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Question Elites

The elite maintain their power depending on how they exhibit leadership in crisis. They know this, especially since a long-standing political belief is that in troubled times, we need good stewardship—a steady hand navigating a ship through the eye of the storm to get us ashore. During the Trump years, the “chaos” of the White House is what left so many journalists disturbed. Incoherent and disorganized, deranged and unhinged, was how they described his style. But be careful what you wish for. Imagine if Trump had displayed muscular leadership during his four years in office. We would have been at war with China and Russia, witnessed the censoring of free speech in leading newspapers, and seen the crushing of the Black Lives Matter protests with the full force of the US army. Elite leadership after disaster can be an existential threat for democracy. By no means is it a precondition for a well-functioning society. So, question leaders who claim to know best. Expose how they neglect, if not intensify, the precariousness of the most vulnerable. You don’t need a PhD from Harvard to know that war benefits weapon manufacturers, not soldiers and civilians, who are its collateral damage. You don’t need to be an economist to know that middle-class wealth is nothing compared to that of the super-rich. People can rule themselves. Be free. Be spontaneous.

No one devoted her life to raising awareness about the danger of elite rule as much as the anarchist Emma Goldman. Before she became known as “Red Emma” and world famous for her impassioned speeches to thousands by assailing the monstrosity of Gilded Age capitalism in relation to the tenement houses in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1890s, Goldman was a refugee from arbitrary power. She arrived in the US with her sister to escape an arranged marriage and her abusive father, Abraham, who blamed her for a sexual assault she experienced as a teen in a hotel in St. Petersburg, where she and her Orthodox Jewish family lived. Goldman resolved to never return to tsarist Russia or to the Jewish village in Kovno, Lithuania, where she was born on June 27, 1869.

Revolutionaries aren’t products of a divine miracle. They’re made. A spark inflames your sense of purpose, shining a bright light upon what was dark before. You’re moved to act. One night, after working a grueling ten-hour day at a job for which she earned fifty cents a week, in Rochester, New York, a seventeen-year-old Goldman read about the event that would change everything for her: the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. On May 4, 1886, a rally was held in Haymarket Square to support the general strike being held for an eight-hour workday. The rally in Haymarket was one of 1,400 held throughout the country over the next few weeks and included, in total, almost half a million participants. At the Haymarket rally, a bomb exploded. Seven policemen and eleven demonstrators died. Eight Chicago labor leaders, proud anarchists, were charged, even though they hadn’t thrown the explosive. Four of them were hanged a year later, in 1887. When she heard a woman enthusiastically endorse their execution, saying that’s just what the murderers deserved, Goldman leapt at her throat, screaming, “I will kill you!”1

Why was Goldman enraged? Because the American government was doing what it always does when the public is stunned—asserting its power to secure its crumbling authority. At the time, singling out anarchists was an effective way to scare the ascendent labor movement, which was being driven by the waves of immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. Goldman wouldn’t stand for it. So, she made Haymarket into a symbol for what became Goldman’s lifelong enemy: Unchecked authority, ruthless in its hypocrisy and shameless in its conduct. Power that creates the disorder it then claims to resolve. “Organized authority [gives] greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth . . . further enslaving the disinherited masses,” she declared. “Government—laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons—is strenuously engaged in ‘harmonizing’ the most antagonistic elements in society.”2

Words matter. Damning, inflamed, intense, agitated turns of phrase—rippling with a frenzied cadence—make you reassess what it means to be a citizen. It’s not violence, but vivid arguments that speak to your life, that make you believe transformation is possible. Violence doesn’t work. Because when violence erupts, the public gets outraged and the government is more repressive. Recall that the assassination of President William McKinley by an overzealous anarchist in 1901 led to the congressional passage of the repressive Alien Immigration Act of 1903, which banned and expelled anarchists. Or the failed killing of union-busting industrialist Henry Clay Frick by Alexander Berkman, Goldman’s longtime confidant, on July 23, 1892, which led not to revolutionary change but to Berkman being jailed for fourteen years.

The great lesson of anarchism is that revolutionary writing is more dangerous than one-off sensational deeds. Arguments are contagious. Remember that Goldman’s pride and joy was her journal, Mother Earth, which she founded in 1906 and remained in print until 1917. When her book Anarchism and Other Essays was published in 1910, she traveled to 37 cities and gave 120 lectures. Write a pamphlet demanding emancipation! Or a protest ballad that turns conventional social norms on their head!

Arguments are vital for movement building. Elites know this well. In 1919, as Goldman was being released from a two-year federal prison sentence in Missouri for printing a hundred thousand copies of a manifesto she wrote encouraging US soldiers to dodge the First World War, for which she was later to be deported to the Soviet Union, the man who would eventually become the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, called her the “most dangerous women in America.” No wonder. Hoover knew that when you open your eyes to the way the state is a coercive force and to the realization that crime, as Goldman said, isn’t a product of natural deviant behavior but of social ills that can be fixed, “naught but misdirected energy,”3 you think differently. No longer do you bow down before the national security apparatus. You no longer tell everyone, in a compulsory rite of passage, that you support the troops. You instead focus on creating institutions of social support that give people resources to rule themselves.

Much of how we think about who should rule depends on the image of what we think they would do. But no one knows what people would do in a world that looks nothing like ours. In 1897, a labor leader asked Goldman what her vision for a free society was. Her response: “I am really too much of an anarchist to work out a program for the members of that society; in fact, I do not bother about such trifling details; all I want is freedom, perfect, unrestricted liberty for myself and others.”4 You’ll never know the future, but you could say that if liberation is to be realized in the future, who you are and what you do must be fluid. Consider that Goldman worked as a nurse midwife by day and organized with the Amalgamated Workers Union by night. She supported birth control and free love, which put her at odds with some puritanical suffragists who celebrated marriage. She was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but later became disillusioned and ended her stay in the Soviet Union soon after the Kronstadt rebellion. She couldn’t stomach watching striking sailors, agitating for better food rations, representative elections, and free speech, being crushed by Leon Trotsky and his Red Army in March 1921.

Be open to new possibilities. A widely discussed story that cemented Goldman’s status as a folk hero is that when she was scolded for dancing—for being too carefree, uninhibited, in charge of her own movements—during a serious anarchist organizing meeting, she responded, that if she couldn’t dance, she wouldn’t come to your revolution.5 Dancing is an apt metaphor for how to understand freedom. Freedom, like dance, breathes and moves, changing to the rhythm of those who are there—who move their bodies and feel the world.

Move spontaneously. Be poetic. Let loose. Collaborate. Question elites. Who needs cops when you are free from starvation? Create massive investments in art and culture. Why not cancel billionaires? Destroy nuclear weapons? Once everyday people no longer appear as a bloodthirsty mob, you relax your need for control and can dream alongside them. How beautiful.

The harrowing explosion that rocked Haymarket Square reverberated for years in Goldman’s heart, long after the rubble was cleared in 1886 and up until she died of a stroke at the age of seventy in 1940 in Toronto. Goldman asked to be buried in Forest Park, Illinois, next to the Haymarket Martyrs Monument, where pilgrims to this day visit her grave with flowers and recite poems to commemorate her legacy. But if you ask our leaders, anarchism, like Goldman’s memory, is still a grave menace to society. How else to explain the decision of Trump’s attorney general William Barr in September 2020 to label New York, Portland, and Seattle “anarchist jurisdictions”—and, thus, seek to withhold federal funds from those cities? This, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests that gripped the nation with the call to defund the police. The demonized anarchist of Barr’s nightmares, like J. Edgar Hoover’s, is dressed in black from head to toe, hides their face behind a mask, and holds a Molotov cocktail while spewing foul language, itching to break windows and instill mayhem at midnight. This is a caricature. But it’s good for distracting attention from the way anarchism is at the forefront of community-revitalization work, without which democracy wouldn’t be the same.

What is anarchism today? It’s found in prison-abolition groups like Critical Resistance in Oakland, New York, and Philly, working to end US mass incarceration. In the Food Not Bombs program. Communityrun bookstores and book publishers like AK Press. Social workers distributing hot meals for the unsheltered. Vegans spearheading the animal rights movement. If the ruling class attended any of these gatherings, they might bristle at the irreverence, shudder at the passion, and wilt in the face of righteous indignation. They might declare a riot. Or scold attendees to get jobs. But there’s no need to think like elites. Or echo their fearmongering. That’s not your job. It’s theirs. It’s best if you, like Goldman, dance like no one’s watching, with reckless abandon, to the beat of freedom, even as the flames of disaster are encircling you. Others will be inspired to do the same and join your revolution. This might allow the fire of law-and-order politics to be extinguished once and for all.

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