Living My Life - Emma Goldman [4]
It was a congenial, conversational, and activist community in which she found herself in lower Manhattan in the late 1880S. The young people who crowded the teashops and cafeterias of the Lower East Side were often well-educated newcomers, compelled to abandon their professional lives in Russia by anti-Semitic prohibitions and pogroms instigated by the czar. In a lyrical description of the Lower East Side at the end of the nineteenth century, one activist reformer recalled the summer evenings when young men and women, weary from work in the city’s sweatshops and factories, escaped the heat of the crowded tenement streets by climbing to the roofs. In pleasant congregation from rooftop to rooftop they raised voices in German, Russian, or Yiddish debating responses to the oppression of the capitalist owners, their politics shaped by the revolutions in Europe, revolutions that witnessed the formation of new nation-states on the ashes of the houses of Bourbon/Orleans and Hapsburg monarchies (Hillquit 1-2.).
Although anarchism flourished among the newcomers, by the time Emma Goldman arrived in New York City in 1889, the appeal to native American workers of this radical alternative had waned, a popular animus against it raised by the Haymarket violence and fanned by a hostile press. Where kept alive, anarchism found its home among the immigrant Italian, Slavic, and Jewish communities in larger cities, as in New York’s Lower East Side. Goldman would become anarchism’s most spirited spokesperson in America, although, eclectic and pragmatic in her adaptation, she would raise the sharp incisive wit of her oratory to advance as well the sexual liberation of women and the redemptive force of aestheticism, advocacies that took her beyond the conceptual borders of the movement as it was defined by its European male architects. While she shaped the tradition she received to her own purposes, it was European anarchism that had nurtured her intellectual development and remained the “beautiful ideal” against which she would measure all political struggles.
Emma Goldman grounded her political belief on a fundamental repudiation of all states and governments. As did socialists, anarchists called for the end to private ownership of the means of production that involved the exploitation of labor. But while anarchists and Marxists merged in the coffeehouses, saloons, and street corners of lower Manhattan, joining forces to swell a protest or support a strike, a profoundly different response to the revolutionary changes in Europe divided them. So serious, in fact, was this division that in 1872, Karl Marx evicted the followers of the revolutionary anarchist Michael Bakunin from the First International, dividing the leftist enemies of capitalism into two irreconcilable camps.
In theory the goals of anarchists and socialists seemed similar: after destroying the capitalist class and ending its exploitation of labor, workers would share the product of their labor with one another in a stateless, communal society. But the Marxist commitment to the end of the state was theoretical, the positioning of an imagined and distant terminus, the process a slow “withering away” of a state apparatus after a protracted postrevolutionary period of political centralization. Following a Marxist revolution,