Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (82 page)

Goldman not only advocated free love but practised it. She had at least one affair with another woman. In her twenties, she lived with Berkman and the artist Fedya as a
ménage à trois.
In 1908 when she was thirty-eight she took a lover called Ben Reitman who was nine years her junior. He was known as the ‘Hobo King’ for his work as a doctor in Chicago among vagrants. For all her declarations of independence, she became obsessed by the ‘handsome brute’. He aroused in her a ‘torrent of elemental passion’ she had never dreamed a man could evoke and she admitted ‘I responded shamelessly to its primitive call, its naked beauty, its ecstatic joy.’
⁴⁶

Reitman continued to have frequent sex with other women during their ten-year relationship and, as their correspondence shows, Goldman could not help feeling jealous and anxious when he was with someone else. Her lamentations might be interpreted as at least a contradiction and perhaps a failure of her philosophy. She recognized the danger herself and wrote to Reitman ‘I have no right to speak of Freedom when I myself have become an abject slave in my love.’
⁴⁷
But her personal experience as a spurned and
neglected lover does not contradict, but rather gives more weight to, her considered thoughts and public statements.

In an essay on ‘Jealousy’ probably written around 1912, she insisted that the anguish over lost love which inspired many Romantic poets has nothing to do with jealousy, which only makes people angry, petty and envious. Goldman traces its source to the idea of an exclusive sex monopoly endorsed by Church and State and sees it embodied in an outmoded code of honour based on possession and vengeance. It also involves the conceit of the male and the envy of the female. The cure is firstly to recognize that no one is the owner of the sex functions of another, and secondly, to accept only love or affection which is voluntarily given: ‘All lovers do well to leave the doors of their love wide open.’
⁴⁸
In a lecture called ‘False Fundamentals of Free Love’, Goldman further distinguished carefully between promiscuity and the free choice of committed love. As she wrote to Reitman at the same time ‘My love is sex, but it is devotion, care, anxiety, patience, friendship, it is all …’
⁴⁹
Goldman always had a romantic view of love, celebrating its ‘savagery’ as well as its ideal beauty, and was fully aware that it was a double-edged sword.

It could be argued that it was easy for Goldman to practise free love because she was infertile through endometriosis. But she could have had an operation to enable her to conceive; she chose not to. As such, her choice amounted to a voluntary form of birth control. Moreover, she was not without maternal feelings and wrote to Reitman: ‘I have a great deep mother instinct for you, baby-mine; that instinct has been the redeeming feature in our relation.’
⁵⁰
This did not prevent her from attacking at times the myth of motherhood and asserting the right of every woman to make a free choice of becoming a parent. In addition, she fought the laws against birth control until she was jailed in 1916. As the contemporary feminist Margaret Anderson observed, Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that ‘women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open’.
⁵¹

Goldman called for a new society where individuals could read, write and say what they liked, and have equal opportunities regardless of their sex to realize their full potential. She wanted women to have control over their bodies and to be able to practise birth control. She hoped men and women would become truly individual whilst living in voluntary associations. She looked to a revolution to bring about both an internal and external change, economic communism as well as a complete transformation of values.

Although at the end of her life, Goldman acknowledged that she was hopelessly out of tune with her contemporaries, she has reached a new and broader audience since her death. She is now widely read and admired for
her trenchant attack on repressive institutions and for her call for the complete fulfilment of the individual. One of the most dangerous women in America, once pilloried and then spurned, she has become the heroine of modern feminists and a founding mother of anarcho-feminism. She allegedly said at an anarchist ball: ‘if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’ If the next revolution is libertarian and feminist, it will certainly be playing many of her favourite tunes.

D
ESPITE
THE
OVERWHELMING
INFLUENCE
of Marxism in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, a number of bold and original thinkers gravitated towards anarchism. Gustav Landauer was amongst those who struggled in the unfavourable political climate and were killed for their activities and views. Others like Johann Most and Rudolf Rocker were forced to move abroad to exert their influence.

Gustav Landauer was the most important anarchist thinker in Germany after Max Stirner. He was born in 1870 of a middle-class Jewish family in Karlsruhe in southern Germany. As a student he joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Due to his political activities, which led to a spell in prison, he was refused entrance to the School of Medicine at Freiburg University. Because of his extreme views, he was also one of a small group who were expelled from the SPD in 1891. Two years later, he became an anarchist, although he preferred to call himself an ‘anarchist-socialist’ to dissociate himself from the Stirnerite egoism which was fashionable in some anarchist circles at the time. As he wrote to his friend Martin Buber, ‘anarchism is the negative side of that which, positively, is called socialism.’
¹
He went on to edit, from 1892, the Berlin anarchist paper
Der Sozialist
, but changed its subtitle to
Organ für Anarchismus-Sozialismus
to stress the socialist nature of his anarchism and the libertarian nature of his socialism. In
Der Sozialist
, he wrote on 15 July 1911: ‘Anarchy is the expression of the liberation of man from the idols of the state, the church and capital; socialism is the expression of the true and genuine community among men, genuine because it grows out of the individual spirit.’
²

Landauer was always prepared to collaborate with socialists. In 1893 he was excluded, with Rosa Luxemburg and others, from the Zürich Congress of the Second International. Undismayed, he attended with Malatesta the Second International Congress held in London in 1896, and tried to put the anarchist case:

Despite his plea for tolerance, the anarchists were expelled. It was the last time anarchists tried to attend meetings of the Socialist International.

Such setbacks did not deter Landauer. He was primarily a thinker and a man of letters, elaborating a form of mystical anarchism which stood in the German idealist tradition stretching as far back as Meister Eckhart. His originality lies in the way he developed the romantic concern with the
Volk
in a libertarian rather than an authoritarian direction. The word
Volk
had come to mean something like the ‘common people’, but it was also used to described the German language, culture, and customs as distinct from the State. Landauer wanted to realize the potential unity of the
Volk
, to develop ‘a connexion between people which is actually there; only it has not yet become bond and binding, it is not yet a higher organism’.
⁴
Landauer was thus an eloquent prophet of real community.

Drawing on the work of the German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, Landauer developed the distinction between community (
Gemeinschaft
), which is an organic, long-standing living together, and atomized, mechanical, and transitory society (
Gesellschaft
). He wanted to see the reborn community develop out of the artificial shell of existing society and the State. His most penetrating and oft-quoted insight is the recognition that the State is not merely something standing above society but a force which permeates everyday life:

The setting up of the community outside and alongside the State is therefore essentially a discovery of something actually present, something which has grown out of the past: ‘This likeness, this equality in inequality, this peculiar quality that binds people together, this common spirit, is an actual fact.’
⁶

While rejecting the artificial State and the atomistic society of capitalism, Landauer saw the nation as a peaceful community of communities: ‘Every nation is anarchistic, that is, without force; the conceptions of nation
and force are completely irreconcilable.’ He also saw the nation as a stepping stone, not an obstacle, to internationalism. ‘The goal of humanity’, he wrote to Julius Bab in 1913, ‘is the outer structure for which we strive; the way toward this goal, however, does not lead merely from our own humanity, but above all through our differentiated nationality.’
⁷
The nation is a circle within the ever-widening circles from the individual to the whole of humanity. This is Landauer’s most important idea, and lays the ground for a nationalism which is not exclusive and xenophobic. He demonstrates that the nation can exist without the State; indeed, one of his principal objections to the State is that it destroys the organic unity of the nation. Each nation can contribute something unique and valuable to our common humanity.

Community for Landauer not is merely the liberal’s view of society as a sum of individuals; it is an organic whole which has its own interests. According to Landauer, Stirner’s absolute and independent individual is a myth, a phantom in the brain. Each individual is united not only to his own local community but also to the rest of humanity, both in a physical and spiritual sense: ‘As the individual organism is only a part of a great, real physical community, so the individual soul is part of a great, real spiritual community.’ Landauer did not reject genuine individualism but rather the atomistic, uprooted individualism of capitalism. In each individual there is a unique individuality which offers a different picture of humanity. The individual personality is therefore a ‘vital part of a larger organic whole’.
⁸

Landauer was not opposed to revolution. ‘Revolution’, he wrote, ‘concerns every aspect of human life—not just the State, the class-structure, industry and commerce, arts and letters, education and learning, but a combination of all these social factors which is at a given moment in state of relative stability.’ He did not consider revolution merely as a period of time or even a borderline between two social conditions, but ‘a principle stepping over vast distances of time’.
⁹
He insisted on the identity of means and ends and the necessity of moral action in the present. He was totally opposed to violent revolution and individual acts of terrorism. The great error of revolutionary anarchists, he wrote, is ‘the idea of being able to reach the ideal of power-lessness through power … every act of force is dictatorship’. For Landauer, anarchy should not involve more war and murder but a spiritual rebirth: ‘The way to a new, higher form of human society leads from the dark, fateful gate of our instincts and
terra abscondita
of our soul, which is our world. Only from within to without can the world be formed …’
¹⁰

Landauer recognized that in revolution, there rises up ‘the image and feeling of positive union through the binding quality, through love’ but it is impossible to solve social problems by political and violent means.
¹¹
This can only be done by each individual’s decision to refuse to co-operate with the existing State and its institutions in order to create positive alternatives: