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- [00:00]
Commercial Announcer
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- [00:33]
Danny Byrd
I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again.
- [00:38]
Interviewer
So what's next?
- [00:39]
Commercial Voice
I feel liberated.
- [00:41]
Danny Byrd
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- [00:48]
Commercial Voice
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- [00:51]
Interviewer
I can work with them.
- [00:54]
Danny Byrd
This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney.
- [01:02]
Commercial Voice
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- [01:59]
Ruth Kinnner
Widely associated with the quote, if I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. Emma Goldman embodied an irrepressible commitment to freedom. Born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in 1869, she emigrated from the Russian Empire as a teenager in search of a freer life in the United States. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Danny Bird and Ruth Kinner trace Goldman's extraordinary journey from her political awakening as an anarchist in America to the Russian Revolution and Spanish Civil War, exploring her contributions to freedom, resistance and social change that still resonate today.
- [02:44]
Interviewer
Ruth for those who may only vaguely know about Emma Goldman as the famous anarchist firebrand, could you start by introducing her? Who was she and what was about her early life that helped shape the person she would become?
- [02:55]
Danny Byrd
So Emma Goldman was born in what's Now Lithuania in 1869 and she studied in tsarist Russia she left Russia in the 1880s to go to America with her sister and she went to America as someone who had been introduced to revolutionary literature in Russia and was therefore on the sort of the radical wing, if you like, but who thought of America as a land of freedom, a land of democracy, everything that autocratic Russia was not. And when she arrived there, like a lot of migrants at the time, she had a rude awakening, if you like, that life was not quite as she'd expected it she was living in fairly sort of poor circumstances but the thing that really changed her, I suppose, is that when she arrived in the 1880s, there was a very famous incident, a trial of anarchists in Chicago in which polarized opinion in America. And on one hand it sort of radicalized a whole generation of activists, including Emma Goldman and on the other, it created this image of the anarchist as a terrorist so there was this sort of divide that was going on at the time and it's called the Haymarket Affair. And it was basically a labor dispute that had resulted in a protest at which a bomb had detonated and it resulted in the arrest of the labour leaders, the anarchist labor leaders in Chicago, none of whom had really been directly connected with the bomb. But the trial was a trial for conspiracy and several of those who were accused, although they hadn't actually been involved in the bombing, were executed. And this really radicalized Emma Goldman. And from then on she thought of herself as an anarchist she started to get involved in anarchist circles, in anarchist activities and she thereafter became a sort of a tireless advocate for anarchist causes I mean, she. She became very well known in America because of her lectures. I mean, she was endlessly lecturing and the lectures themselves drew, I mean, often enormous crowds and they also drew attention to her as someone who was a disruptor, someone who was not only very critical of American institutions but who was prepared to question some of the sort of the prevailing norms, particularly about interpersonal relationships, the institution of marriage, the position of women and what she called the enslavement of women, particularly in marriage. So these were the things that promoted her, if you like, as a public figure, both within anarchist circles and with a wider public who thought of anarchism as something that was thoroughly disreputable and probably also extremely dangerous.
- [05:46]
Interviewer
Before we go any further, I think it's worth clarifying what anarchism actually meant to Goldman how did she understand it and how different was her vision from the popular image of anarchists? That existed at the time so that's
- [05:57]
Danny Byrd
quite a difficult question because the idea that existed in the anti anarchist circles was that anarchists were just mindless irrational terrorists they were bomb throwing crazy people who just wanted to destroy everything There was nothing positive in anarchism and Emma Goldman, I mean she comes from a tradition which thinks of anarchism as a part of the socialist movement so anarchism presents a critique of the state of capitalism of property relations, of inequalities but what it tries to do is to suggest that the solution to the problems that we see in society are up to us to resolve by ourselves that what we need to do is to find alternatives that don't rely on the very institutions that are responsible for the oppression in the first place and so anarchism puts itself, if you like outside of the established norms and institutions so it appears to be undemocratic it appears to stand against everything we hold dear but from the anarchist point of view of course all of the institutions that we think safeguard our liberties and safeguard our rights are actually institutions that only give us limited rights in order to protect the enormous benefits that the elites gain through their control of resources, property and so forth so anarchism for her is I mean she calls it the beautiful idea Anarchism is about self organization, self government and changing relationships so that we avoid systematic domination now one of
- [07:32]
Interviewer
the most important people in her life was Alexander Berkman can you tell us a bit about that relationship and how did it influence her political development and what does it reveal, do you think about Goldman herself?
- [07:43]
Danny Byrd
So Alexander Berkman is someone that she meets when she first starts to mix in anarchist circles and they've both read the same kinds of literature in Russia They've both read Chernyshevsky's what Is to Be Done this is the key thing that holds them together in the first instance and they become lovers and they're after lifelong friends and Berkman is a soulmate to Tuama Goldman, you know he's also intellectually extremely alert and someone who's already been sort of immersed if you like in anarchist circles I suppose the initial sort of influence that he has or that they have on each other is this idea of free love so they're both committed to a notion of consensual relationships which are not sanctified by the Church which are chosen freely by themselves which last as long as their love lasts and which changes according to the relationship that they both want to cultivate so although they start as lovers that relationship ends but they still retain this enormously strong bond and he becomes to her, I suppose, her kind of intellectual rock the person that she bounces her ideas off he edits her work I mean, together they get involved in the 1890s, actually in an assassination attempt which this follows a shooting of workers at the Homestead Factory it's run by Andrew Carnegie but the hard man, if you like, who runs the factory, the Carnegie factory is a guy called Frick and Berkman and Goldman holds him responsible for the shooting of the workers and Berkman tries to assassinate him he fails, but he's then locked up for 14 years so they're separated during this time but they still retain this extremely close relationship and she does everything she can, if you like, when he's in prison both to make sure that he's all right to ensure that he's supported on his release and that that relationship, again, sort of is rekindled on his release although it becomes a much more of a comradely relationship rather than a sexual
- [10:00]
Interviewer
relationship I'd like to look a little bit at the context of the time that she's emerging in because as you've mentioned, she becomes this prolific speaker she's going on these lecture tours she's rabble rising, essentially and she becomes one of the most famous radical speakers in the world but figures like that don't emerge in a vacuum so what was it about the social, political and cultural conditions of the time that made it possible for someone like her to find an audience and become such an influential public figure?
- [10:29]
Danny Byrd
So, I mean, she lives a long life I think the thing that's important in the early years of her life is the sort of the impoverishment, if you like, of a lot of the migrant communities that arrive in America. So there's a huge wave of migration in the 1870s and 80s so she finds a voice amongst those people but she also finds a voice with the unemployed and these are the people that she starts to speak to initially so there's a financial crash, there's massive unemployment and the topics that she's talking about in the first instance are about the impoverishment of workers and the vulnerability of workers to these failures of the commercial system or of capitalism, if you like and she distinguishes herself as a speaker partly because she's a woman and she's incredibly eloquent and she. I mean, by all accounts she holds an audience in her hands once she starts to speak I mean, she's a magnetic presenter of ideas when you read her her essays you can see that she has a great ability to, to unpack very complex notions of oppression and exploitation in a way that is easily understandable, very accessible and has a real angry punch to it. So she's not standing there as someone who says, you know, things are bad but they're going to get better. She's. She's someone who's standing there and telling the workers things are bad and they're not going to get better unless you do something about it. And this is, you know, it's an incredibly kind of powerful and inspiring message. And I think this is, you know, really what makes her fame notwithstanding. I mean, you know, in addition to the fact that she's also then picked out by the, the media as someone who is incredibly dangerous as a speaker and also someone who the police start to watch very carefully. She's put under surveillance, she's arrested. This also adds to her notoriety. So there's this whole sort of cycle of talking rebel rousing, as you put it, press coverage, her fearlessness. All of this sort of paints a kind of a portrait of this, of this woman who's come to America and has dared to sort of question the freedoms that America is promoting as a, as a guardian of democracy and actually sort of encouraging workers to resist. You know, it's a great recipe for success.
- [12:58]
Interviewer
Absolutely. And do you think she revelled in that idea of herself as this thorn in the side?
- [13:04]
Commercial Narrator
Actually?
- [13:04]
Danny Byrd
I mean, there are clearly moments where, I mean, she becomes very exhausted. I mean, there are moments of doubt. I mean, she's a very reflective person. I don't think that she necessarily always found it easy to do these things. I mean, and when you think about the sort of, I mean she was crossing America, you know, from Chicago to San Francisco, she, I mean, from 1906 she's running, she sets up this journal called Mother Earth. So she's running all of that. And most of these things she's doing on a shoestring and she's trying to sort of keep her body and soul together by going into various sort of jobs and ventures. So it's not an easy life. And I mean, not only that, I mean, after she, she finishes the romantic relationship with Berkman, she has a number of relationships, some of which, I mean, the later relationships take an enormous toll on her because I mean, one of the people that she, she has a long term relationship called Ben Reitman, I mean, he's very promiscuous, he's unfaithful to her. She realizes that she's become very dependent on him and all of the ideas that she's putting out as an anarchist about free love and its benefits and its liberating effect, she finds very difficult to reconcile with how she actually feels about someone who doesn't seem to reciprocate the love that she has for them. So I think it's a hard life that she has.
- [14:23]
Interviewer
Yes, especially in the context of that time, I would imagine, where there is a certain ideal about what a woman should be doing as today, there are those expectations as well. But even more so back then, I'm assuming it would have been much more difficult to forge that path.
- [14:37]
Danny Byrd
Yes, and I think she doesn't have an easy time necessarily in the anarchist movement either, because a lot of the things that she's advocating about self liberation, about questioning all of these norms, I mean, upset quite a lot of the sort of the puritans in the socialist movement who think that the only thing that matters is class struggle and you shouldn't be upsetting the bourgeoisie by these sort of frivolous attacks on marriage and prostitution and all of this. And Emma Goldman is one who's standing there and saying, if you don't understand that these forms of oppression are actually central to the kind of society that we're building through our revolt, through our refusal to take the roles that have been ascribed to us, then then you're not really a revolutionary at all. I mean, she challenges all of those norms as well.
- [15:33]
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- [16:58]
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- [17:29]
Danny Byrd
So good, so good, so good.
- [17:31]
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- [17:55]
Interviewer
I'd like to look a little bit more into her personal life because as we've been talking, it was every bit as unconventional as her politics. What do we know about her romantic relationships? And how did she navigate the often difficult balance between personal freedom and emotional attachment?
- [18:10]
Danny Byrd
So I think that the starting point is her view that when we're talking about revolutionary change, we're not talking about a new tomorrow. We're not talking about a moment of transition or a cataclysmic transformation. What we're talking about is a continual resistance against systems that seek to constrain us or define us in ways that we don't identify with ourselves. So one of the things that she gets very excited about, if you like, or very angry about is the, is the way, way that patriarchal norms work and actually the way that Christianity and the church in particular want to enforce certain moral codes which are not our own. And these codes play into, into a much more complex sort of system of, of exploitation and repression. So she's, she's always trying to live her life and that it's no accident that her, her autobiography is called Living My Life in ways which will always present the challenge from the point of view of the person who wants to realize their freedom. And so, I mean, she, she starts off, I suppose, thinking about this idea in terms of women's oppression and the ways in which women are coerced into marriage relationships which are basically forcing them to prostitute themselves, which require women to be ignorant of sex, which deny women access to birth control, which basically enslave women to their husbands because they don't have access to work or economic freedom either, or economic independence. So she's thinking of the relationship between men and women as enslaving. And gradually, as time goes on, I think she becomes aware, I mean, largely through people like Edward Carpenter, who's one of the great socialists in Britain, who's openly homosexual and lives a homosexual life. She becomes aware of the fact that the same kinds of oppressions that she's thinking about as affecting women actually affect everybody in different kind of ways. So however we want to identify what society is doing is telling us we can only live in one kind of way, which is sanctified by the church or sanctified by somebody else. And so the rationale that she, or the. The reasoning that she applies to, to women's oppression gets extended, if you like, then to the ways in which gender and sex are themselves constructed repressively. And so she starts to talk about, in the language of the time, the intermediate sexes. So people who have different characteristics, who don't fit the norms of male or female, and who want to live according to different kinds of, you know, what we would now call gender fluidity. In 1912. There's a series of letters which survive from Imelda Sperry to Emma Goldman and some replies from Emma Goldman, but it's not a complete set. So what we have in the letters from Imelda Sperry are a set of love letters, effectively, to Emma Goldman, which refer also to. I mean, there's one letter in particular which refers to the relationship that they've had. You know, the scholars who are. Who are closer to this than I am think that it's pretty clear that she did have a lesbian relationship with Imelda Sperry.
- [21:44]
Ruth Kinnner
And.
- [21:45]
Danny Byrd
And I think the. I mean, the significance of it, if you like, is her. I mean, she's also very supportive, I mean, which is unusual at the time in socialist circles. She's incredibly supportive of Oscar Wilde and appalled by the person, his persecution, as she sees it. So I think the significance of it is not only her willingness to experiment in her own life, but also to think about really taboo subjects and to embrace the fact of difference and the different kinds of repression that people face and how we can test that through our interpersonal and loving relationships. I mean, the thing that she doesn't do is make it public. And I guess that's the puzzle of that relationship. She doesn't write about it.
- [22:37]
Interviewer
Now, as you mentioned, she lived a very long and full life and she also lived through some extraordinary periods of upheaval. Looking across her lifetime, which events, whether labour disputes, wars, revolutions or political crises, had the greatest impact on her life and public reputation?
- [22:53]
Danny Byrd
I suppose I would say that the period leading up to America's entry into the war in 1917, so she's been agitating, I mean, there are, I mean, two things sort of converge from, I suppose, the 1910s onward. She's spending a lot of time agitating for birth control, for women's access to birth control. She's supporting people who are talking about rape in marriage, which is considered to be obscene at the time in America. And this gives her enormous notoriety. And at the same time, as she sees the looming threat of European war and America's entry into war, she starts campaigning against that. And after 1914, there's a big split in the anarchist movement, in the European anarchist movement, when most anarchists refused to take sides in the war, but some anarchists actually back the Entente powers, the French and the British. She campaigns against the war. She also campaigns against conscription. And so she's then considered at this point to be not only troublesome in the sense that she's creating all sorts of problems for family relationships and all of those sorts of norms, but that she's also being now seen as un American because she's campaigning against what's considered to be a patriotic duty and a republican virtue, which is to fight. And as a result of this, I mean, she is imprisoned. And eventually what happens is that with the increasing kind of increasingly repressive laws that are passed against anarchists because of their anti war activities, she's put on trial and she's deported from America. And like all of the deportees at the time, they're sent back to their countries of origin. So she's sent back to Russia, which is in the throes of revolution, and she's initially very excited about the fact that Russia is in revolution. But the thing that makes the huge impact on her life, I suppose, is one, that she's thrown out of America, but two, that when she's in Russia she begins to see that the way that the Bolsheviks are organizing their affairs is not anarchist in any sense, it's very dictatorial, there are masses of political prisoners. And so she, she, she detaches herself as an anarchist from this massively important revolutionary event. And this sort of puts her, I mean, when you know, when everybody is, is. Is looking from a distance and thinking, certainly in America, the socialist movement is. Is pretty much signed up to the idea that the Russian Revolution is a liberationary movement. She's coming back to Europe eventually and saying, this is not the revolution. This is not what we want. This is the same kind of totalitarianism or dictatorship that we've been fighting against. And she becomes completely alienated from the mainstream of the socialist movement because she's standing up as an anarchist. And that, I think, has an enormous effect on her.
- [26:06]
Interviewer
Of course, so much of Goldman's life was shaped by conflict with the authorities, whether it's surveillance, imprisonment, deportation, if you, as you've just been spelling out, and exile, how did those experience affect her thinking? And what can they tell us about the relationship between political dissent and state power during this period?
- [26:24]
Danny Byrd
So, I mean, eventually, I suppose what happens in her later writings is that she makes a direct link, if you like, between the kinds of repression that she sees in Russia and the slide or the disintegration, as she sees it, of the republic in America. So she, instead of thinking that democracy is the bullock against totalitarianism, and later, because she sees the rise of Mussolini and Hitler against the rise of fascism, what she sees in America is the possibility that these things could happen anywhere. And I suppose the really important lesson that she takes from that is that, which is, you know, a lesson that she's always had from the start, is that if we want to think about rights and the kinds of the values that liberalism promotes, equality, freedom, justice, we have to fight for that. We have to continually assert our rights. We can't think that rights are something that are granted to us by governments and be grateful for that, because we have to understand that if we think of them as permissions or as grants, then we're accepting the fact that they can be withdrawn at any moment. So the important political lesson I think that she takes from seeing the spread of the right, if you like, or the extension of the right in Europe and the ways in which the repression has operated in America, which is, you know, incredibly repressive, is that you have to keep fighting, you have to keep asserting those rights. And you do that by different kinds of means, depending on your context. So we're not just. We're not talking about asserting rights necessarily violently, but certainly standing your ground and being prepared for confrontation.
- [28:19]
Interviewer
I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about Emma's life during what is now known as the interwar period, the period between the 1920s and 1930s. What was she doing and where exactly was she based during this time?
- [28:29]
Danny Byrd
Oh, she's all over the place. I mean, she spent quite a lot of time in the uk. I mean, the difficulty that she has after, after escaping from Russia and she does have to escape is that she doesn't have settled status. Eventually she marries in order to get citizenship in, in the uk and that gives her greater security. But she's, she's traveling around, so she goes. I mean, she has a brief spell back in America. She's. She has a spell in Canada. As I say, she spends quite a lot of time in the uk. She's, she's also, I mean, after, after Russia, she's, she's, she goes, she moves across Europe, she's traveling, she's lecturing. As time goes on and of course, as, as people begin to see, certainly after the death of Lenin, the rise of Stalin and the way that the interwar politics pans out. I mean, certainly Soviet politics pans out, she begins to rebuild, if you like. So the alienation that was created by her initial denunciation of the Bolsheviks is recouped by the fact that she becomes one of the first people to warn about the problems of Bolshevism and the Soviet regime. So she begins to get a greater audience again and she publishes her autobiography, which becomes a huge bestseller and attracts an enormous amount of attention and praise. The other thing that, I suppose the important thing that she's doing in the interwar period, which is I suppose her last sort of political act, is that she gets involved in the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Revolution. So the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 36 after Franco's failed coup. She's close to the Spanish anarchists and she spends a lot of time both going to Spain and trying to support the revolution and also raise money for the anarchist cause in Spain. And she's a tireless advocate, I think, for the, for the Spanish revolutionaries at a moment when again, the anarchist movement is very divided about what's going on and the rights and wrongs of the strategy that anarchists take in order to try and protect themselves from fascist takeover.
- [30:44]
Interviewer
Of course, that is another example where ultimately the ideals that she had lived her life by were completely demolished by Franco's victory in 1939. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit now about the final years of Emma's life and what she was thinking. What was the state of the world, you know, as she was dying? What did she think was going to happen?
- [31:04]
Danny Byrd
That's a really interesting question. So she writes a very famous essay towards the end of her life, which, I mean, and the title kind of gives away perhaps her state of mind. And she says, was My Life Worth Living? And she looks back at her life. It's an incredibly powerful piece of writing. And she admits, if you like, that a lot of the things that she fought for have been. Either didn't come to pass or have been undone. And then she looks across the sort of. The disappointments. I mean, she also admits, I suppose, that. I mean, in terms of the feminist movement, that although feminism hasn't worked out as she wanted it to, it's become a very sort of electoral movement based on sort of gaining access to the existing establishment or institutional setup rather than trying to challenge the institutional setup. She also admits that women have made certain gains, that there have been certain sort of improvements in women's lives. But she. I mean, she's generally very accepting, if you like, of the fact that the great dreams and hopes she had didn't come to fruition. And then she says, so was it worth living? And she says, of course, because. And this plays, I think, to her unwavering sense that unless you try, unless you challenge, unless you assert yourself for the person you want to be, for the life you want to live, for the. For the being you might become, actually, things would have been very different if she hadn't done anything. Then life wouldn't have been worth living. What made her life worth living was that she attempted to push all of these things. And that legacy survives. And it's not just her. It's all of the people that she was working with, all of the people that she organized with, all of the people whose disappointments she shares.
- [33:05]
Interviewer
Probably misquoting this, but Emma Goldman is well known for the quote, if I can't dance in your revolution, I don't want to be a part of it. And there's a tendency to remember her, I suppose, as a bit of an uncompromising revolutionary. But when you look closely at her life, are there aspects of her character that you think are often overlooked? Perhaps her contradictions or vulnerabilities or even her personal passions which have been kind of forgotten.
- [33:26]
Danny Byrd
So I think, like a lot of activists who write, particularly essayists, and I think this is not just of anarchists. I think you find this in people like John Stuart Mill, too. They write essays and it's difficult sometimes to find. You know, if you want to find a coherent political theory, then actually you're going to struggle because people are writing in particular contexts for particular purposes. I think the complication with Emma Goldman is that she's not someone who is philosophically trained, if you like, and she's someone who is deeply impassioned. So she's always writing with her heart on her sleeve and she's writing as a speech maker as much as anything else. So you're always going to find tensions and contradictions in Emma Goldman. So, for example, we can see for all of her, all of the support that she wanted to give to intermediate sexes, if you like, to people who didn't identify as. As heteronormative. She also has this idea of motherhood as, as women's fulfillment and these things don't quite match up, but I don't think they, you know, I don't think they really have to because Emma Goldman is. Is always talking about different kinds of oppression and how. How we should confront those oppressions as we see them. So there's never going to be a perfect oppression, a silver bullet or a perfect recipe. It's always how we, individually and in our. Through our collective actions, how we confront what we see to be the barriers that stop us being the people we want to be. And I think that's bound to have all kinds of contradictions and tensions. But just on the dancing, I mean, for me, I mean, she. It is a. It's a quote that comes from the 70s and it's attributed to her. But there are two stories that she tells in Living My Life, and they're both about dancing. The first one is the story that she tells where she just goes to a dance with her sister and she just loves the music and she dances with abandon and she's taken aside and she's told that basically her behavior is not feminine. And she says, I don't care, you know, I am going to dance. And the second story is, is where she's dancing, but this time in a socialist club, and she's told, your behavior is unbecoming of someone who is committed to revolutionary change and class struggle. And she says the same thing, I don't care. I'm not fighting for your revolution. I'm fighting for my revolution. And if I dance, I dance because that's the kind of change I want. Abandon and dancing.
- [36:09]
Interviewer
Brilliant. I wonder, Ruth as well, if you could tell me a little bit about Emma's standing within the anarchist movement itself and what her legacy is in terms of anarchism today.
- [36:19]
Danny Byrd
So since the 1970s, when Emma Goldman is rediscovered, certainly in America, largely by feminists, I think she has emerged as the most prominent anarchist feminist voice in the anarchist movement there's a risk of overstating that. I mean, there are certainly other women who are active in the same period and some which she knows so famously Voltairine Declare, who she writes an essay about is also sort of talking about the same kinds of things. I mean, we also have people like Louise Michel who she's a great admirer of. But Emma Goldman becomes the person who attracts the most attention, I suppose for her consistent denunciation of women's oppression, her attacks on women's oppression and her sort of fearless refusal to cave in to the pressures that confront her. So her legacy is of being this anarchist feminist someone who challenges the kind of the vulgar or more vulgar conceptions of anarchism as being a class only movement. Emma Goldman certainly blows that out the water.
- [37:28]
Interviewer
Many people today have probably encountered Emma Goldman through popular culture rather than her own writings Perhaps most notably in the 1981 film Reds where she was portrayed by Maureen Stapleton who famously won an Oscar for that role. How do you think Goldman's public image has evolved since her death? And are there any misconceptions about her that you want to debunk or think need to be put to rest?
- [37:50]
Danny Byrd
So I think, I mean the. I mean the other thing that where she features, where she becomes quite well known is the book Ragtime. So she features in that as well by Doctorow. And I think there is a tendency sometimes to portray Emma Goldman as, you know, the kind of the fleshy side, if you like Emma Goldman, the sort of over sexualize her. And I don't think that's how she understood free love. I mean, free love was about how we enter into relationships with each other. You know, the experimentation can easily get detached if you like. And I think that there can be a certain sort of voyeurism about Emma Goldman which tends to downplay the broader message, the kind of the richer message that she wanted to give about or wanted to explain about the ways in which we can enjoy loving relationships in many, many different ways and that this becomes a basis for recreating our society. And I think that there's a risk that that sometimes gets lost because of the adventurousness, if you like, of her own personal life.
- [39:07]
Interviewer
I guess I do have one final question which is you obviously spoke about her. Was it an essay that she'd wrote just before she died where she was reflecting on whether her life had been worth living? And I guess looking at that today in terms of it's almost been a century, do you think she would feel that some of her ideas have been fulfilled, or would she be frustrated by the state of the world? I guess, essentially, do Emma Goldman's ideas have any relevance to today's world? Do they still speak to us in the 21st century?
- [39:36]
Danny Byrd
Oh, I like to think that she's up there and thinking that she's been completely vindicated. Yeah, you look at what goes on in the interwar, you look at that situation, you look at the the response of the authorities at the time to the challenges that were being made, to the failures of democracy, and it resonates. And I think everything she says is worth rereading. I think she's utterly vindicated.
- [40:10]
Ruth Kinnner
That was Ruth Kinnner speaking to Danny Byrd. Ruth is professor of Political Theory and co founder of the Anarchism Research Group at Loughborough University. She is also a historian of ideas with interests in historical and contemporary anarchism, 19th and early 20th century socialist thought, utopianism and political militancy, and is the author of the Government of no the Theory and Practice of Anarchism, published by Pelik.
- [40:45]
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