Emma Goldman

Sunday, November 17, 2024

What Is It

Activist and anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman fought for human liberation in every realm of life. While she opposed the women's suffrage movement, she was a staunch advocate for women’s rights. So why did she think the right to vote was so unimportant? What did she think was required to achieve her anarchist goals? And how ahead of her time was she on labor, prison abolition, and sexual liberation? Josh and Ray explore her life and thought with Candace Falk from UC Berkeley, editor of Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years.

Part of our Wise Women series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Comments (2)


Daniel's picture

Daniel

Monday, November 4, 2024 -- 12:25 PM

Because anarchism as a

Both revolutionary communism and Goldman's anti-statist anarchism are in agreement on the issue of abolition of the wage system of labor compensation, and thus share a common heritage of Marxist economic theory. It is interesting to see how each interprets one element in particular of this heritage, Marx's reinterpretation under industrial conditions of the so called "labor theory of value", to draw opposite conclusions about how it should apply to practical action. The theory purports to establish the essentially exploitive and inevitably self defeating nature of wage compensation, first by showing that the money in which compensation consists is a commodity like any other insofar as it must be generated by work, and as a standard commodity of exchange is a matter of convention and has no fixed value of its own. Second it shows that in any translation of the value of one commodity into a value of another, e.g. three bales of hay are worth one bale of cotton, there must be an invariant basis of comparison, or a "third thing" which remains unchanged in the transaction. This, as the theory goes, is the time the laborer put into it, or the quantifiable duration of labor necessary to produce it. Because this quantity doesn't change regardless of what it's exchanged for, Marx claims that it is "fixed" in the commodity which is thus the sole determining factor of its exchange value, independently from what use is made of what it might be exchanged for, or its practical value. By accumulation of exchange value, wages then emerge as the current form of labor exploitation updated for industrial conditions, emphasized by one class, composed of the owners of the means by which exchangeable products are produced, in opposition to another, composed of those who produce the products which are exchanged.

What's interesting as an historical question and on which the difference in wages-interpretation between Goldman's anarchism and revolutionary communism hinges, is how wage-system appearances, how wages appear to the compensated, differ from wage-system realities, what wages cost the owner/employer. In slave economies for example, where there is no compensation, the laborer's work appears to the laborer to be (relatively) cost-free for the owner, but in reality is paid in the form of material necessities of survival and productivity. Under a feudal regime of agricultural serfdom, on the other hand, the laborer sees clearly the difference between what quantity of labor is compensated, namely the days worked on the feudal lord's estate, and what quantity is not compensated, the days worked on the laborer's own plot of land for individual use, so that no difference occurs between laborer's perception of compensation and its reality for the owner. But under the wage-compensation system, both because payment occurs after the labor time is over and because the unpaid quantity of labor for what exceeds the costs to the owner of maintaining the laborer in productive existence is not known to, or even deliberately hidden from, the laborer, it seems to the laborer her/himself that they're getting paid for all of it, while only being paid for a part. This is counted therefore as one of the elements which makes the so-called "proletariat", the class of wage laborers, a revolutionary class insofar as appearance of formal compensation and reality of material exploitation succeed one another in a progressively disclosive phenomenological chronology. Having passed through an ostensibly final stage of labor exploitation, by truncating the class of wage laborers from the class of owners and associated elements, the oppressed class is not disposed merely to overthrow an oppressor class to become an oppressor itself over another, but rather to serve as a liberation of work from the distinction between classes themselves. To this the question of the state's role comes in, where Goldman stands firmly and consistently against any such involvement. Does anyone, before continuing, have any suggestions with regards to the nature of the dispute?

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dianabuckley

Monday, November 4, 2024 -- 2:52 AM

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