Living My Life - Emma Goldman [5]
The anarchist followers of Bakunin, by contrast, continuing the tradition begun by the French printer and journalist Pierre Proudhon, sought the total and immediate elimination of the state after revolution. In its place, free federations of autonomous groups would emerge, networks of workers joined voluntarily into syndicalist associations, without any centralized administrative apparatus. Proudhon had conceived of the free individual as the basic unit of society. Rather than contracting with governments to ensure his well-being, as in the Lockean tradition that informed the American Declaration of Independence, the individual liberated from state tyranny enters into free associations with other individuals, these associations forming the social networks of public life. Although this new collectivity has its own force or character, Proudhon wrote, it must never become a monolithic totality in which individual differences are merged.
A whiff of nostalgia accompanies the anarchist vision, as it repudiates the new centralized nation-states that demanded allegiance from the smaller communities of premodern Europe. Anarchism looks backward for its model to the medieval city-state as a smaller, autonomous unit in a network of mutual interest with other such cities. Insisting on the liberty of individuals and preferring the ideal of small, autonomous groups of workers, perhaps at a printing press distributing political tracts, anarchism positions itself in libertarian resistance to authoritarian Marxism, opposing its call for a postrevolutionary centralized state, even when that is depicted as a transitional necessity.
Anarchists after Proudhon retained his notion of “mutual-ism” while becoming less clear about the constitution of the stateless collective that would replace nation-states, particularly as Proudhon’s world of peasants and small craftsmen gave way to large concentrations of industrial workers. As the great Russian anarchist theorists Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin coped with industrialization, the idea of a federation of workers’ collectives as the basic unit of social organization replaced the notion of individuals in association. Still, when pressed for details about such an anarchist community, Goldman claimed, with other anarchists, that she was less interested in distant outcomes than in correcting present ills, since no future community should be constrained by the imaginings of present planners, fettered as they were by the bonds of government.
By the time Emma Goldman had arrived in New York City, the work of the Russian aristocrat Kropotkin, elegant, lucid, and optimistic, dominated the direction of anarchist thought. A university-trained scientist whom many of his contemporaries regarded as saintly, Kropotkin believed that a spirit of cooperation was native to human beings, indeed to the animal world as well. Social organization among all species evolved in response to natural conditions. Human beings, like other natural creatures, adapted themselves in cooperative ways to serve their own interests in survival and would continue to do so without artificial regulations like the laws of government. Wedding this Darwinian framework, although in cooperative not competitive terms, to the philosophy of anarchism, Kropotkin described human beings learning to rely on “mutual aid” in their struggle to survive the vicissitudes of natural and social adversity. That such an intrinsic spirit of cooperation could be tapped in the struggle to form workers’ collectives was at the heart of his optimistic anarchist vision.
Goldman called Kropotkin the father of modern anarchism, not only because he had brought the discipline of Darwinian science to political philosophy, giving the stamp of a species’ inevitability to the Proudhonian vision of voluntary association, but because he became a theoretician as well of the