Emma Goldman, a young shopkeeper in 1892, was serving a customer in her ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass., when she got the latest news about a labor strike in Pittsburgh.
As she explains in her autobiography, “Living My Life”: “One afternoon a customer came in for an ice cream while I was alone in the store. As I set the dish down before him, I caught the large headlines of his paper: ‘LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN HOMESTEAD — FAMILIES OF STRIKERS EVICTED FROM THE COMPANY HOUSES — WOMAN IN CONFINEMENT CARRIED OUT INTO STREET BY SHERIFFS.’ I read over the man’s shoulder Frick’s dictum to the workers: He would rather see them dead than concede to their demands, and he threatened to import Pinkerton detectives. The brutal bluntness of the account, the inhumanity of Frick toward the evicted mother, inflamed my mind. Indignation swept my whole being. I heard the man at the table ask: ‘Are you sick, young lady? Can I do anything for you?’ ‘Yes, you can let me have your paper,’ I blurted out. ‘You won’t have to pay me for the ice cream. But I must ask you to leave. I must close the store.’ The man looked at me as if I had gone crazy.”
Goldman closed her store that day, permanently. Standing in revolutionary solidarity with the working class against Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, was more important than making sundaes. “It was Homestead, not Russia; I knew it now,” wrote Goldman, a Lithuanian-born anarchist, seeing the battle in Pittsburgh as the spark that could ignite a worldwide firestorm of revolt against hierarchy and subjugation.
The first task was to arouse America’s insufficiently radical masses by printing a manifesto and taking it to Pittsburgh, she explained, “a flaming call to the men of Homestead to throw off the yoke of capitalism, to use their present struggle as a steppingstone to the destruction of the wage system, and to continue toward social revolution and anarchism.”
Rather than negotiate a union contract, Frick ordered the construction of a solid board fence topped with barbed wire around the Homestead mill. Striking workers dubbed the fortified property “Fort Frick.”
“Not a strike, but a lockout,” Frick announced. “It was,” wrote Goldman, “an open declaration of war.”
On July 6, 1892, a 13-hour battle between strikers and 300 Pinkerton detectives, hired by Frick to protect the nonunion workers he planned to employ, left 10 dead and 65 wounded.
“I will kill Frick,” proclaimed Alexander Berkman, Goldman’s lover and close political associate, and, like Goldman, a Lithuanian-born anarchist. Gaining entry to Frick’s office, Berkman shot Frick twice in the neck and stabbed him four times in the leg. Frick survived and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
“A blow aimed at Frick,” theorized Goldman, would “strike terror in the enemy’s ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of America had its avengers.”
Nearly three decades after the assassination attempt on Frick (and after being imprisoned three times — for inciting a riot, distributing birth-control information and conspiring to obstruct the military draft), Goldman was deported to the Soviet Union, along with Berkman, in 1919.
Greeted as heroes, Goldman and Berkman met all the leading figures of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — Vladimir Lenin, Gregory Zinoviev, Alexandra Kollontai and Leon Trotsky. Lenin readily accepted Goldman’s proposal that she and Berkman develop a group called “Russian Friends of American Liberty” to advance the rights of political prisoners in the United States.
Instead, what Goldman witnessed firsthand in Russia from 1920 to 1921 was worse than Homestead. “I saw before me the Bolshevik State, formidable, crushing every constructive revolutionary effort, suppressing, debasing and disintegrating everything,” she wrote in her book, “My Disillusionment In Russia,” published in 1923.
From close range, Goldman observed the slaughter of workers who went on strike in several Petrograd factories. “The ‘conquest’ of the city was characterized by ruthless savagery,” a “bloodbath” of those classified by the government as “counter-revolutionaries,” she reported. “They had dared to raise their voice in protest against the new rulers of Russia.”
Goldman’s conclusion, after witnessing the concentration camps, the destruction of trade unions, the persecution of independent thought, the rampant corruption raging throughout the Soviet government, and the forced labor inflicted upon the masses (and the wholesale arrest of Russia’s anarchists): “The centralized political State was Lenin’s deity, to which everything else was to be sacrificed.”
—Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.
{ 10 comments }
What would you expect in Communist Russia? The good life? I guess the revolutionaries felt that they could just wish their utopia into existence.
Sadly, Ms. Goldman neglected to channel her fervor for “justice” into learning the bare rudiments of economics–knowlege available at the time to anyone willing to read and think. I am sure that a careful reading of the Mills, or Say, or Ricardo, would have made clear to Ms Goldman principles that she probably did not want to know.
For example, she would have learned that average wage rates reflect average productivity–productivity made possible through the accumulation of capital by the same capitalists that Ms. Goldman loved to malign. She would have learned that forcing wage rates higher through the coercive threats of labor unions serves only to retard average productivity, and average wage rates, by reducing aggregate production and imposing destructive work rules that retard efficiency. She would have learned that labor union goons use physical force to impose unjustly high wage rates on the enterprises they exploit, at the cost of lower wages or unemployment for everyone else.
But, of course, this knowlege implies capitalists perform a benevolent market function, and further implies that capitalism is morally valuable. Certainly Ms. Goldman would recoil in horror from such knowlege, and return with a vengeance to her studies of socialism and “anarchy”.
“…to throw off the yoke of capitalism… and to continue toward social revolution and anarchism.”
Anarchism really makes no sense without “-capitalism” behind it.
Goldman’s story is so much nonsense. Does anyone really believe she was motivated in her actions by sudden moral outrage at a story in the newspaper? She was obviously already well-versed in communist ideology.
Her “lover” made an attempt at murder, a fact that apparently did not bother her (the ends justify the means, after all). Based on the information here presented, Frick, the object of her hatred and attempted murder, was justly defending his property and his non-union workers from violent union thugs.
Goldman was a moral reprobate, an ignoramus and a socialist. (Redundancy alert!)
Frankly, I don’t understand the point of this article. What are you trying to tell us?
I don’t understand this either. The article could be taken as an equal criticism of the capitalist and communist systems.
If one is to criticize the soviet central planners (and who would not) one should also question the governor of Pennsylvania. Was not the use of the militia to suppress a strike a clear case of government interference in the contractual bargaining between capital and labor?
John Hepp,
According to the article, the 300 detectives were hired by Frick.
Were your statement to be true, your charge that the governor’s actions reflect the capitalist system would be false. The governor is a State actor, not to be mistaken with a capitalist.
Anarchism really makes no sense without “-capitalism” behind it.
And capitalism really makes no sense without “anarcho-” in front of it.
This is truly an amusing exposition of a legitimate anarchist opposing the authoritarianism that capitalism is defined by, only to be disparaged by the pseudo-anarchists whose only presence seems to be on this website, apparently. Unfortunately, some might have an interest in learning a thing or two about microeconomics before repeating untruths.
“For example, she would have learned that average wage rates reflect average productivity–productivity made possible through the accumulation of capital by the same capitalists that Ms. Goldman loved to malign. She would have learned that forcing wage rates higher through the coercive threats of labor unions serves only to retard average productivity, and average wage rates, by reducing aggregate production and imposing destructive work rules that retard efficiency. She would have learned that labor union goons use physical force to impose unjustly high wage rates on the enterprises they exploit, at the cost of lower wages or unemployment for everyone else.”
This is false. In the capitalist economy, labor markets are characterized by asymmetric information, and the consequent agency problems of adverse selection and moral hazard, as well as principal-agent problems at the heart of hierarchical organization. Underpayment is also a consequence of the absence of perfect/costless information in labor markets: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1992.tb01978.x/abstract
“This paper investigates the degree of shortfall between the wages workers earn and what they could earn assuming perfect or costless information in the labor market. We use the stochastic frontier regression technique to estimate the degree of shortfall found in wages on an individual basis. The paper tests, in addition, a number of hypotheses supplied by search theory in this context. The results generally confirm the propositions from search theory and indicate that, on the average, worker wages fall short of worker potential wages by approximately 10 percent.”
The most compelling benefit of workers’ ownership and management may not be its superior justice, but its superior efficiency, because of the elimination of principal-agent problems through its elimination of the artificial separation of ownership and labor. Capitalists merely serve the role of imposing opportunity costs by maintaining an inefficient firm organizational model.
is it any wonder that the 1924 immigration laws were passed?
http://is.gd/03Gkz8
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