Emma Goldman helped to found ...anarchism without adjectives. For anarchists, capitalism is a system that robs workers, intellectuals, artists, and peasants of their productive, creative labor, transferring both profit and control of labor to owners. Organized religion supports this theft by teaching adherents to defer to authority and hope passively for reward in the next life. The state uses organized violence to protect owners, suppress workers, and mobilize people’s loyalties and sense of home into a vicious, narrow patriotism that justifies and energizes war, which in turn furthers the profits and power of the capitalist class and its allies. Colonialism calls on the religious mandate of civilizing and converting the rest of the world to justify seizing the resources of less well-armed societies for global capitalist expansion. Schools undermine children’s natural curiosity and turn students into automatons regurgitating the orthodoxies they are taught. Into this sweeping critique of established authority, Goldman introduced the aesthetic sensibility of the American romantic movement, Nietzsche’s spirit of rebellion, and her own unique feminism. From Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau she absorbed a poetic, sensuous individualism. Like many other anarchists of her day, she emphasized the centrality of radical art, poetry, literature and drama to the emergence of free individuals. #EmmaGoldman #Anarchism #PublicDomain #Religion #Education #Capitalism #Colonialism #Patriotism #War #Feminism #Art #Literature
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 17:02:29 +0000
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