Review of “Anarchism and Other Essays” by Emma Goldman (ISBN 9780486224848)

This is a fascinating book. As Emma Goldman painted it, Anarchism is the ultimate in Western freedom, but at its core it is humanist and not a sociopathic cult of individual advantage (Ayn Rand comes to mind) – and certainly not the cult of terror as it was commonly portrayed. Yet Goldman and her comrades never succeeded in making Anarchism attractive to the public. This was due to constant character assassination by the corporate press, infighting, and whispers that Goldman was somehow associated with several high-profile assassinations, including President McKinley’s. The Anarchists themselves were passionate orators who spoke in generalities, were fond of using literary references, and they were not shy about stating that the public they were courting could sometimes be nothing more than a stupid mob. And they were arguing against nationalism and populism at a time these were quite popular. Anarchists were feared and reviled as ISIS is today, and J. Edgar Hoover’s modern FBI was created largely out of this fear.

Anarchism and Communism were both finished off by the corporate press, intense government surveillance, zealous prosecutions, show trials, executions, Congressional hearings, and the suppression of their ideas by legal edict. In the United States we have always had freedom of the press and expression – as long as any ideas expressed are in line with capitalism and nationalist fever.

Anarchism may be dead, but Goldman’s social and political criticism is as relevant as ever. In fact, reading this volume of individual essays written almost exactly a century ago is to realize how little has changed in this nation. Is our militarism, police brutality, neglect of the poor, social inequality, gun fever, our culture of violence, or the massive prison industry anything new? Read this book and weep. It has always been thus so.

The book’s first essay, “Anarchism,” argues successfully for individual freedoms and shows that the only function of the state is to guard a monopoly on violence for the benefit of oligarchs to whom the masses have stupidly given away their rights, wealth, and lives. True. But for all the Tolstoy and Emerson she quotes, Goldman does not really offer a picture of how Anarchism would actually work in practice. In fact, she is rather cagey about committing to any depiction of a new way of organizing society, except to say that social associations would be voluntary.

“Minorities versus Majorities” puts her on firmer theoretical ground, but her views insult the public. Jimmy Carter knew the sting of a public too dumb and proud to be chastised for its greed and shortsighted thinking. Don’t mess with the mob. Instead we prefer the rouged flattery of a Reagan who capitalized on our American 20 Mule Team Borax wholesomeness, Christliness and cleanliness. Goldman shows that majorities routinely persecute minorities and, worse, usually do so in the service of privileged minorities. Goldman could not have foreseen the Hobby Lobby case, but this is a perfect contemporary example of her point. She points out that public opinion is fickle and dangerous and that it tends to reject justice in favor of stasis. Goldman says it is individuals, not the masses, who generate new ideas that change the world. The crowd “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”

“The Psychology of Political Violence” attempts to explain why lone wolves were flaunting society’s monopoly on violence and using it themselves: “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 least as an irresponsible lunatic.” She defends the bomb-throwing lone wolves and the authors of political manifestos (like the contemporary Unabomber). She sympathizes with those driven to insane acts by a cruel society: “The 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.” She lists the homicidal damage by the state: victims of wars of choice, victims of industrial accident, the poor who die of hunger, victims of police and Pinkerton killings: “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.” And I agree. The terror of individuals is nothing compared with the terror of any state.

“Prisons” describes the huge prison industry that existed a century ago, and the prison-industrial complex built to permit corporations to further exploit the incarcerated. Sound familiar? Goldman quotes Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde, something we would shy away from today – after all, there is no need to describe the actual human experience of being unjustly (or justly) jailed or condemned. She points out that in 1915 the U.S. was spending $6 billion a year to incarcerate people – five times the combined output of wheat and coal, and representing the greatest proportion of jailed people in the world. “Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts.” Goldman points out that, whatever we are doing, it’s not working. We still have the most violent society in the world. She cites homicide rates of that time. Chicago then had 118 murders that year. London (5 times greater in population) had only 22. She points out that crime is a direct consequence of human desperation and quotes Havelock Ellis extensively. She examines the nature of crimes; from political to violent to economic, she charges society with creating the conditions for crime to flourish. Citing Quetelet, Lacassagne, and Ellis, she writes: in the end “every society has the criminals it deserves.”

“Patriotism: A menace to Liberty” cites the well-known Dr. Johnson quote describing patriotism as the “refuge of scoundrels.” Goldman describes how hyper-nationalism is nothing but a tool for encouraging a violent society to extend that violence to wars of opportunity. She cites Tolstoy’s conception of patriotism – “the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.” Goldman could not have foreseen the future when soldiers were elevated as gladiators to be publicly worshipped, thanked with several holidays a year, given preferential hiring, and granted economic, social, and even legal benefits denied others.

Goldman points out that the ruling class has its “cosmopolitan” (current word: “global”) interests, that patriotism is for chumps, for the masses. She hadn’t heard of Swiss or Cayman Island accounts but she points out that it is never the oligarchs who must sacrifice their children – they tend to get the officer positions far from the front. Quoting Carlisle: “war is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.” And then we wonder why our citizens act in greater proportion like wild beasts. Goldman speaks explicitly of the links between “militarism” and “commercialism.” In the end, she writes, war is incredibly profitable – at least for some people.

She brilliantly describes the benefits of a volunteer military (which the U.S. had at the time, just as we do today: “conscription has created in Europe a deep-seated hatred of militarism among all classes of society.” And “it is the compulsory feature of militarism which has created a tremendous anti-militarist movement, feared by the European Powers far more than anything else.” It seems when someone else is dying for questionable militaristic adventures we don’t bother to examine the reasons for it so closely. In fact, she says, capitalism is based on militarism: “The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter.” She points out that militarism is reinforced by economic security. She could not have foreseen how many men (40% from the South) signed up for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she understood their economic motivations: “Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments?” Goldman also could not have foreseen JROTC or the militaristic high school recruiting provisions in “No Child Left Behind,” but she wrote: “Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception: ‘Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.’ Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy.”

The book also includes a pamphlet Goldman wrote defending the memory of Francisco Ferrer, an anti-cleric and anti-monarchist who was killed for his beliefs rather than actions by Alfonso León Fernando María Jaime Isidro Pascual Antonio de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, otherwise known as King Alfonso XIII.

In addition to her political work, Goldman wrote literary and cultural commentary. “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism” aptly nails the stifling effects of Puritanism on American culture. “It is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses.” The Puritan Fathers “established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. […] Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. […] With Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible.” It is Puritanism, Goldman writes, that, “having suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, […] blesses her married sister for incontinent fruitfulness in wedlock. Indeed, not merely blesses her, but forces the woman […] to bear children.” Goldman did not foresee the day when unmarried women, too, would be forced to bear children they did not want. Prostitution is “born of the hypocrisy of Puritanism.” It is the back-alley, the outlet, the furtive, the covert, the perverted expression of sexuality that, like much in this country, cannot breathe. To top it all off, she writes, the poor worker can’t even spend Sundays away from the gloom of Capitalism; he must attend church and permit himself to be lectured-to. Puritanism, in the end, contributes to stifled, miserable, unharmonious lives.

The Anarchists were among the earliest feminists. In “The Traffic in Women,” Emma Goldman describes how Capitalism and Puritanism create a culture in which women become commodities. She actually uses the word “commodity.” She also uses the phrase “double standard” when describing attitudes around sex for men and women. At first, a poor woman with no means of her own must resort to what she euphemistically calls “Mrs. Warren’s profession.” And these are working girls in every sense. “The average wage received by women is six dollars per week for forty-eight to sixty hours of work, and 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?” Citing Margaret Sanger’s observations on women driven to prostitution by economic necessity, she writes: “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.” Goldman points out that the “sanctity of marriage” cannot survive poverty, much less natural inclinations. Much of her critique of sexual politics had its genesis in being ostracized by friends and comrades, and actually having to set up her seamstress shop (she did piece work) in a brothel, where she was treated kindly and where she began to see the women there as desperate, even moral, workers – only driven to the profession by necessity. Citing Havelock Ellis, Goldman saw the institution of marriage in a patriarchy as inherently corrupt: “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.” For women, Goldman described marriage as a “miserable institution which they can not outgrow.”

In “Woman Suffrage” Goldman turns her attention to universal suffrage, the right of women to vote. But she warns women that the vote alone will not set them free. Starting with Christianity, she writes: “Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned women to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman.” Goldman could not predict the Palins and Bachmanns of today, so she must have had extraordinary powers of discernment. War, too, oppresses women, leaving them bereft, lonely, often without resources. Her energies are sapped and sucked by housekeeping. “Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage.” She mocks the power of the vote and asks what it has bought men: “The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and, by that right, he has forged chains about his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, in fact, of everything except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.” She looks in several countries where women have the vote and finds individual freedoms there completely lacking. In four states which already permit women to vote, Puritanism keeps them in their place. She cites Emmeline Pankhurst on economic equality. Without economic parity there can be no equality. Why, after 100 years and thousands of observations like Goldman’s, is this still so? And then she takes on class.

“The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” was written as women’s suffrage was partly underway. It is in some ways a meditation on What’s Next? Goldman realized that emancipation would not be panacea. She predicted continuing wage inequality with men; that women now functioning independently would be afraid to “marry down” because of class concerns; that “love would rob her of her freedom and independence; […] that motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession.” Goldman somehow saw the future long before women had to discover how to “lean in” and attack “glass ceilings.” She cites a book by Laura Marholm on exceptional women of the day: Eleonora Duse; Sonya Kovalevskaia; and others. She writes that the more exceptional the woman, the more difficult it is to find a mate who will love her and awaken love in her: “In the case of the modern woman, these attributes serve as a hindrance to the complete assertion of her being.” It has taken a hundred years for some men to cherish exceptional women; but even here nothing is perfect.

“Marriage and Love” is a savage attack on the institution of marriage. “On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close inspection it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.” Ouch. “Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement. […] Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments.” Double Ouch. “Dante’s motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: ‘Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.'” Triple Ouch, anyone? She declares marriage as a failed institution; every twelvth marriage ends in divorce. She obviously didn’t see a 50% failure rate coming. “Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? […] How can such an arrangement end except in failure?”

“The Modern Drama” is Emma Goldman sticking her toe into literary criticism. She was exceptionally knowledgable of literature in French, German, Russian, English, and Yiddish and frequently cited contemporary writers in these languages. She tipped her hat to Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Andreiev, Gorki, Whitman, Chekov, Mirbeau, Zola, Maupassant, Holz, Suderman – and others. Her influences would have been chiefly European Naturalists writing fiction and drama. But Drama, the theater, was especially dear to her heart. She had nothing against propaganda and pamphleteering. She did it herself. But she especially venerated the theater as a place where people could see humanity in a mirror. She saw drama also as a way to suggest new values to society. For this reason it is not difficult to understand why she especially loved Ibsen’s plays. Much of this essay is analysis of plots; what the characters and their strivings meant to her. And, by extension, to humanity.

She was something. I would have to add her to my list of exceptional women of history I’d like to meet in a time machine. Rosa Parks, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg…

The introduction to this collection by Richard Drinnon is aptly titled “Harking Back to the Future,” which was absolutely perfect. Emma Goldman was way ahead of her times, and a century later is still way ahead of ours.

Review of Orfeo by Richard Powers

We don’t fully understand the link with Orfeo (Orpheus) until the end of Richard Powers’ book, when we have to acknowledge Els’ life’s goal in hindsight as the strivings, like Orfeus, of the musical being known for his ability to charm all living things, capable of even moving stones to tears. Like Orfeo, Els dies at the hands of those who cannot hear his divinely-inspired music. The Greek historian Strabo wrote of Orpheus as a mortal suspected of hatching a violent plot by his killers – and this is pretty much what happens to poor Peter Els in the book.

As I began reading Orfeo, it struck me that Peter’s father’s death merited only a quarter of a page, yet the author’s digressions on Kindertotenlieder and his dead dog, Fidelio, and the reminiscences of their attendance of musical funerals (really!) went on for pages. Powers worked a little too hard to sell us the notion that Els was a high-strung music geek – the kind who has a little eight year-old’s erection when he hears dissonant music for the first time. Please. I was really not enjoying the book at first.

But it did eventually get better.

Within short order we learn that Els is obsessed with the notion of creating transcendent music, something good, something unique, something remarkable, something possibly even holy. Unfortunately he cannot seem to find it in a world that filters out so much, that has such a short attention span: a world that generates and treats music like a commodity. Intermixing hints of the godliness of Els’ goals – and hints of a social critique of art in a capitalist society – muddies Powers’ theme.

In the first 70+ pages we find Els persisting in his art, but also taking the occasional shortcut. He experiments with Markov chains – probabilistic state machines that permit new states to be randomly generated. If you’ve heard it – and it exists – Markov chain-generated music is dull and lifeless, even when using many orders of complexity and tweaked by a human hand. It is unsurprising that Els moves on to something more alive – though randomness is at the heart of both his music and his life.

Els is explicitly compared to Faust several times – more muddying. He makes the acquaintance of Richard Bonner, a performance artist and artistic co-conspirator described as “seductive,” and he begins to see the act of making art as not simply bold but subversive. Is Orfeo the story of a Faust’s fatal seductions by a Mephistopheles or is it what happens when artists have impossibly high ambitions and are not understood?

Ultimately, Els’ wife Maddy, once a fringe musician herself but now a responsible wife and mother, begins to appear to him as a “schoolmarm” and his marriage and relationship with daughter Sara founder as he goes his own way and they move to Saint Louis. He lives a somewhat itinerant existence until (by random chance, again) he becomes a lowly adjunct professor in a charity appointment.

Much of the plot of Orfeo is counterposed with events of the Sixties through 9/11. There is the occasional reference to theory of art under capitalism (recalling Adorno and the Frankfurter school). In numerous places music (recounting the experiences of Messaiaen and Shostakovich, for example) is described as subversive to the state, and even Els’ innocent project of producing music with a telephone keypad for his daughter may have had unintended consequences (unwittingly dialing emergency services) that leave him on a Homeland Security watchlist. Creating custom sequences of DNA encoded with music might have seemed like conceptual art to Els, but in post 9/11 Amerika it is an attack on die Heimat, Verrat gegen das Vaterland.

Many reviews of the book seem to peg Orfeo as an exercise in music appreciation, and no doubt Powers adores the composers he describes. However, for “civilians” like me it was also a book about seeking patterns and manipulating them. Many of the obsessions of practitioners of art, music, and literature seem to center on recognition of patterns and concepts, and/or imposing, forcing, shoe-horning, conjuring, or wishing them [just as often inartfully] into some kind of artistic vision. To some degree, everyone in Els’ family is guilty of this offense: his doomed authoritarian father; his brother Paul, a conspiracy theorist; and his sister Susan, living in an ashram in India. Els, either by temperament or choice of collaborators, is looking for meaning in nature and working mightily to convert nature into meaning. Even Els daughter Sara is a data mining whiz – perhaps the ultimate in pattern recognition pursuits. Maybe there’s no avoiding it: it’s just what we humans do.

There is a sequence in the book early on in which Els goes for his morning walk and encounters a Spandex goddess running while listening to her iPod, filtering thousands of melodies by sending them like a concentration camp guard either to the right, where they live for a closer listening later, or to the left, where they meet a certain death. “The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.” We learn that Els has a rule for himself: that he will always listen through to the end of a piece. This flaunts the practices of a society whose teens are drowning in Adderall. After attempting to listen to the hour-long pieces Powers has chosen to describe in the novel, I confess to firmly belonging to the ranks of Adderall philistines. Life is too short to honor or indulge every artist’s notion.

Society’s brutal winnowing principle is not just for the products of art but for artists as well. Society surrounds “dangerous” art and artists like macrophages attacking pathogens – a principle reflected in the paranoia overtaking our nation. “The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain.” Once Els goes on the run, someone discovers an old composition of his and “mines” the lyrics for dangerous and subversive references. Society is clearly afraid of challenge and provocation – if nowhere else than in the citizenry’s pointy little heads.

Els is painfully aware that his artistic search is not bringing him any pleasure, nor does it seem to bring anyone else much. In England after a traffic-direction miscalculation has killed his mother while vacationing there, Els goes to a pub and sees happy publicans singing to crude tunes: “People at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years.” How easy it is for artists to doubt themselves. And sometimes with inexplicably good reason.

Our protagonist lives in an age in which randomness, chaos, and lack of control are what truly set the world in motion. And why should his art not reflect this reality? Watching the Arab Spring unfold, we see it through Els’ eyes: “As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune.” Thus, we can imagine, his interest in musical DNA was hatched.

Still in England, Els visits his first love, Clara, who has set him on his artistic trajectory. They have dinner and she takes him upstairs to her bedroom, telling him everything is on the table, anything is possible – and he flees from her. It seems tragic to the reader but Els senses the same danger in Clara that society senses in him – and he does not have the courage to live life on these terms. He really doesn’t know in which world he belongs. On the one hand, he is Sara’s father (“make something good, daddy”) and on the other a subversive wannabe. This is the tragedy of the book. He cannot be a god.

Els eventually writes an opera entitled “City of God.” It is a Reformation tragedy based on actual events in Münster, Germany. A group of Protestant religious fanatics who have become polygamists believe the earthly world must end before a heavenly kingdom replaces it. Bonner is a collaborator in the production, but it is threatened by oddly similar events unfolding in real time in Waco, Texas. We learn that Els is not in the enterprise solely for fame, since he pulls away from his own opera when Waco hits the news. Something else motivates him (l’art pour l’art)? Somehow we start taking his music more seriously, seeing him as more artistically principled, but simultaneously as more timid.

Els, based on positive reviews of his opera, is then offered a job as an adjunct music professor and one of his students comes for musical advice, showing him a complex composition it turns out was written by software called “Sibelius” – a “program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus.” Shortcuts call out to Els again. Is he himself an average tunesmith who needs a lab full of DNA to make him another Orpheus. The answer is: yes.

After concocting his test-tube music and being investigated after his dog’s death, the seventy-one year-old Els goes on the run, first visiting a therapist with whom he once had an affair, his ex-wife, Bonner (now in an Arizona care facility for Alzheimer’s patients), and finally his daughter. By now we have learned that Els has tinnitus, brain lesions which have affected his musical sensibilities, and Bonner has convinced him that, as long as he is considered a terrorist, he might as well engender a little terror – by leaving a trail of vaguely incriminating Tweets. As Els navigates to his daughter’s house in a borrowed car with “the Voice” app on a borrowed cellphone, he notices the marks of tramps and vagrants on the highway, recalling a composer who memorialized them. To a consummate pattern-seeker like Els there are signs and wonders everywhere. His frame of reference has always been musical, but ultimately all of life is just random noise.

Finally Els arrives at his daughter’s house. He notices she has a piano and has not, apparently, rejected everything musically important to him. But, having sufficiently alarmed Homeland Security, Els is now surrounded by a SWAT team. With his musical powers gone and seeing his life as one huge mistake, Els decides to “arm” himself with a thin flower vase – art as a weapon – all too easily confused with a beaker of pathogens. We know how this sad story is going to end – and in the tragic end the novel is ultimately focused on society’s fear of art and the difficult path to it by artists of any stripe – not solely as a music appreciation project by Powers, the failed composer.