's way and
often his bitterest enemy. It is then for his own protection and also for his need of the companion and
friend in the woman he loves that a great many men
want her to be relieved from the terrible imposition of
constant reproduction of life, that therefore they are in
favor of Birth Control.

From whatever angle, then, the question of Birth Control may be considered, it is the most dominant issue of
modern times and as such it cannot be driven back by persecution, imprisonment or a conspiracy of silence.

Those who oppose the Birth Control Movement claim
to do so in behalf of motherhood. All the political charlatans prate about this wonderful motherhood, yet on
closer examination we find that this motherhood has gone
on for centuries past blindly and stupidly dedicating its
offspring to Moloch. Besides, so long as mothers are
compelled to work many hard hours in order to help support the creatures which they unwillingly brought into
the world, the talk of motherhood is nothing else but
cant. Ten per cent, of married women in the city of
New York have to help make a living. Most of them
earn the very lucrative salary of $280 a year. How dare
anyone speak of the beauties of Motherhood in the face
of such a crime?

But even the better paid mothers, what of them? Not
so long ago our old and hoary Board of Education declared that mother teachers may not continue to teach.
Though these antiquated gentlemen were compelled by
public opinion to reconsider their decision, it is absolutely
certain that if the average teacher were to become a
mother every year, she would soon lose her position.
This is the lot of the married mother; what about the unmarried mother? Or is anyone in doubt that there are
thousands of unmarried mothers? They crowd our shops
and factories and industries everywhere, not by choice
but by economic necessity. In their drab and monotonous
existence the only color left is probably a sexual attraction which without methods of prevention invariably leads
to abortions. Thousands of women are sacrificed as a
result of abortions because they are undertaken by quack
doctors, ignorant midwives in secrecy and in haste. Yet
the poets and the politicians sing of motherhood. A
greater crime was never perpetrated upon woman.

Our moralists know about it, yet they persist in behalf
of an indiscriminate breeding of children. They tell us
that to limit offspring is entirely a modern tendency be-
cause the modern woman is loose in her morals and
wishes to shirk responsibility. In reply to this, it is necessary to point out that the tendency to limit offspring is
as old as the race. We have as the authority for this
contention an eminent German physician Dr. Theilhaber
who has compiled historic data to prove that the tendency
was prevalent among the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the
Persians and many tribes of American Indians. The
fear of the child was so great that the women used the
most hideous methods rather than to bring an unwanted
child into the world. Dr. Theilhaber enumerates fifty-seven methods. This data is of great importance in as
much as it dispels the superstition that woman wants to
become a mother of a large family.

No, it is not because woman is lacking in responsibility,
but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception. Never in the
history of the world has woman been so race conscious
as she is to-day. Never before has she been able to see
in the child, not only in her child, but every child, the
unit of society, the channel through which man and
woman must pass; the strongest factor in the building
of a new world. It is for this reason that Birth Control rests upon such solid ground.

We are told that so long as the law on the statute books
makes the discussion of preventives a crime, these
preventives must not be discussed. In reply I
wish to say that it is not the Birth Control Movement, but the law, which will have to go. After
all, that is what laws are for, to be made and unmade. How dare they demand that life shall submit to
them? Just because some ignorant bigot in his own limitation of mind and heart succeeded in passing a law at
the time when men and women were in the thralls of religious and moral superstition, must we be bound by it
for the rest of our lives? I readily understand why
judges and jailers shall be bound by it. It means their
livelihood; their function in society. But even judges
sometimes progress. I call your attention to the decision
given in behalf of the issue of Birth Control by Judge
Gatens of Portland, Oregon. "It seems to me that the
trouble with our people to-day is, that there is too much
prudery. Ignorance and prudery have always been the
millstones around the neck of progress. We all know
that things are wrong in society; that we are suffering
from many evils but we have not the nerve to get up
and admit it, and when some person brings to our attention something we already know, we feign modesty and
feel outraged." That certainly is the trouble with most
of our law makers and with all those who are opposed to
Birth Control.

I am to be tried at Special Sessions April 5th. I do
not know what the outcome will be, and furthermore, I
do not care. This dread of going to prison for one's
ideas so prevalent among American radicals, is what
makes the movement so pale and weak. I have no such
dread. My revolutionary tradition is that those who are not willing to go to prison for their ideas have never
been considered of much value to their ideas. Besides,
there are worse places than prison. But whether I
have to pay for my Birth Control activities or come
out free, one thing is certain, the Birth Control movement cannot be stopped nor will I be stopped from carrying on Birth Control agitation. If I refrain from discussing methods, it is not because I am afraid of a second
arrest, but because for the first time in the history of
America, the issue of Birth Control through oral information is clear-cut and as I want it fought out on its
merits, I do not wish to give the authorities an opportunity to obscure it by something else. However, I do
want to point out the utter stupidity of the law. I have
at hand the testimony given by the detectives, which,
according to their statement, is an exact transcription of
what I spelled for them from the platform. Yet so ignorant are these men that they have not a single contracept
spelled correctly now. It is perfectly within the law for
the detectives to give testimony, but it is not within the
law for me to read the testimony which resulted in my
indictment. Can you blame me if I am an anarchist and
have no use for laws ? Also, I wish to point out the utter
stupidity of the American court. Supposedly justice is
to be meted out there. Supposedly there are to be no
star chamber proceedings under democracy, yet the other
day when the detectives gave their testimony, it had to be
done in a whisper, close to the judge as at the confessional in a Catholic Church and under no circumstances
were the ladies present permitted to hear anything that
was going on. The farce of it all! And yet we are expected to respect it, to obey it, to submit to it.

I do not know how many of you are willing to do it,
but I am not. I stand as one of the sponsors of a world-wide movement, a movement which aims to set woman
free from the terrible yoke and bondage of enforced
pregnancy; a movement which demands the right for
every child to be well born; a movement which shall help
free labor from its eternal dependence; a movement which
shall usher into the world a new kind of motherhood. I
consider this movement important and vital enough to
defy all the laws upon the statute-books. I believe it will
clear the way not merely for the free discussion of contracepts but for the freedom of expression in Life, Art
and Labor, for the right of medical science to experiment
with contracepts as it has in the treatment of tuberculosis
or any other disease.

I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail,
but I never will be silent; I never will acquiesce or submit to authority, nor will I make peace with a system
which degrades woman to a mere incubator and
which fattens on her innocent victims. I now and here
declare war upon this system and shall not rest until the
path has been cleared for a free motherhood and a
healthy, joyous and happy childhood.

[Mother Earth. v.11 (April 1916). pp. 468-75.]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Social Aspects of Birth Control}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Francisco Ferrer (Goldman)

2010-08-09T05:17:44Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'FRANCISCO FERRER By Emma Goldman. NEVER before in the history of the world has one man's death so thoroughly united struggling mankind. Never before has one man's death calle…'

FRANCISCO FERRER

By Emma Goldman.

NEVER before in the history of the world has one man's death so thoroughly united struggling mankind. Never before has one man's death called forth such a universal cry of indignation. Never before has one man's death so completely torn the veil from the sinister face of the hydra-headed monster, the Catholic Church.

Never before in the history of the world has one man's death so shaken the thrones of the golden calf, and spread ghastly fear among its worshippers.

One solitary death, yet more powerful than a million cringing lives. More powerful even than that black spectre which, for almost two thousand years, has tortured man's soul and poisoned his mind. Francisco Ferrer stretched in the ditch at Montjuich, his tender, all-too-loving heart silenced by twelve bullets —yet speaking, speaking in a voice so loud, so clear, so deep. . . . Wherein lies the secret of this wonderful phenomenon?

Francisco Ferrer, the Anarchist and teacher? Yes, but there were other Anarchists and teachers: Louise Michel and Elisee Reclus, for instance, beloved by many. Yet why has their death not proved such a tremendous force?

Francisco Ferrer, the founder of the Modern School? But, then, the Modern School did not originate with Francisco Ferrer, though it was he who carried it to Spain. The father of the Modern School is Paul Robin, the latter-day Dr. Pascal,—old in years, with the spirit of Spring, tender and loving, he taught modern methods of education long before Ferrer. He organized the first Modern School at Cempuis, near Paris, wherein children found a home, a warm, beautiful atmosphere.

Again, there is Sebastian Faure and his Beehive. He, too, has founded a Modern School, a free, happy, and harmonious place for children. There are scores of modern schools in France, yet no other man's death will act as a fertilizing force as that of Francisco Ferrer.

Was Ferrer's influence so great because of a lifetime of devoted effort? During eight years his heroic spirit strove to spread the light in the dark land of his birth. For eight years he toiled, ceaselessly, to rescue the child from the destructive influence of superstition. One hundred and nine schools with seventy thousand pupils crowned the gigantic efforts of our murdered comrade, while three hundred and eight liberal schools sprang into being, thanks to his beneficial influence. Yet all this and more fails to account for the tremendous volcano that swept the civilized world at Francisco Ferrer's death.

His trial was a farce. The evidence against him perjured. But was there ever a time when the State hesitated to resort to perjury when dealing with opponents? Was there ever a time when it exercised justice toward those who endangered its stronghold? The State is the very embodiment of injustice and perjury. Some make a pretence at fairness: Spain was brazen; that is all. What, then, is the secret of the phenomenon?

<div align=center><nowiki>* * *</nowiki></div>

Driven from its omnipotent position of open crime by the world's progress, the Catholic Church had not ceased to be a virulent poison within the social body. Its Borgia methods merely became more hidden, more secret, yet none the less malignant and perfidious. Cowed into apparent submission, it had not dared since the days of Huss and Bruno to openly demand a noble victim's blood. But at last, blinded by arrogance and conceit and the insatiable thirst for martyrs' blood, the Catholic Church forgot the progress of the world, forgot the spirit of our age, forgot the growth of free ideas. As of old, it was the Jesuit hand that stretched forth its bloody fingers to snatch its victim. It was the Archbishop of Barcelona who, in a statement signed by the prelates of the Church, first denounced Ferrer and demanded his life. As of old, Inquisition methods were used in the incarceration and mock trial of Ferrer. No time was to be given the progressive world to check the premeditated murder. Hastily and secretly was the martyr assassinated. Full well the Church knew that the dead cannot be saved. In vain the frantic efforts of Church and State to connect Francisco Ferrer with the uprising at Barcelona. In vain their delirious cries defaming the character of the dead.

In vain the scurrilous attacks of their harlots upon the ideas and comrades of Ferrer—attacks which have now reached even the American press.

Before the awakened consciousness of mankind the world over the Catholic Church stands condemned as the instigator and perpetrator of the foul crime committed at Montjuich. It is this awakened human consciousness which has resurrected Francisco Ferrer.

Therein lies the secret of the force of one man's death, of one solitary man in the ditch of Montjuich.

[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category: Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

Emma Goldman

2010-08-09T05:07:01Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

[[Image:Emma_Goldman.jpg|right|thumb]]
* '''[[Anarchy and the Sex Question]]''' - September 1896
* '''[[Anarchy Defended by Anarchists]]''' - October 1896
* '''[[The Tragedy at Buffalo]]''' - October 1901
* '''[[The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation]]''' - March 1906
* '''[[The Child and Its Enemies]]''' - April 1906
* '''[[La Ruche]]''' - November 1907
* '''[[What I Believe]]''' - July 1908
* '''[[A New Declaration of Independence]]''' - July 1909
* '''[[Francisco Ferrer (Goldman)|Francisco Ferrer]]''' - November 1909
* '''[[Down With the Anarchists!]]''' - 1910?
* '''[[The White Slave Traffic]]''' - January 1910
* '''[[Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Guard]]''' - March 1910
* '''[[Anarchism: What It Really Stands For]]''' - 1911
* '''[[Ross Winn's Obituary]]''' - September 1912
* '''[[Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice]]''' - January 1913
* '''[[Victims of Morality]]''' - March 1913
* '''[[The Failure of Christianity]]''' - April 1913
* '''[[Intellectual Proletarians]]''' - February 1914
* '''[[Preparedness, the Road to Universal Slaughter]]''' - December 1915
* '''[[Donald Vose: The Accursed]]''' - January 1916.
* '''[[The Philosophy of Atheism]]''' - February 1916
* '''[[The Social Aspects of Birth Control]]''' - April 1916
* '''[[The Promoters of the War Mania]]''' - March 1917
* '''[[The Woman Suffrage Chameleon]]''' - May 1917
* '''[[The Holiday]]''' - June 1917
* '''[[The Truth About the Bolsheviki]]''' - 1918
* '''[[Was My Life Worth Living?]]''' - December 1934
* '''[[The Individual, Society and the State]]''' - 1940

* '''[[The Psychology of Political Violence]]'''
----
* [http://corvusdistribution.org/index.php?title=Emma_Goldman at Corvus Editions]
* [http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/goldman/Goldmanarchive.html at Anarchy Archives]
* [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/ Emma Goldman Papers]
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman at Wikipedia]
* [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Emma_Goldman at Wikisource]

The Child and Its Enemies

2010-08-09T04:51:18Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES. By Emma Goldman. Is the child to be considered as an individuality, or as an object to be moulded according to the whims and fancies of those about i…'

THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES.

By Emma Goldman.

Is the child to be considered as an individuality, or as an object to be moulded according to the whims and fancies of those about it? This seems to me to be the most important question to be answered by parents and educators. And whether the child is to grow from within, whether all that craves expression will be permitted to come forth toward the light of day; or whether it is to be kneaded like dough through external forces, depends upon the proper answer to this vital question.

The longing of the best and noblest of our times makes for the strongest individualities. Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of his kind.

It must be borne in mind that it is through the channel of the child that the development of the mature man must go, and that the present ideas of the educating or training of the latter in the school and the family—even the family of the liberal or radical—-are such as to stifle the natural growth of the child.

Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising personality a deadly enemy; therefore every effort is being made to cramp human emotion and originality of thought in the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automatin, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist. If one, nevertheless, meets with real spontaneity (which, by the way, is a rare treat,) it is not due to our method of rearing or educating the child: the personality often asserts itself, regardless of official and family barriers. Such a discovery should be celebrated as an unusual event, since the obstacles placed in the way of growth and development of character are so numerous that it must be considered a miracle if it retains its strength and beauty and survives the various attempts at crippling that which is most essential to it.

Indeed, he who has freed himself from the fetters of the thoughtlessness and stupidity of the commonplace; he who can stand without moral crutches, without the approval of public opinion—private laziness, Friedrich Nietzsche called it—may well intone a high and voluminous song of independence and freedom; he has gained the right to it through fierce and fiery battles. These battles already begin at the most delicate age.

The child shows its individual tendencies in its plays, in its questions, in its association with people and things. But it has to struggle with everlasting external interference in its world of thought and emotion. It must not express itself in harmony with its nature, with its growing personality. It must become a thing, an object. Its questions are met with narrow, conventional, ridiculous replies, mostly based on falsehoods; and, when, with large, wondering, innocent eyes, it wishes to behold the wonders of the world, those about it quickly lock the windows and doors, and keep the delicate human plant in a hothouse atmosphere, where it can neither breathe nor grow freely.

Zola, in his novel "Fecundity," maintains that large sections of people have declared death to the child, have conspired against the birth of the child,—a very horrible picture indeed, yet the conspiracy entered into by civilization against the growth and making of character seems to me far more terrible and disastrous, because of the slow and gradual destruction of its latent qualities and traits and the stupefying and crippling effect thereof upon its social well-being.

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

The ideal of the average pedagogist is not a complete, well-rounded, original being; rather does he seek that the result of his art of pedagogy shall be automatons of flesh and blood, to best fit into the treadmill of society and the emptiness and dulness of our lives. Every home, school, college and university stands for dry, cold utilitarianism, overflooding the brain of the pupil with a tremendous amount of ideas, handed down from generations past. "Facts and data," as they are called, constitute a lot of information, well enough perhaps to maintain every form of authority and to create much awe for the importance of possession, but only a great handicap to a true understanding of the human soul and its place in the world.

Truths dead and forgotten long ago, conceptions of the world and its people, covered with mould, even during the times of our grandmothers, are being hammered into the heads of our young generation. Eternal change, thousandfold variations, continual innovation are the essence of life. Professional pedagogy knows nothing of it, the systems of education are being arranged into files, classified and numbered. They lack the strong fertile seed which, falling on rich soil, enables them to grow to great heights, they are worn and incapable of awakening spontaneity of character. Instructors and teachers, with dead souls, operate with dead values. Quantity is forced to take the place of quality. The consequences thereof are inevitable.

In whatever direction one turns, eagerly searching for human beings who do not measure ideas and emotions with the yardstick of expediency, one is confronted with the products, the herdlike drilling instead of the result of spontaneous and innate characteristics working themselves out in freedom.

"No traces now I see
Whatever of a spirit's agency.
'Tis drilling, nothing more."

These words of Faust fit our methods of pedagogy perfectly. Take, for instance, the way history is being taught in our schools. See how the events of the world become like a cheap puppet show, where a few wirepullers are supposed to have directed the course of development of the entire human race.

And the history of our own nation! Was it not chosen by Providence to become the leading nation on earth ? And does it not tower mountain high over other nations ? Is it not the gem of the ocean? Is it not incomparably virtuous, ideal and brave? The result of such ridiculous teaching is a dull, shallow patriotism, blind to its own limitations, with bull-like stubbornness, utterly incapable of judging of the capacities of other nations. This is the way the spirit of youth is emasculated, deadened through an over-estimation of one's own value. No wonder public opinion can be so easily manufactured.

"Predigested food" should be inscribed over every hall of learning as a warning to all who do not wish to lose their own personalities and their original sense of judgment, who, instead, would be content with a large amount of empty and shallow shells. This may suffice as a recognition of the manifold hindrances placed in the way of an independent mental development of the child.

Equally numerous, and not less important, are the difficulties that confront the emotional life of the young. Must not one suppose that parents should be united to children by the most tender and delicate chords? One should suppose it; yet, sad as it may be, it is, nevertheless, true, that parents are the first to destroy the inner riches of their children.

The Scriptures tell us that God created Man in His own image, which has by no means proven a success. Parents follow the bad example of their heavenly master; they use every effort to shape and mould the child according to their image. They tenaciously cling to the idea that the child is merely part of themselves—an idea as false as it is injurious, and which only increases the misunderstanding of the soul of the child, of the necessary consequences of enslavement and subordination thereof.

As soon as the first rays of consciousness illuminate the mind and heart of the child, it instinctively begins to compare its own personality with the personality of those about it. How many hard and cold stone cliffs meet its large wondering gaze? Soon enough it is confronted with the painful reality that it is here only to serve as inanimate matter for parents and guardians, whose authority alone gives it shape and form.

The terrible struggle of the thinking man and woman against political, social and moral conventions owes its origin to the family, where the child is ever compelled to battle against the internal and external use of force. The categorical imperatives: You shall! vou must! this is right! that is wrong! this is true! that is false! shower like a violent rain upon the unsophisticated head of the young being and impress upon its sensibilities that it has to bow before the long established and hard notions of thoughts and emotions. Yet the latent qualities and instincts seek to assert their own peculiar methods of seeking the foundation of things, of distinguishing between what is commonly called wrong, true or false. It is bent upon going its own way, since it is composed of the same nerves, muscles and blood, even as those who assume to direct its destiny. I fail to understand how parents hope that their children will ever grow up into independent, self-reliant spirits, when they strain every effort to abridge and curtail the various activities of their children, the plus in quality and character, which differentiates their offspring from themselves, and by the virtue of which they are Teminently equipped carriers of new, invigorating ideas. A young delicate tree, that is being clipped and cut by the gardener in order to give it an artificial form, will never reach the majestic height and the beauty as when allowed to grow in nature and freedom.

When the child reaches adolescence, it meets, added to the home and school restrictions, with a vast amount of hard traditions of social morality. The cravings of love and sex are met with absolute ignorance by the majority of parents, who consider it as something indecent and improper, something disgraceful, almost criminal, to be suppressed and fought like some terrible disease. The love and tender feelings in the young plant are turned into vulgarity and coarseness through the stupidity of those surrounding it, so that everything fine and beautiful is either crushed altogether or hidden in the innermost depths, as a great sin, that dares not face the light.

What is more astonishing is the fact that parents will strip themselves of everything, will sacrifice everything for the physical well-being of their child, will wake nights and stand in fear and agony before some physical ailment of their beloved one; but will remain cold and indifferent, without the slightest understanding before the soul cravings and the yearnings of their child, neither hearing nor wishing to hear the loud knocking of the young spirit that demands recognition. On the contrary, they will stifle the beautiful voice of spring, of a new life of beauty and splendor of love; they will put the long lean finger of authority upon the tender throat and not allow vent to the silvery song of the individual growth, of the beauty of character, of the strength of love and human relation, which alone make life worth living.

And yet these parents imagine that they mean best for the child, and for aught I know, some really do; but their best means absolute death and decay to the bud in the making. After all, they are but imitating their own masters in State, commercial, social and moral affairs, by forcibly suppressing every independent attempt to analyze the ills of society and every sincere effort toward the abolition of these ills; never able to grasp the eternal truth that every method they employ serves as the greatest impetus to bring forth a greater longing for freedom and a deeper zeal to fight for it.

That compulsion is bound to awaken resistance, every parent and teacher ought to know. Great surprise is being expressed over the fact that the majority of children of radical parents are either altogether opposed to the ideas of the latter, many of them moving along the old antiquated paths, or that thev are indifferent to the new thoughts and teachings of social regeneration. And yet there is nothing unusual in that. Radical parents, though emancipated from the belief of ownership in the human soul, still cling tenaciously to the notion that they own the child, and that they have the right to exercise their authority over it. So they set out to mould and form the child according to their own conception of what is right and wrong, forcing their ideas upon it with the same vehemence that the average Catholic oarent uses. And, with the latter, they hold out the necessity before the young "to do as I tell you and not as I do." But the impressionable mind of the child realizes early enough that the lives of their parents are in contradiction to the ideas they represent; that, like the good Christian who fervently prays on Sunday, yet continues to break the Lord's commands the rest of the week, the radical parent arraigns God, priesthood, church, government, domestic authority, yet continues to adjust himself to the condition he abhors. Just so, the Freethought parent can proudly boast that his son of four will recognize the picture of Thomas Paine or Ingersoll, or that he knows that the idea of God is stupid. Or that the Social Democratic father can point to his little girl of six and say, "Who wrote the Capital, dearie?" "Karl Marx, pa!" Or that the Anarchistic mother can make it known that her daughter's name is Louise Michel, Sophia Perovskaya, or that she can recite the revolutionary poems of Herwegh, Freiligrath, or Shelley, and that she will point out the faces of Spencer, Bakunin or Moses Harmon almost anywhere.

These are by no means exaggerations; they are sad facts that I have met with in my experience with radical parents. What are the results of such methods of biasing the mind? The following is the consequence, and not very infrequent, either. The child, being fed on one-sided, set and fixed ideas, soon grows weary of rehashing the beliefs of its parents, and it sets out in quest of new sensations, no matter how inferior and shallow the new experience may be, the human mind cannot endure sameness and monotony. So it happens that that boy or girl, over-fed on Thomas Paine, will land in the arms of the Church, or they will vote for imperialism only to escape the drag of economic determinism and scientific socialism, or that they open a shirt-waist factory and cling to their right of accumulating property, only to find relief from the old-fashioned communism of their father. Or that the girl will marry the next best man, provided he can .make a living, only to run away from the everlasting talk on variety.

Such a condition of affairs may be very painful to the parents who wish their children to follow in their path, yet I look upon them as very refreshing and encouraging psychological forces. They are the greatest guarantee that the independent mind, at least, will always resist every external and foreign force exercised over the human heart and head.

Some will ask, what about weak natures, must they not be protected? Yes, but to be able to do that, it will be necessary to realize that education of children is not synonymous with herdlike drilling and training. If education should really mean anything at all, it must insist upon the free growth and development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible.

[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category: Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Child and Its Enemies}}

The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation

2010-08-09T04:46:15Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Tragedy of Women's Emancipation By Emma Goldman BEGIN my article with an admission: Regardless of all political and economic theories, treating of the fundamental differences b…'

Tragedy of Women's Emancipation

By Emma Goldman

BEGIN my article with an admission: Regardless of all political and economic theories, treating of the fundamental differences between the various groups within the human race, regardless of class and race distinctions, regardless of all artificial boundary lines between woman's rights and man's rights, I hold that there is a point where these differentiations may meet and grow into one perfect whole.

With this I do not mean to propose a peace treaty. The general social antagonism which has taken hold of our entire public life to-day, brought about through the force of opposing and contradictory interests, will crumble to pieces when the reorganization of our social life, based upon the principles of economic justice, shall have become a reality.

Peace and harmony between the sexes, and individuals does not necessarily depend on a superficial equalization of human beings; nor does it call for the elimination of individual traits or peculiarities. The problem that confronts us, to-day, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be oneself, and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one's own innate qualities. This seems to me the basis upon which the mass and the individual, the true democrat and the true individuality, man and woman can meet without antagonism and opposition. The motto should, not be forgive one another; it should be, understand one another. The oft-quoted sentence of Mme. de Stael: "To understand everything means to forgive everything," has never particularly appealed to me; it has the odor of the confessional; to forgive one's fellow being conveys the idea of pharisaical superiority. To understand one's being suffices. This admission partly represents the fundamental aspect of my views on the emancipation of woman and its effect upon the entire sex.

Emancipation should make it possible for her to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activivy should reach expression; and all artificial barriers should be broken and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.

This was the original aim of the movement for woman's emancipation. But the results so far achieved have isolated woman and have robbed her of the fountain springs of that happiness which is so essential to her. Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being who reminds one of the products of French arboriculture with its arabesque trees and shrubs--pyramids, wheels and wreaths; anything except the forms which would be reached by the expression of their own inner qualities. Such artificially grown plants of the female sex are to be found in large numbers, especially in the so-called intellectual sphere of our life.

Liberty and equality for woman! What hopes and aspirations these words awakened when they first uttered by some of the noblest and bravest souls of those days. The sun in all its light and glory was to rise upon a new world; in this world woman was to be free to direct her own destiny, an aim certainly worthy of the great enthusiasm, courage, perseverance and ceaseless effort of the tremendous host of pioneer men and women, who staked everything against a world of prejudice and ignorance.

My hopes also move towards that goal, but I insist that the emancipation of woman, as interpreted and practically applied to-day, has failed to reach that great end. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipation from emancipation, if she really desires to be free. This may sound paradoxical, but is, nevertheless, only too true.

What has she achieved through her emancipation? Equal Suffrage in a few states. Has that purified our political life, as many well-meaning advocates have predicted? Certainly not. Incidentally it is really time that persons with plain, sound judgment should cease to talk about corruption in politics in a boarding-school tone. Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals or the laxity of morals of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one. Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottoes of which are: "to take is more blessed than to give"; "buy cheap and sell clear"; "one soiled hand washes the other." There is no hope that even woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics.

Emancipation has brought woman economic equality with man; that is, she can choose her own profession and trade, but as her past and present physical training have not equipped tier with the necessary strength to compete with man, she is often compelled to exhaust all her energy, use up her vitality and strain every nerve in order to reach the market value. Very few ever succeed, for it is a fact that women doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers are neither met with the same confidence, nor do they receive the same remuneration. And those that do reach that enticing equality generally do so at the expense of their physical and psychical well-being. As to the great mass of working girls and women, how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweat-shop, department store, or office? In addition is the burden which is laid on many women of looking after a "home, sweet home" cold, dreary, disorderly, uninviting--after a day's hard work. Glorious independence! No wonder, that hundreds of girls are so willing to accept the first offer of marriage, sick and tired of their independence behind the counter, or at the sewing or typewriting machine. They are just as ready to marry as girls of of middle class people who long to throw off the yoke of parental dependence. A so-called independence which leads only to earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal that one can expect woman to sacrifice everything for it. Our highly praised independence is, after all, but a slow process of dulling and stifling woman's nature, her love instinct and her mother instinct.

Nevertheless, The position of the working girl is far more natural and human than that of her seemingly more fortunate sister in the more cultured professional walk of life. Teachers, physicians, lawyers, engineers, etc., who have to make a dignified, straightened and proper appearance, while the inner life is growing empty and dead.

The narrowness of the existing conception of woman's independence and emancipation; the dread of love for a man who is not her social equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and independence, the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession--all these together make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without touching or gripping her soul.

Emancipation as understood by the majority of its adherents and exponents, is of too narrow a scope to permit the boundless joy and ecstasy contained in the deep emotion of the true woman, sweetheart, mother, freedom.

The tragic fate of the self-supporting or economically free woman does not consist of too many, but of too few experiencees. True, she surpasses her sister of past generations in knowledge of the world and human nature; and it is because of that that she feels deeply the lack of life's essence, which alone can enrich the human soul and without which the majority of women have become mere automatons.

That such a state of affairs was bound to come was foreseen by those who realized that in the domain of ethics, there still remained decaying ruins of the time of the undisputed superiority of man; ruins that are still considered useful. And, which is more important, a goodly number of the emancipated are unable to get along without them. Every movement that aims at the destruction of existing institutions and the replacement thereof with such as are more advanced more perfect, has followers, who in theory stand for the most extreme radical ideas, and who, nevertheless, in their every-day practice, are like the next best Philistine, feigning respectability and clamoring for the good opinion of their opponents. There are, for example, Socialists, and even Anarchists, who stand for the idea that property is robbery, yet who will grow indignant if anyone owe them the value of a half-dozen pins.

The same Philistine can be found in the movement for woman's emancipation. Yellow journalists and milk and water literateurs have painted pictures of the emancipated woman that make the hair of the good citizen and his dull companion stand up on end. Every member of the women's rights movement was pictured as a George Sand in her absolute disregard of morality. Nothing was sacred to her. She had no respect for the ideal relation between man and woman. In short, emancipation stood only for a reckless life of lust and sin; regardless of society, religion and morality. The exponents of woman's rights were highly indignant at such a misrepresentation, and, lacking in humor, they exerted all their energy to prove that they were not at all as bad as they were painted, but the very reverse. Of course, as long as woman was the slave of man, she could not be good and pure, but now that she was free and independent she would prove how good she could be and how her influence would have a purifying effect on all institutions in society. True, the movement for woman's rights has broken many old fetters, but it has also established new ones. The great movement of true emancipation has not met with a great race of women, who could look liberty in the face. Their narrow puritanical vision banished man as a disturber and doubtful character out of their emotional life. Man was not to be tolerated at any price, except perhaps as the father of a child, since a child could not very well come to life without a father. Fortunately, the rigid puritanism never will be strong enough to kill the innate craving for motherhood. But woman's freedom is closely allied to man's freedom, and many of my so-called emancipated sisters seem to overlook the fact that a child born in freedom needs the love and devotion of each human being about him, man as well as woman. Unfortunately, it is this narrow conception of human relations that has brought about a great tragedy in the lives of the modern man and woman.

About fifteen years ago appeared a work from the pen of the brilliant Norwegian writer, Laura Marholm, called "'Woman, a Character Study." She was one of the first to call attention to the, emptiness and narrowness of the existing conception of woman's emancipation and its tragic effect upon the inner life of woman. In her work she speaks of the fate of several gifted women of international fame: The genius, Eleanora Duse; the great mathematician and writer, Sanja Kovalevskaja; the artist and poet nature, Marie Bashkirzeff, who died so young. Through each description of the lives of these women of such extraordinary mentality, runs a marked trail of unsatisfied craving for a full, rounded, complete and beautiful life, and the unrest and loneliness resulting from the lack of it. Through these masterly psychological sketches, one cannot help but see that the higher the mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial mate, who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, comrade and strong individuality who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.

The average man with his self-sufficiency, his ridiculously superior airs of patronage towards the female sex, is an impossibility for woman, as depicted in the "Character Study" by Laura Marholm. Equally impossible for her is the man who can see in her nothing more than her mentality and genius, and who fails to awaken her woman nature.

A rich intellect and a fine soul are usually considered necessary attributes of a deep and beautiful personality. In the case of the modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete assertion of her being. For over one hundred years, the old form of marriage, based on the Bible, "till death us do part" has been denounced as an institution that stands for the sovereignty of the man over the woman, of her of complete submission to his whims and commands and the absolute dependence upon his name and support. Time and again it has been conclusively proven that the old matrimonial relation restricted woman to the function of man's servant and the bearer of his children. And yet we find many emancipated women prefer marriage with all its deficiencies to the narrowness of an unmarried life; narrow and unendurable because of the chains of moral and social prejudice that cramp and bind her nature.

The cause for such inconsistency on the part of many advanced women is to be found in the fact that they never truly understood the meaning of emancipation. They thought that all that was needed was independence from external tyrannies; the internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth, such as ethical and social conventions, were left to take care of themselves; and they have taken care of themselves. They seem to get along beautifully in the heads and hearts of the most active exponents of woman's emancipation, as in the heads and hearts of our grandmothers.

These internal tyrants, whether they be in the form of public opinion or what will mother say, or brother, father, aunt or relative of any sort; what will Mrs. Grundy, Mr. Comstock, the employer, the Board of Education say? All these busybodies, moral detectives, jailers of the human spirit, what will they say? Until woman has learned to defy them all, to stand firmly on her own ground and to insist upon her own unrestricted freedom, to listen to the voice of her nature, whether it call for life's greatest treasure, love for a man, or her most glorious privilege, the right to give birth to a child, she cannot call herself emancipated. How many emancipated women are brave enough to acknowledge that the voice of love is calling, wildly beating against, their breasts demanding to be satisfied.

The French novelist, Jean Reibrach, in one of his novels, "New Beauty," attempts to picture the ideal, beautiful, emancipated woman. This ideal is embodied in a young girl, a physician. She talks very clearly and wisely of how to feed infants, she is kind and administers medicines free to poor mothers. She converses with a young man of her acquaintance about the sanitary conditions of the future and how various bacilli and germs shall be exterminated by the use of stone walls and floors, and the doing away of rugs and, hangings. She is, of course, very plainly and practically dressed, mostly in black. The young man who, at their first meeting was overawed by the wisdom of his emancipated friend, gradually learns to understand her, and, recognizes one fine day that he loves her. They are young and she is kind and beautiful, and though always in rigid attire, her appearance is softened by her spotlessly clean white collar and cuffs. One would expect that he would tell her of his love, but he is not one to commit romantic absurdities. Poetry and the enthusiasm of love cover their blushing faces before the pure beauty of the lady. He silences the voice of his nature and remains correct. She, too, is always exact, always rational, always well behaved. I fear if they had formed a union, the young man would have risked freezing to death. I must confess that I can see nothing, beautiful in this new beauty, who is as cold as the stone walls and floors she dreams of. Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan, and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by a father's curse, mother's moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks. If love does not know how to give and take without restriction it is not love, but a transaction that never fail to lay stress on a plus and a minus.

The greatest shortcoming of the emancipation of the present day lies in its artificial stiffness and its narrow respectabilities which produce an emptiness in woman's soul that will not let her drink from the fountain of life. I once remarked that there seemed to be a deeper relationship between the old-fashioned mother and hostess, ever on the alert for the happiness of her little ones and the comfort of those she loved and the truly new woman, than between the latter and her average emancipated sister. The disciples of emancipation pure and simple declared me heathen, merely fit for the stake. Their blind zeal did not let them see that my comparison between the old and the new was merely to prove that a goodly number of our grandmothers had more blood in their veins, far more humor and wit, and certainly a greater amount of naturalness, kind-heartedness and simplicity than the majority of our emancipated professional women who fill our colleges, halls of learning, and various offices. This does not mean a wish to return to the past, nor does it condemn woman to her old sphere, the kitchen and the nursery.

Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and clearer future. We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and habits. The movement for woman's emancipation has so far made but the first step in that direction. It is to be hoped that it will gather strength to make another. The right to vote, equal civil rights, are all very good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gained its true liberation from its masters through its, own efforts. It is necessary that woman learn that lesson, that she realize that her freedom will reach as far as her power to achieve her freedom reaches. It is therefore far more important for her to begin with her inner regeneration to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs. The demand for various equal rights in every vocation in life is just and fair, but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed if the partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonomous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.

Pettiness separates, breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give one's self boundlessly in order to find oneself richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness and replace the tragedy of woman's emancipation with joy, limitless joy.

[Mother Earth. v.1 (March 1906). pp. 9-18.]

[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category: Articles from "Mother Earth"]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation}}

A New Declaration of Independence

2010-08-09T04:38:10Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: {{

A New Declaration of Independence

by Emma Goldman

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.

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. 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.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving men and women, realizing the great injustice and brutality of this state of affairs, earnestly and boldly do hereby declare, 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.

This `Declaration' was written at the request of a certain newspaper, which subsequently refused to publish it, though the article was already in composition.

[Originally published in ''Mother Earth'', Vol. IV, no. 5, July 1909.]

{{DEFAULTSORT:New Declaration of Independence}}
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category:Articles from "Mother Earth"]]

What I Believe

2010-08-09T04:34:25Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'What I Believe Emma Goldman "What I believe" has many times been the target of hack writers. Such blood-curdling and incoherent stories have been circulated about me, it is no …'

What I Believe

Emma Goldman

"What I believe" has many times been the target of hack writers. Such blood-curdling and incoherent stories have been circulated about me, it is no wonder that the average human being has palpitation of the heart at the very mention of the name Emma Goldman. It is too bad that we no longer live in the times when witches were burned at the stake or tortured to drive the evil spirit out of them. For, indeed, Emma Goldman is a witch! True, she does not eat little children, but she does many worse things. She manufactures bombs and gambles in crowned heads. B-r-r-r!

Such is the impression the public has of myself and my beliefs. It is therefore very much to the credit of The World that it gives its readers at least an opportunity to learn what my beliefs really are.

The student of the history of progressive thought is well aware that every idea in its early stages has been misrepresented, and the adherents of such ideas have been maligned and persecuted. One need not go back two thousand years to the time when those who believed in the gospel of Jesus were thrown into the arena or hunted into dungeons to realize how little great beliefs or earnest believers are understood. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul. If, then, from time immemorial, the New has met with opposition and condemnation, why should my beliefs be exempt from a crown of thorns?

"What I believe" is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect. While it may be true that Herbert Spencer's formulation of liberty is the most important on the subject, as a political basis of society, yet life is something more than formulas. In the battle for freedom, as Ibsen has so well pointed out, it is the struggle for, not so much the attainment of, liberty, that develops all that is strongest, sturdiest and finest in human character.

Anarchism is not only a process, however, that marches on with "sombre steps," coloring all that is positive and constructive in organic development. It is a conspicuous protest of the most militant type. It is so absolutely uncompromising, insisting and permeating a force as to overcome the most stubborn assault and to withstand the criticism of those who really constitute the last trumpets of a decaying age.

Anarchists are by no means passive spectators in the theatre of social development; on the contrary, they have some very positive notions as regards aims and methods.

That I may make myself as clear as possible without using too much space, permit me to adopt the topical mode of treatment of "What I Believe":

==I. AS TO PROPERTY==

"Property" means dominion over things and the denial to others of the use of those things. So long as production was not equal to the normal demand, institutional property may have had some ''raison d'être''. One has only to consult economics, however, to know that the productivity of labor within the last few decades has increased so tremendously as to exceed normal demand a hundred-fold, and to make property not only a hindrance to human well-being, but an obstacle, a deadly barrier, to all progress. It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives --- young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

It is conceded by all radical thinkers that the fundamental cause of this terrible state of affairs is (I) that man must sell his labor; (2) that his inclination and judgment are subordinated to the will of a master.

Anarchism is the only philosophy that can and will do away with this humiliating and degrading situation. It differs from all other theories inasmuch as it points out that man's development, his physical well-being, his latent qualities and innate disposition alone must determine the character and conditions of his work. Similarly will one's physical and mental appreciations and his soul cravings decide how much he shall consume. To make this a reality will, I believe, be possible only in a society based on voluntary co-operation of productive groups, communities and societies loosely federated together, eventually developing into a free communism, actuated by a solidarity of interests. There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of personal conduct.

==II. AS TO GOVERNMENT==

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world.

I therefore believe, with my fellow-Anarchists, that the statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates. Millet's pictorial description of "The Man with the Hoe," Meunier's masterpieces of the miners that have aided in lifting labor from its degrading position, Gorki's descriptions of the underworld, Ibsen's psychological analysis of human life, could never have been induced by government any more than the spirit which impels a man to save a drowning child or a crippled woman from a burning building has ever been called into operation by statutory regulations or the policeman's club. I believe --- indeed, I know --- that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

The Anarchists are therefore justified in assuming that Anarchism --- the absence of government --- will insure the widest and greatest scope for unhampered human development, the cornerstone of true social progress and harmony.

As to the stereotyped argument that government acts as a check on crime and vice, even the makers of law no longer believe it. This country spends millions of dollars for the maintenance of her "criminals" behind prison bars, yet crime is on the increase. Surely this state of affairs is not owing to an insufficiency of laws! Ninety per cent of all crimes are property crimes, which have their root in our economic iniquities. So long as these latter continue to exist we might convert every lamp-post into a gibbet without having the least effect on the crime in our midst. Crimes resulting from heredity can certainly never be cured by law. Surely we are learning even to-day that such crimes can effectively be treated only by the best modern medical methods at our command, and, above all, by the spirit of a deeper sense of fellowship, kindness and understanding.

==III. AS TO MILITARISM==

I should not treat of this subject separately, since it belongs to the paraphernalia of government, if it were not for the fact that those who are most vigorously opposed to my beliefs on the ground that the latter stand for force are the advocates of militarism.

The fact is that Anarchists are the only true advocates of peace, the only people who call a halt to the growing tendency of militarism, which is fast making of this erstwhile free country an imperialistic and despotic power.

The military spirit is the most merciless, heartless and brutal in existence. It fosters an institution for which there is not even a pretense of justification. The soldier, to quote Tolstoi, is a professional man-killer. He does not kill for the love of it, like a savage, or in a passion, like a homicide. He is a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors. He is ready to cut throats or scuttle a ship at the command of his ranking officer, without knowing or, perhaps, caring how, why or wherefore. I am supported in this contention by no less a military light than Gen. Funston. I quote from the latter's communication to the New York Evening Post of June 30, dealing with the case of Private William Buwalda, which caused such a stir all through the Northwest. "The first duty of an officer or enlisted man," says our noble warrior, "is unquestioning obedience and loyalty to the government to which he has sworn allegiance; it makes no difference whether he approves of that government or not."

How can we harmonize the principle of "unquestioning obedience" with the principle of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? The deadly power of militarism has never before been so effectually demonstrated in this country as in the recent condemnation by court-martial of William Buwalda, of San Francisco, Company A, Engineers, to five years in military prison. Here was a man who had a record of fifteen years of continuous service. "His character and conduct were unimpeachable," we are told by Gen. Funston, who, in consideration of it, reduced Buwalda's sentence to three years. Yet the man is thrown suddenly out of the army, dishonored, robbed of his chances of a pension and sent to prison. What was his crime? Just listen, ye free-born Americans! William Buwalda attended a public meeting, and after the lecture he shook hands with the speaker. Gen. Funston, in his letter to the Post, to which I have already referred above, asserts that Buwalda's action was a "great military offense, infinitely worse than desertion." In another public statement, which the General made in Portland, Ore., he said that "Buwalda's was a serious crime, equal to treason."

It is quite true that the meeting had been arranged by Anarchists. Had the Socialists issued the call, Gen. Funston informs us, there would have been no objection to Buwalda's presence. Indeed, the General says, "I would not have the slightest hesitancy about attending a Socialist meeting myself." But to attend an Anarchist meeting with Emma Goldman as speaker --- could there be anything more "treasonable"?

For this horrible crime a man, a free-born American citizen, who has given this country the best fifteen years of his life, and whose character and conduct during that time were "unimpeachable," is now languishing in a prison, dishonored, disgraced and robbed of a livelihood.

Can there be anything more destructive of the true genius of liberty than the spirit that made Buwalda's sentence possible --- the spirit of unquestioning obedience? Is it for this that the American people have in the last few years sacrificed four hundred million dollars and their hearts' blood?

I believe that militarism --- a standing army and navy in any country --- is indicative of the decay of liberty and of the destruction of all that is best and finest in our nation. The steadily growing clamor for more battleships and an increased army on the ground that these guarantee us peace is as absurd as the argument that the peaceful man is he who goes well armed.

The same lack of consistency is displayed by those peace pretenders who oppose Anarchism because it supposedly teaches violence, and who would yet be delighted over the possibility of the American nation soon being able to hurl dynamite bombs upon defenseless enemies from flying machines.

I believe that militarism will cease when the liberty-loving spirits of the world say to their masters: "Go and do your own killing. We have sacrificed ourselves and our loved ones long enough fighting your battles. In return you have made parasites and criminals of us in times of peace and brutalized us in times of war. You have separated us from our brothers and have made of the world a human slaughterhouse. No, we will not do your killing or fight for the country that you have stolen from us."

Oh, I believe with all my heart that human brotherhood and solidarity will clear the horizon from the terrible red streak of war and destruction.

==IV. AS TO FREE SPEECH AND PRESS==

The Buwalda case is only one phase of the larger question of free speech, free press and the right of free assembly.

Many good people imagine that the principles of free speech or press can be exercised properly and with safety within the limits of constitutional guarantees. That is the only excuse, it seems to me, for the terrible apathy and indifference to the onslaught upon free speech and press that we have witnessed in this county within the last few months.

I believe that free speech and press mean that I may say and write what I please. This right, when regulated by constitutional provisions, legislative enactments, almighty decisions of the Postmaster General or the policeman's club, becomes a farce. I am well aware that I will be warned of consequences if we remove the chains from speech and press. I believe, however, that the cure of consequences resulting from the unlimited exercise of expression is to allow more expression.

Mental shackles have never yet stemmed the tide of progress, whereas premature social explosions have only too often been brought about through a wave of repression.

Will our governors never learn that countries like England, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, with the largest freedom of expression, have been freest from "consequences"? Whereas Russia, Spain, Italy, France and, alas! even America, have raised these "consequences" to the most pressing political factor. Ours is supposed to be a country ruled by the majority, yet every policeman who is not vested with power by the majority can break up a meeting, drag the lecturer off the platform and club the audience out of the hall in true Russian fashion. The Postmaster General, who is not an elective officer, has the power to suppress publications and confiscate mail. From his decision there is no more appeal than from that of the Russian Czar. Truly, I believe we need a new Declaration of Independence. Is there no modern Jefferson or Adams?

==V. AS TO THE CHURCH==

At the recent convention of the political remnants of a once revolutionary idea it was voted that religion and vote getting have nothing to do with each other. Why should they? "So long as man is willing to delegate to the devil the care of his soul, he might, with the same consistency, delegate to the politician the care of his rights. That religion is a private affair has long been settled by the Bis-Marxian Socialists of Germany. Our American Marxians, poor of blood and originality, must needs go to Germany for their wisdom. That wisdom has served as a capital whip to lash the several millions of people into the well-disciplined army of Socialism. It might do the same here. For goodness' sake, let's not offend respectability, let's not hurt the religious feelings of the people.

Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress.

Organized churchism has stripped religion of its naïveté and primitiveness. It has turned religion into a nightmare that oppresses the human soul and holds the mind in bondage. "The Dominion of Darkness, as the last true Christian, Leo Tolstoi, calls the Church, has been a foe of human development and free thought, and as such it has no place in the life of a truly free people.

==VI. AS TO MARRIAGE AND LOVE==

I believe these are probably the most tabooed subjects in this country. It is almost impossible to talk about them without scandalizing the cherished propriety of a lot of good folk. No wonder so much ignorance prevails relative to these questions. Nothing short of an open, frank, and intelligent discussion will purify the air from the hysterical, sentimental rubbish that is shrouding these vital subjects, vital to individual as well as social well-being.

Marriage and love are not synonymous; on the contrary, they are often antagonistic to each other. I am aware of the fact that some marriages are actuated by love, but the narrow, material confines of marriage, as it is, speedily crush the tender flower of affection.

Marriage is an institution which furnishes the State and Church with a tremendous revenue and the means of prying into that phase of life which refined people have long considered their own, their very own most sacred affair. Love is that most powerful factor of human relationship which from time immemorial has defied all man-made laws and broken through the iron bars of conventions in Church and morality. Marriage is often an economic arrangement purely, furnishing the woman with a life-long life insurance policy and the man with a perpetuator of his kind or a pretty toy. That is, marriage, or the training thereto, prepares the woman for the life of a parasite, a dependent, helpless servant, while it furnishes the man the right of a chattel mortgage over a human life.

How can such a condition of affairs have anything in common with love? --- with the element that would forego all the wealth of money and power and live in its own world of untrammeled human expression? But this is not the age of romanticism, of Romeo and Juliet, Faust and Marguerite, of moonlight ecstasies, of flowers and songs. Ours is a practical age. Our first consideration is an income. So much the worse for us if we have reached the era when the soul's highest flights are to be checked. No race can develop without the love element.

But if two people are to worship at the shrine of love, what is to become of the golden calf, marriage? "It is the only security for the woman, for the child, the family, the State." But it is no security to love; and without love no true home can or does exist. Without love no child should be born; without love no true woman can be related to a man. The fear that love is not sufficient material safety for the child is out of date. I believe when woman signs her own emancipation, her first declaration of independence will consist in admiring and loving a man for the qualities of his heart and mind and not for the quantities in his pocket. The second declaration will be that she has the right to follow that love without let or hindrance from the outside world. The third and most important declaration will be the absolute right to free motherhood.

In such a mother and an equally free father rests the safety of the child. They have the strength, the sturdiness, the harmony to create an atmosphere wherein alone the human plant can grow into an exquisite flower.

==VII. AS TO ACTS OF VIOLENCE==

And now I have come to that point in my beliefs about which the greatest misunderstanding prevails in the minds of the American public. "Well, come, now, don't you propagate violence, the killing of crowned heads and Presidents?" Who says that I do? Have you heard me, has any one heard me? Has anyone seen it printed in our literature? No, but the papers say so, everybody says so; consequently it must be so. Oh, for the accuracy and logic of the dear public!

I believe that Anarchism is the only philosophy of peace, the only theory of the social relationship that values human life above everything else. I know that some Anarchists have committed acts of violence, but it is the terrible economic inequality and great political injustice that prompt such acts, not Anarchism. Every institution to-day rests on violence; our very atmosphere is saturated with it. So long as such a state exists we might as well strive to stop the rush of Niagara as hope to do away with violence. I have already stated that countries with some measure of freedom of expression have had few or no acts of violence. What is the moral? Simply this: No act committed by an Anarchist has been for personal gain, aggrandizement or profit, but rather a conscious protest against some repressive, arbitrary, tyrannical measure from above.

President Carnot, of France, was killed by Caserio in response to Carnot's refusal to commute the death sentence of Vaillant, for whose life the entire literary, scientific and humanitarian world of France had pleaded.

Bresci went to Italy on his own money, earned in the silk weaving mills of Paterson, to call King Humbert to the bar of justice for his order to shoot defenseless women and children during a bread riot. Angelino executed Prime Minister Canovas for the latter's resurrection of the Spanish inquisition at Montjuich Prison. Alexander Berkman attempted the life of Henry C. Frick during the Homestead strike only because of his intense sympathy for the eleven strikers killed by Pinkertons and for the widows and orphans evicted by Frick from their wretched little homes that were owned by Mr. Carnegie.

Every one of these men not only made his reasons known to the world in spoken or written statements, showing the cause that led to his act, proving that the unbearable economic and political pressure, the suffering and despair of their fellow-men, women and children prompted the acts, and not the philosophy of Anarchism. They came openly, frankly and ready to stand the consequences, ready to give their own lives.

In diagnosing the true nature of our social disease I cannot condemn those who, through no fault of their own, are suffering from a wide-spread malady.

I do not believe that these acts can, or ever have been intended to, bring about the social reconstruction. That can only be done, first, by a broad and wide education as to man's place in society and his proper relation to his fellows; and, second, through example. By example I mean the actual living of a truth once recognized, not the mere theorizing of its life element. Lastly, and the most powerful weapon, is the conscious, intelligent, organized, economic protest of the masses through direct action and the general strike.

The general contention that Anarchists are opposed to organization, and hence stand for chaos, is absolutely groundless. True, we do not believe in the compulsory, arbitrary side of organization that would compel people of antagonistic tastes and interests into a body and hold them there by coercion. Organization as the result of natural blending of common interests, brought about through voluntary adhesion, Anarchists do not only not oppose, but believe in as the only possible basis of social life.

It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form --- the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings endowed with the spirit of solidarity result in the perfection of social harmony --- which is Anarchism. Indeed, only Anarchism makes non-authoritarian organization a reality, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes.

[Originally published in ''New York World'', July 19, 1908.]

[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]

The Tragedy at Buffalo

2010-08-09T04:26:47Z

Shawn P. Wilbur:

The Tragedy at Buffalo

by Emma Goldman

:For they starve the little frightened child
::Till it weeps both night and day:
:And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
::And gibe the old and gray,
:And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
::And none a word may say.

:::—Oscar Wilde.

Never before in the history of governments has the sound of a pistol shot so startled, terrorized, and horrified the self-satisfied, indifferent, contented, and indolent public, as has the one fired by Leon Czolgosz when he struck down William McKinley, president of the money kings and trust magnates of this country.

Not that this modern Caesar was the first to die at the hands of a Brutus. Oh, no! Since man has trampled upon the rights of his fellow men, rebellious spirits have been afloat in the atmosphere. Not that William McKinley was a greater man than those who throned upon the fettered form of Liberty. He did not compare either in intellect, ability, personality, or force of character with those who had to pay the penalty of their power. Nor will history be able to record his extraordinary kindness, generosity, and sympathy with those whom ignorance and greed have condemned to a life of misery, hopelessness, and despair.

Why, then, were the mighty and powerful thrown into such consternation by the deed of September 6? Why this howl of a hired press? Why such blood-thirsty and violent utterances from the clergy, whose usual business it is to preach "peace on earth and good will to all"? Why the mad ravings of the mob, the demand for rigid laws to curtail freedom of press and speech?

For more than thirty years a small band of parasites have robbed the American people, and trampled upon the fundamental principles laid down by the forefathers of this country, guaranteeing to every man, woman and child, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." For thirty years they have been increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging the army of the unemployed, the hungry, homeless, and friendless portion of humanity, tramping the country from east to west and north to south, in a vain search for work. For many years the home has been left to the care of the little ones, while the parents are working their life and strength away for a small pittance. For thirty years the sturdy sons of America were sacrificed on the battlefield of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt factory surroundings. For long and weary years this process of undermining the nation's health, vigor, and pride, without much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been going on. Maddened by success and victory, the money-powers of this "free land of ours" became more and more audacious in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with rotten and decayed European tyrannies in supremacy of power.

With the minds of the young poisoned with a perverted conception of patriotism, and the fallacious notion that all are equal and that each one has the same opportunity to become a millionaire (provided he can steal the first hundred thousand dollars), it was an easy matter indeed to check the discontent of the people; one is therefore not surprised when one hears Americans say, "We can understand why the poor Russians kill their czar, or the Italians their king, for think of the conditions that prevail there; but he who lives in a republic, where each one has the opportunity to become President of the United States (provided he has a powerful party back of him), why should he attempt such acts? We are the people, and acts of violence in this country are impossible."

And now that the impossible has happened, that even America has given birth to the man who struck down the king of the republic, they have lost their heads, and are shouting vengeance upon those who for years have shown that the conditions here were beginning to be alarming, and unless a halt be called, despotism would set its heavy foot on the hitherto relatively free limbs of the people.

In vain have the mouthpieces of wealth denounced Leon Czolgosz as a foreigner; in vain they are making the world believe that he is the product of European conditions, and influenced by European ideas. This time the "assassin" happens to be the child of Columbia, who lulled him to sleep with

:"My country, 'tis of thee,
:Sweet land of liberty,"

and who held out the hope to him that he, too, could become President of the country. Who can tell how many times this American child has gloried in the celebration of the 4th of July, or on Decoration Day, when he faithfully honored the nation's dead? Who knows but what he, too, was willing to "fight for his country and die for her liberty"; until it dawned upon him that those he belonged to have no country, because they have been robbed of all that they have produced; until he saw that all the liberty and independence of his youthful dreams are but a farce. Perhaps he also learned that it is nonsense to talk of equality between those who have all and those who have nothing, hence he rebelled.

"But his act was mad and cowardly," says the ruling class. "It was foolish and impractical," echo all petty reformers, Socialists, and even some Anarchists.

What absurdity! As if an act of this kind can be measured by its usefulness, expediency, or practicability. We might as well ask ourselves of the usefulness of a cyclone, tornado, a violent thunderstorm, or the ceaseless fall of the Niagara water. All these forces are the natural results of natural causes, which we may not yet have been able to explain, but which are nevertheless a part of nature, just as force is natural and part of man and beast, developed or checked, according to the pressure of conditions and man's understanding. An act of violence is therefore not only the result of conditions, but also of man's psychical and physical nature, and his susceptibility to the world surrounding him.

Does not the summer fight against the winter, does it not resist, mourn, and weep oceans of tears in its eager attempt to shield its children from the icy grip of frost? And does not the winter enshroud Mother Earth with a white, hard cover, lest the warm spring sunshine should melt the heart of the hardened old gentleman? And does he not gather his last forces for a bitter and fierce battle for supremacy, until the burning rays of the sun disperse his ranks?

Resistance against force is a fact all through nature. Man being part of nature, he, too, is swayed by the same force to defend himself against invasion. Force will continue to be a natural factor just so long as economic slavery, social superiority, inequality, exploitation, and war continue to destroy all that is good and noble in man.

That the economic and political conditions of this country have been pregnant with the embryo of greed and despotism, no one who thinks and has closely watched events can deny. It was, therefore, but a question of time for the first signs of labor pains to begin. And they began when McKinley, more than any other President, had betrayed the trust of the people, and became the tool of the moneyed kings. They began when he and his class had stained the memory of the men who produced the Declaration of Independence, by the blood of the massacred Filipinos. They grew more violent at the recollection of Hazelton, Virden, Idaho, and other places, where capital has waged war on labor; until on the 6th of September the child begotten, nourished and reared by violence, was born.

That violence is not the result of conditions only, but also largely depends upon man's inner nature, is best proven by the fact that while thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant. What is it that drives him to commit the act, while others pass quietly by? It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others.

It is, therefore, not cruelty, or a thirst for blood, or any other criminal tendency, that induces such a man to strike a blow at organized power. On the contrary, it is mostly because of a strong social instinct, because of an abundance of love and an overflow of sympathy with the pain and sorrow around us, a love which seeks refuge in the embrace of mankind, a love so strong that it shrinks before no consequence, a love so broad that it can never be wrapped up in one object, as long as thousands perish, a love so all-absorbing that it can neither calculate, reason, investigate, hut only dare at all costs.

It is generally believed that men prompted to put the dagger or bullet in the cowardly heart of government, were men conceited enough to think that they will thereby liberate the world from the fetters of despotism. As far as I have studied the psychology of an act of violence, I find that nothing could be further away from the thought of such a man than that if the king were dead, the mob will cease to shout "Long live the king!"

The cause for such an act lies deeper far too deep for the shallow multitude to comprehend. It lies in the fact that the world within the individual, and the world around him, are two antagonistic forces, and, therefore, must clash.

Do I say that Czolgosz is made of that material? No. Neither can I say that he was not. Nor am I in a position to say whether or not he is an Anarchist; I did not know the man; no one as far as I am aware seems to have known him, but from his attitude and behavior so far (I hope that no reader of "Free Society" has believed the newspaper lies), I feel that he was a soul in pain, a soul that could find no abode in this cruel world of ours, a soul "impractical," inexpedient, lacking in caution (according to the dictum of the wise); but daring just the same, and I cannot help but bow in reverent silence before the power of such a soul, that has broken the narrow walls of its prison, and has taken a daring leap into the unknown.

Having shown that violence is not the result of personal influence, or one particular ideal, I deem it unnecessary to go into a lengthy theoretical discussion as to whether Anarchism contains the element of force or not. The question has been discussed time and again, and it is proven that Anarchism and violence are as far apart from each other as liberty and tyranny. I care not what the rabble says; but to those who are still capable of understanding I would say that Anarchism, being, a philosophy of life, aims to establish a state of society in which man's inner make-up and the conditions around him, can blend harmoniously, so that he will be able to utilize all the forces to enlarge and beautify the life about him. To those I would also say that I do not advocate violence; government does this, and force begets force. It is a fact which cannot be done away with through the prosecution of a few men and women, or by more stringent laws-this only tends to increase it.

Violence will die a natural death when man will learn to understand that each unit has its place in the universe, and while being closely linked together, it must remain free to grow and expand.

Some people have hastily said that Czolgosz's act was foolish and will check the growth of progress. Those worthy people are wrong in forming hasty conclusions. What results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one thing, however, is certain: he has wounded government in its most vital spot. As to stopping the wheel of progress, that is absurd. Ideas cannot be retarded by restraint. And as to petty police persecution, what matter?

As I write this, my thoughts wander to the death-cell at Auburn, to the young man with the girlish face, about to be put to death by the coarse, brutal hands of the law, walking up and down the narrow cell, with cold, cruel eyes following him,

:"Who watch him when he tries to weep
:And when he tries to pray;
:Who watch him lest himself should rob
:The prison of its prey."

And my heart goes out to him in deep sympathy, and to all the victims of a system of inequality, and the many who will die the forerunners of a better, nobler, grander life.

Emma Goldman

[Published in the Free Society, October 1901]

[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category: Articles from "Free Society"]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tragedy at Buffalo}}

Anarchy and the Sex Question

2010-08-09T04:21:19Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Anarchy and the Sex Question by Emma Goldman The workingman, whose strength and muscles are so admired by the pale, puny off-springs of the rich, yet whose labour barely brings…'

Anarchy and the Sex Question

by Emma Goldman

The workingman, whose strength and muscles are so admired by the pale, puny off-springs of the rich, yet whose labour barely brings him enough to keep the wolf of starvation from the door, marries only to have a wife and house-keeper, who must slave from morning till night, who must make every effort to keep down expenses. Her nerves are so tired by the continual effort to make the pitiful wages of her husband support both of them that she grows irritable and no longer is successful in concealing her want of affection for her lord and master, who, alas! soon comes to the conclusion that his hopes and plans have gone astray, and so practically begins to think that marriage is a failure.

THE CHAIN GROWS HEAVIER AND HEAVIER

As the expenses grow larger instead of smaller, the wife, who has lost all of the little strength she had at marriage, likewise feels herself betrayed, and the constant fretting and dread of starvation consumes her beauty in a short time after marriage. She grows despondent, neglects her household duties, and as there are no ties of love and sympathy between herself and her husband to give them strength to face the misery and poverty of their lives, instead of clinging to each other, they become more and more estranged, more and more impatient with each other's faults.

The man cannot, like the millionaire, go to his club, but he goes to a saloon and tries to drown his misery in a glass of beer or whiskey. The unfortunate partner of his misery, who is too honest to seek forgetfulness in the arms of a lover, and who is too poor to allow herself any legitimate recreation or amusement, remains amid the squalid, half-kept surroundings she calls home, and bitterly bemoans the folly that made her a poor man's wife.

Yet there is no way for them to part from each other.

BUT THEY MUST WEAR IT.

However galling the chain which has been put around their necks by the law and Church may be, it may not be broken unless those two persons decide to permit it to be severed.

Should the law be merciful enough to grant them liberty, every detail of their private life must be dragged to light. The woman is condemned by public opinion and her whole life is ruined. The fear of this disgrace often causes her to break down under the heavy weight of married life without daring to enter a single protest against the outrageous system that has crushed her and so many of her sisters.

The rich endure it to avoid scandal --- the poor for the sake of their children and the fear of public opinion. Their lives are one long continuation of hypocrisy and deceit.

The woman who sells her favours is at liberty to leave the man who purchases them at any time, "while the respectable wife" cannot free herself from a union which is galling to her.

All unnatural unions which are not hallowed by love are prostitution, whether sanctioned by the Church and society or not. Such unions cannot have other than a degrading influence both upon the morals and health of society.

THE SYSTEM IS TO BLAME

The system which forces women to sell their womanhood and independence to the highest bidder is a branch of the same evil system which gives to a few the right to live on the wealth produced by their fellow-men, 99 percent of whom must toil and slave early and late for barely enough to keep soul and body together, while the fruits of their labour are absorbed by a few idle vampires who are surrounded by every luxury wealth can purchase.

Look for a moment at two pictures of this nineteenth century social system.

Look at the homes of the wealthy, those magnificent palaces whose costly furnishings would put thousands of needy men and women in comfortable circumstances. Look at the dinner parties of these sons and daughters of wealth, a single course of which would feed hundreds of starving ones to whom a full meal of bread washed down by water is a luxury. Look upon these votaries of fashion as they spend their days devising new means of selfish enjoyment --- theatres, balls, concerts, yachting, rushing from one part of the globe to another in their mad search for gaiety and pleasure. And then turn a moment and look at those who produce the wealth that pays for these excessive, unnatural enjoyments.

THE OTHER PICTURE

Look at them herded together in dark, damp cellars, where they never get a breath of fresh air, clothed in rags, carrying their loads of misery from the cradle to the grave, their children running around the streets, naked, starved, without anyone to give them a loving word or tender care, growing up in ignorance and superstition, cursing the day of their birth.

Look at these two startling contrasts, you moralists and philanthropists, and tell me who is to be blamed for it! Those who are driven to prostitution, whether legal or otherwise, or those who drive their victims to such demoralisation?

The cause lies not in prostitution, but in society itself; in the system of inequality of private property and in the State and Church. In the system of legalized theft, murder and violation of the innocent women and helpless children.

THE CURE FOR THE EVIL.

Not until this monster is destroyed will we get rid of the disease which exists in the Senate and all public offices; in the houses of the rich as well as in the miserable barracks of the poor. Mankind must become conscious of their strength and capabilities, they must be free to commence a new life, a better and nobler life.

Prostitution will never be suppressed by the means employed by the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst and other reformers. It will exist as long as the system exists which breeds it.

When all these reformers unite their efforts with those who are striving to abolish the system which begets crime of every description and erect one which is based upon perfect equity --- a system which guarantees every member, man, woman or child, the full fruits of their labour and a perfectly equal right to enjoy the gifts of nature and to attain the highest knowledge --- woman will be self-supporting and independent. Her health no longer crushed by endless toil and slavery no longer will she be the victim of man, while man will no longer be possessed of unhealthy, unnatural passions and vices.

AN ANARCHIST'S DREAM

Each will enter the marriage state with physical strength and moral confidence in each other. Each will love and esteem the other, and will help in working not only for their own welfare, but, being happy themselves, they will desire also the universal happiness of humanity. The offspring of such unions will be strong and healthy in mind and body and will honour and respect their parents, not because it is their duty to do so, but because the parents deserve it. They will be instructed and cared for by the whole community and will be free to follow their own inclinations, and there will be no necessity to teach them sychophancy and the base art of preying upon their fellow-beings. Their aim in life will be, not to obtain power over their brothers, but to win the respect and esteem of every member of the community.

ANARCHIST DIVORCE.

Should the union of a man and woman prove unsatisfactory and distasteful to them they will in a quiet, friendly manner, separate and not debase the several relations of marriage by continuing an uncongenial union.

If, instead of persecuting the victims, the reformers of the day will unite their efforts to eradicate the cause, prostitution will no longer disgrace humanity.

To suppress one class and protect another is worse than folly. It is criminal. Do not turn away your heads, you moral man and woman.

Do not allow your prejudice to influence you: look at the question from an unbiased standpoint.

Instead of exerting your strength uselessly, join hands and assist to abolish the corrupt, diseased system.

If married life has not robbed you of honour and self-respect, if you have love for those you call your children, you must, for your own sake as well as theirs, seek emancipation and establish liberty. Then, and not until then, will the evils of matrimony cease.

THE END

[Originally published in The Alarm, Sunday, September 27, 1896, p. 3.]

[[Category: Works by Emma Goldman]]
[[Category: Articles from "The Alarm"]]

Anarchy Defended by Anarchists

2010-08-09T04:15:08Z

Shawn P. Wilbur: Created page with 'Anarchy Defended by Anarchists Emma Goldman & John Most To most Americans Anarchy is an evil-sounding word -- another name for wickedness, perversity, and chaos. Anarchists are…'

Anarchy Defended by Anarchists

Emma Goldman & John Most

To most Americans Anarchy is an evil-sounding word -- another name for wickedness, perversity, and chaos. Anarchists are looked upon as a herd of uncombed, unwashed, and vile ruffians, bent on killing the rich and dividing their capital. Anarchy, however, to its followers actually signifies a social theory which regards the union of order with the absense of all government of man by man; in short, it means perfect individual liberty.

If the meaning of Anarchy has so far been interpreted as a state of the greatest disorder, it is because people have been taught that their affairs are regulated, that they are ruled wisely, and that authority is a necessity.

In by-gone centuries any person who asserted that mankind could get along without the aid of worldly and spiritual authority was considered a madman, and was either placed in a lunatic asylum or burned at the stake; whereas to-day hundreds of thousands of men and women are infidels who scorn the idea of a supernatural Being.

The freethinkers of to-day, for instance, still believe in the necessity of the State, which protects society; they do not desire to know the history of our barbarian institutions. They do not understand that government did not and cannot exist without oppression; that every government has committed dark deeds and great crimes against society. The development of government has been in the order, despotism, monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy; but it has always been a tyranny.

It cannot be denied that there are a large number of wise and well-meaning people who are anxious to better the present conditions, but they have not sufficiently emancipated themselves from the prejudices and superstitions of the dark ages to understand the true inwardness of the institution called government.

"How can we get along without government?" ask these people. "If our government is bad let us try to have a good one, but we must have government by all means!"

The trouble is that there is no such thing as good government, because its very existence is based upon the submission of one class to the dictatorship of another. "But men must be governed," some remark; "they must be guided by laws." Well, if men are children who must be led, who then is so perfect, so wise, so faultless as to be able to govern and guide his fellows.

We assert that men can and should govern themselves individually. If men are still immature, rulers are the same. Should one man, or a small number of men, lead all the blind millions who compose a nation?

"But we must have some authority, at least," said an American friend to us. Certainly we must, and we have it, too; it is the inevitable power of natural laws, which manifests itself in the physical and social world. We may or may not understand these laws, but we must obey them as they are a part of our existence; we are the absolute slaves of these laws, but in such slavery there is no humiliation. Slavery as it exists to-day means an external master, a lawmaker outside of those he controls; while the natural laws are not outside of us -- they are in us; we live, we breathe, we think, we move only through these laws; they are therefore not our enemies but our benefactors.

Are the laws made by man, the laws on our statute books, in conformity with the laws of Nature? No one, we think, can have the temerity to assert that they are.

It is because the laws prescribed to us by men are not in conformity with the laws of Nature that mankind suffers from so much ill. It is absurd to talk of human happiness so long as men are not free.

We do not wonder that some people are so bitterly opposed to Anarchy and its exponents, because it demands changes so radical of existing notions, while the latter offend rather than conciliate by the zealousness of their propaganda.

Patience and resignation are preached to the poor, promising them a reward in the hereafter. What matters it to the wretched outcast who has no place to call his own, who is craving for a piece of bread, that the doors of Heaven are wider open for him than for the rich? In the face of the great misery of the masses such promises seem bitter irony.

I have met very few intelligent women and men who honestly and conscientiously could defend existing governments; they even agreed with me on many points, but they were lacking in moral courage, when it came to the point, to step to the front and declare themselves openly in sympathy with anarchistic principles.

We who have chosen the path laid down for us by our convictions oppose the organization called the State, on principle, claiming the equal right of all to work and enjoy life.

When once free from the restrictions of extraneous authority, men will enter into free relations; spontaneous organizations will spring up in all parts of the world, and every one will contribute to his and the common welfare as much labor as he or she is capable of, and consume according to their needs. All modern technical inventions and discoveries will be employed to make work easy and pleasant, and science, culture, and art will be freely used to perfect and elevate the human race, while woman will be coequal with man.

"This is all well said," replies some one, "but people are not angels, men are selfish."

What about? Selfishness is not a crime; it only becomes a crime when conditions are such as to give an individual the opportunity to satisfy his selfishness to the detriment of others. In an anarchistic society everyone will seek to satisfy his ego; but as Mother Nature has so arranged things that only those survive who have the aid of their neighbors, man, in order to satisfy his ego, will extend his aid to those who will aid him, and then selfishness will no more be a curse but a blessing.

A dagger in one hand, a torch in the other, and all his pockets brimful with dynamite bombs -- that is the picture of the Anarchist such as it has been drawn by his enemies. They look at him simply as a mixture of a fool and a knave, whose sole purpose is a universal topsy-turvy, and whose only means to that purpose is to slay any one and every one who differs from him. The picture is an ugly caricature, but its general acceptance is not to be wondered at, considering how persistently the idea has been drummed into the mind of the public. However, we believe Anarchy -- which is freedom of each individual from harmful constraint by others, whether these others be individuals or an organized government -- cannot be brought about without violence, and this violence is the same which won at Thermopylae and Marathon.

The popular demand for freedom is stronger and clearer than it has ever been before, and the conditions for reaching the goal are more favorable. It is evident that through the whole course of history runs an evolution before which slavery of any kind, compulsion under any form, must break down, and from which freedom, full and unlimited freedom, for all and from all must come.

From this it follows that Anarchism cannot be a retrogade movement, as has been insinuated, for the Anarchists march in the van and not in the rear of the army of freedom.

We consider it absolutely necessary that the mass of the people should never for a moment forget the gigantic contest that must come before their ideas can be realized, and therefore they use every means at their disposal -- the speech, the press, the deed -- to hasten the revolutionary development.

The weal of mankind, as the future will and must make plain, depends upon communism. The system of communism logically excludes any and every relation between master and servant, and means really Anarchism, and the way to this goal leads through a social revolution.

As for the violence which people take as the characteristic mark of the Anarchist, it cannot and it shall not be denied that most Anarchists feel convinced that "violence" is not any more reprehensible toward carrying out their designs than it is when used by an oppressed people to obtain freedom. The uprising of the oppressed has always been condemned by tyrants: Persia was astounded at Greece, Rome at the Caudine Forks, and England at Bunker Hill. Can Anarchy expect less, or demand victories without striving for them?

[Originally published in ''Metropolitan Magazine'', vol. IV, No. 3; October 1896.]

[[Category:Works by Johann Most]]
[[Category:Works by Emma Goldman]]