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Title: Emma Goldman in Exile Author: David Porter Date: 1990, Winter Language: en Topics: biography, Emma Goldman, review Source: Fifth Estate #333, Winter, 1990. Retrieved August 19, 2019 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/333-winter-1990/emma-goldman-in-exile/
a review of
Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil
War, Alice Wexler, Beacon Press, Boston, 1989, 301 pp.
The nature and purpose of “doing history” are at stake in Alice Wexler’s
new book, Emma Goldman in Exile. America’s best-known anarchist endured
numerous personal and political crises from her 1919 deportation to
Civil War Russia to her subsequent odyssey throughout Europe and Canada,
her immersion in the 1930s Spanish revolution, and her-death in 1940.
Based on extensive research, Wexler’s book usefully describes this
journey. But the book is more than this. Unfortunately so, since the
interpretive voice of the author is usually louder than her subject.
One approach in writing history is to create a “time-machine”
transporting readers to the lived experience of the past. Such an art
emphasizes the subjectivities of historical individuals themselves,
without framing their contexts according to present day categories. As
when visiting abroad, ideally readers begin not only to recognize the
scenery, but also to sense the logic of “native” feelings, motivations
and language. This relatively unmediated approach respects and enhances
authentic historical “others.” However strange or disturbing, past
societies and individuals are allowed to speak, human diversity is
respected, the range of humankind is enriched and enlarged, the
potential scope of human freedom expanded.
Of course, the “time-machine” is intrusive in itself. That is, the
historian’s very presence necessarily distorts the “reality” of the
context under study—as best-intentioned anthropologists can verify from
field studies of their own. As social creatures of the present,
historians inevitably filter past realities through current
consciousness, deciding what evidence to search for and what is
significant. But, like anthropologists, historians can find ways to
consciously minimize intrusive distortion—at the very least by calling
it to the reader’s attention.
Contrarily, most historians carry out colonizing expeditions—capturing
and processing slices of the past to bring forward for exhibition and
evaluation according to contemporary tastes and standards. Consciously
or not, the goal is exotic titillation, confirmation of existing biases
or proof of one’s “scientific” competence as a digger and labeler of
artifacts.
Unfortunately, in Emma Goldman in Exile, Wexler appears to choose both
directions at once. At times, Goldman’s energy, courage, wisdom,
compassion, humor and sometimes irascible personal nature speak for
themselves. Goldman, the sometimes self-contradicting, yet dedicated
visionary stands out with inspiring qualities and flaws alike.
Occasionally, Wexler gives the same autonomous voice to the overall
anarchist movement as well—with its idealism and accomplishments, its
inconsistencies and sometimes bitter internal disputes. To her credit,
Wexler relies heavily on primary source materials from the 1920s and
30s, such as Goldman’s own prolific writing and interviews with
Goldman’s contemporaries.
Yet Wexler isn’t content to let us observe, to encourage too much our
deeper empathy, though she clearly admires some aspects of Goldman and
the anarchist movement. Eventually uncomfortable at both personal and
political levels, she seems compelled through much of the book to
diagnose Goldman’s psychological drives and “political illusions” in
order to tame them both. This competition between opposite approaches
wrenches not only the author, but her readers and historical subjects as
well.
Wexler is influenced by current theorists who view in autobiography a
tendency toward distorted, self-serving mythologies. Curiously, she
seems unaware of this in her own writing. In important ways, the book is
an account of Wexler’s attempt to coopt the person of Emma Goldman for
the purpose of “reasonable, progressive reform.”
Examples of Wexler’s intrusiveness abound, but are most obvious in her
“realist” political assessments of the Russian and Spanish revolutions
and the rise of anti-Communist hysteria in the West, as well as in her
anxious psychologizing of Goldman’s every other move. I should clarify
this point. It’s fair for anyone to have a dialogue with voices from the
past on political or emotional issues. Yet books of this sort should be
identified as such (e.g., “Wexler’s Debates with Emma Goldman on
Political Change in the Interwar Period” or “Wexler’s Theories on the
Psychological Traits of Aging and Exiled Radical Females”). Without such
labeling, when the biographer’s interpretations become too major a
voice, the central historical subject becomes diminished, disjointed and
without integrity, a mere case-study for some other agenda.
Attempting to prove the “naiveté” or “poor judgment” or “emotionalism”
of the subject forces the reader’s attention, in this case, from
Goldman’s life to Wexler’s. The latter may or may not be interesting,
but it shouldn’t be offered as the “reality” of what happened in the
past. Where Wexler lets Goldman and her peers speak for themselves in
sketching “an anarchist geography of the world as she knew it in the
1920s and 1930s” or when she allows anarchist accomplishments (or
failures) to stand on their own, she succeeds in creating a fair
historical representation.
Where she insists that Goldman’s “emotionalism” and “naiveté” underlay
her critical reaction to the Bolshevik regime or contributed “to the
emergence of an anti-Communist consensus” in the West, she fails her
readers. In asserting that Goldman was “a mythmaker whose most powerful
myth turned out to be herself,” and that the exile of her final two
decades became the “central thread of her existence, shaping her
fictions and her truths, her limitations and her legacy,” Wexler sets
herself up as ultimate judge and interpreter of fiction and fact. She
declares herself; in effect, to be Goldman’s post facto political and
psychological mentor.
Wexler argues that while Goldman’s central identity remained anarchist,
her thoughts and actions were profoundly shaped by her traumatic
uprooting from a stimulating and “heroic” radical political context in
the U.S. In her bitterness, frustration, loneliness and despair, says
Wexler, Goldman misread the nature of the Soviet regime, became fixated
on its evils almost to the point of paranoia and thus unwittingly helped
create the very strength of that anti-Communist ideology which kept her
exiled abroad.
But Wexler has a larger agenda as well. For her, the ultimate political
“flaws” of Goldman were also those of the anarchist movement generally,
since, as Wexler states, “by the summer of 1922, Goldman could speak
[about Russia] with the authority of the movement behind her, not only
as an individual.” As well, “Goldman’s limitations as a propagandist and
analyst were not hers alone. They were also those of the anarchist
movement…” Additionally, “In the end, the anarchists, and Goldman
herself, suffered most from their obsessive anti-Communism and
anti-Marxism, for it drained their energies from more constructive
anarchist efforts…”
In other words, after denigrating the significance of Goldman’s critique
through constant reference to her self-admitted turmoil and loneliness,
Wexler pins the same judgment on the anarchist movement generally
(though without even pretending to examine its diverse composition and
experience). Ironically, Wexler’s projection of “obsessive politics”
onto anarchists as a whole also negates the purpose of psychologizing
about Goldman herself.
This book, then, is Wexler’s political text far more than Goldman’s.
Hidden beyond Goldman’s psychological “paralysis” and her ensuing
“subjective” and “shrill” distortions, according to Wexler, was the
“more complex reality” of Soviet experience.
In Wexler’s apologia for Leninism, the early move toward workers’
control of industry “proved unable to cope with the disorganization of
the war.” Therefore, the Bolsheviks had to introduce the draconian
measures of War Communism. While saving the cities from starvation and
even yielding certain social gains, such measures also “led to massive
abuses.”
Bolshevik repression of anarchists began, in Wexler’s view, in April
1918 only in response to anarchist terrorism, while the agonizing
violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 was politically
justified because of the dangers it posed, if successful, to the ability
of the regime to defend itself against White attacks.
Says Wexler, “The Stalinist state differed dramatically from that of
Russia under the new Economic Policy,” yet she admits that under the
latter “it was no longer possible to question publicly the legitimacy of
the one-party dictatorship, which civil war had made increasingly
authoritarian” (emphasis mine). Rather than seeing Bolshevik repression
as at least partly due to Leninist “vanguardism” and political power as
inevitably corrupting in itself, Wexler attacks Goldman for denying the
possibility of improvement in Russia and for insisting that Bolshevik
evils were inherent in their politics. From Wexler’s logic it naturally
follows that Goldman was also unreasonable and naive not to build
alliances with socialists and dissident Communists on behalf of Soviet
political prisoners. Goldman was equally at fault for
“characteristically” blaming Marxist indoctrination for “training the
German people in passivity,” which led to their lack of resistance to
Nazi rule in 1933.
Despite Wexler’s understanding that anti-Red sentiment in the U.S. was
well-formed with a strong momentum of its own before Goldman’s critiques
of Bolshevik rule, she insists on blaming at least part of its success
and influence on Goldman herself. She criticizes Goldman for attacking
Russian exiles’ proposed revisions of anarchism (in 1926), though does
not inform us of the hierarchical principles suggested.
Similarly, she describes Goldman’s picture of the Spanish revolution as
“limited” and “romantic,” her anger toward all parties in the Spanish
conflict as almost indiscriminate, and exhibiting a tendency “to ignore
and distort the international context, and the military situation
outside of Catalonia” (contrary to what Wexler describes as Communist
realism on both scores).
Such assertions as the above are an author’s prerogative. But by
consistently viewing (and forcing the reader to view) Goldman’s life and
work of her last two decades through Wexler’s perspective, the author
presents her apparent own left-liberal/socialist interpretation as the
final word. While she could have at least invited readers’ participation
in the dialogue by explicitly setting forth her own psychological,
ethical or political criteria for judging Goldman and the anarchists,
she fails to do so.
When she also speculates that Goldman’s ambivalence toward Alexander
Berkman was perhaps a projection of her unconscious childhood guilt over
her brother’s death or that part of the reason for Goldman’s ultimate
wrath at the Bolsheviks was her unconscious Prussian hatred of
everything Russian, one wonders what else was at stake in writing this
book.
There are also several factual errors which perhaps suggest an
(unconscious?) aversion to an anarchist perspective. In Barcelona of
late 1936, Goldman and writer H.E. Kaminski did not visit a CNT-FAI
prison since these didn’t exist, but rather a jail under the auspices of
the new Catalan regime. The notorious SIM political police, established
in mid-1937, did not “increasingly come under the control of Russian
advisors and the Spanish Communist party;” it was created and controlled
by the Communists from the start.
Although the POUM leaders on trial in Spain in late 1938 were
“acquitted” of charges of high treason and espionage, they were still
sentenced to long prison terms. Finally, the author consistently
misspells the name of Federica Montseny, one of the most important FAI
“influentials” during the Spanish Civil War.
More positively, when the author allows Goldman to speak for herself on
various issues, when Wexler writes poignantly on the death of Berkman,
and when she acknowledges the positive accomplishments and repression
suffered by the Spanish anarchists, she comes closest to allowing us an
unmediated glimpse of significant history.
While recapitulating accounts already available, her attempt generally
to organize the principal themes and contexts of Goldman’s final two
decades also provides a useful service. As well, her specific original
research on persistent U.S. surveillance of Goldman in exile adds a
sobering dimension to Goldman’s struggle abroad.
In general, Wexler’s book is serious and thoughtful, but its weaknesses
are important. Informed readers will have to judge for themselves
whether the positive features, surrounded as they are by Wexler’s
political and psychological agenda, are worth the price involved.
Portions of the account bring us closer to Goldman’s reality, but for
me, there is too much which distracts, distorts and diminishes along the
way.
Further reading on Emma Goldman and the Spanish Revolution
Vision On Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution by David
Porter—$8
The May Days: Barcelona 1937 with contributions by Augustin Souchy, Jose
Peirats, Burnett Bolloten & Emma Goldman. Freedom Press, 128 pp. $6
Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary by Antonio Tellez, translated by Stuart
Christie. Elephant Editions 208 pp. $6
Lessons of the Spanish Revolution by Vernon Richards 256 pp. $8