Living My Life - Emma Goldman [27]
Less certain is the legacy she left behind her as a critic of the two central forces that shaped the political profile of the twentieth century, capitalism and communism. One of her detractors on the left said acidly of her that she was “not paralyzed by seeing too many sides of the problem” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 85). Yet even with the benefit of historical hindsight, good people may differ about the impartiality with which she reached her early indictment of the infant Bolshevik state. To some the moral clarity with which she condemned Soviet elitism and the growth of a Soviet police state stood in luminous contrast to the paralysis of other left liberals, who too long remained apologists for Soviet oppression and bloodshed. To others her early and unconditional repudiation of the Bolshevik revolution, made before Stalin took power, may have failed to account sufficiently for the exigencies of the fragile state surrounded by enemies and the emergency measures needed to sustain a war economy. More fatefully, as Alice Wexler has suggested, for the decades that followed the close of World War II, Goldman’s easy conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism lent legitimacy to the “continuity theory,” a Cold War ideology that rendered all forms of socialism in whole cloth and homogenized, as if they were necessarily embryonic Stalinist tyrannies.
As a blueprint for social revolution, anarchism itself suffered from the very conditions of its extraordinary appeal. Its fidelity to the principle of individual autonomy and mutual cooperation limited its response to the more complex operations of large nation-states. As the immigrant communities who had brought anarchism with them to the United States aged, the “beautiful ideal” of no state became less and less the choice of radical social activists, who looked increasingly to government welfare programs for redress of social inequities. If one searches for an enduring legacy of anarchism in the twentieth century, it is to be found perhaps in its having represented an appealing alternative to those structures of powers which, in their very massive, impersonal, and centralized constitution, felt overbearing, inhibiting, and destructive. When other left alternatives to capitalist expansion were found wanting or discredited, the “beautiful ideal” of Emma Goldman’s remained on the drawing board of American political possibility.
Small wonder, then, that a resurgence of anarchism accompanied the political activism of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, initiated by the civil rights movements and opposition to the unpopular war in Vietnam. A new generation of antiwar activists and advocates of free speech and free love found common ground in Emma Goldman’s anarchism. Her face adorned T-shirts, posters, and banners. A clinic in Iowa City was named for her, as was a theater troupe in New York. Screenplays, stage plays, and even an opera were written about her, as a generation rejecting the militarism, corporatism, and industrialism of the mainstream capitalist West found the anti-hierarchical and antiauthoritarian principles of anarchism congenial. If anarchism had seemed less and less relevant to America in the 1930s, with New Deal centralism promising a more beneficent role for government than anarchism allowed, to a generation disavowing the ideological disputes of the “old Left,” the purity of the anarchist ideal, with its invitations to form