Emma’s ghost

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is long-departed from this world, but the spirit of America’s most famous self-proclaimed anarchist seemed to haunt last year’s battle in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and this year’s protest in Washington, D.C., against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), globalism, capitalism and whatever else ails the world.

As Goldman saw it, the world has two main camps: the oppressed and the oppressors. Children are destined to become either rebels, “outraged by every injustice perpetrated against them or upon others,” or rubber stamps, “registering every convention and taboo imposed on them.” Needless to say, Goldman belonged to the first noble category. She was to communism what Ayn Rand was to capitalism (both, as it happens, were born in Russia), to the point of being jailed in 1893 for urging the unemployed to take the food they needed “by force.”

Poor Emma found her ideals put to the test when she was deported to Russia in 1919, just in time to catch her Bolshevik idols taking everything by brute force. She left in 1921, disillusioned by the dictatorship, but with her ideals remarkably intact. In 1934, she was still expressing hope that “if the devices by which men can harm one another, such as private property, are removed, and if the worship of authority can be discarded, co-operation will be spontaneous and inevitable, and the individual will find its highest calling to contribute to the enrichment of social well-being.”

Poor Emma rallied behind anarchism, or her version of it, which stated that the “center of gravity in society is the individual.” However, she made it clear that this had nothing in common with “rugged individualism,” which is “predatory” and always running for the cover of the state and the protection of armies, navies and “whatever devices for strangulation it has at its command.” Rugged individualism, she said, is simply “one of the many pretenses the ruling class makes to unbridled business and political extortion.”

The firebrand revolutionary’s writings then disintegrate into a veritable Pandora’s box of paradox. Personal freedom and individualism are good, she writes, yet they run the danger of allowing greedy people to act in their own, and not the public’s, interest. And because the world was not yet rid of injustices — or, in her words, “myriad ways by which the strong, the cunning, the rich can seize power and hold it” — something had to be brought to bear in order to effect much-needed social change. But what?

The solution, in Emma’s mind, lay in the notion of “uncompromising rebellion” against government and authority. Had she lived long enough, she might have praised China’s Cultural Revolution — unleashing student revolutionaries to “struggle against” party officials (with the exception of Chairman Mao) and bourgeois institutions and ideas — until she saw how horribly it was put into practice. Defiant to the end, Emma died with her lofty ideals intact, refusing to acknowledge those who died and suffered as a result of them.

In Seattle late last year and in Washington earlier this month, thousands of self-styled anarchists took to the streets calling for the dismantling of global institutions. As one said, “I’m trying to close down the evil, global monetary system.” Others railed against the evils of capitalism, or blamed the World Bank and other institutions for poverty in developing countries. “Shut them down” was the rallying cry; “forgive the debts of the poor nations” was another.

Well-meaning people argued that the collapse of the globalist agenda would usher in new paths to social and economic development, the notion being that present institutions are all capitalist pawns. Humanity would be free to pursue “new experiments” once the old ones are torn down. Goldman would no doubt approve, any flaky vision of Utopia being preferable to the perennially less-than-perfect system at hand.

The irony of the Seattle and Washington protests is that most of the protestors are, by world standards, prosperous, free, well-educated and healthy. Yet they insist on slamming the very system that has afforded them the freedom to protest, ostensibly because it has failed the poor, which make up 80% of the world’s population. They cannot be faulted for wanting to improve matters, but they are nonetheless short-sighted, arrogant and befuddled in their thinking.

This is not meant as a criticism, but as a challenge: It’s easier to destroy than build, to toss aside than to repair, and to point to problems than to find solutions. It’s easy to condemn sweatshops in developing countries from the comfort of an American armchair. It takes courage to walk into the home of a third-world factory worker and tell him that your goal is to eliminate the job that feeds his family, and to say “please understand, it’s for the greater global good.”

It takes even more courage to hold political leaders — rather than multi-national corporations — responsible for plundering a nation’s resources for personal gain and for failing to deliver basic education and social programs. Throwing good money at bad government hasn’t worked and it never will, yet the notion that transferring wealth from rich nations to poor ones will somehow cure poverty stubbornly persists.

More than 100 of the world’s poorest nations met in Cuba recently to demand debt relief and a greater share of the world’s power and wealth. Political leaders from Nigeria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Venezuela and other countries were on hand to discuss the gap between the rich and the poor. There were no protestors, but, had there been, most would have agreed that, yes, globalization is exacerbating the problems of poor nations. Everybody wants to save the world, and it’s easier and more politically correct to blame the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO for its ills than to point an accusing finger at corruption, cronyism, kleptocracy, lawlessness and incompetent government. Safer too.

We’re not suggesting that young people (or anyone else) shouldn’t protest or challenge the status quo. Quite the contrary. The IMF and World Bank have made mistakes — the most obvious being Russia, where the introduction of capitalism produced economic chaos because legal and regulatory agencies were not yet in place to ensure fair markets — but they are trying.

The biggest challenge will be to find new ways to influence intransigent governments to pay greater attention to the legal rights and social aspirations of their citizens. When these aspirations are not met, corporations are often viewed as a potential solution — as well as a potential source — of the problems. But companies have commercial objectives too, which they must balance against the demands of local communities and a myriad of other stakeholders.

As time goes on, protesters may come to realize that there is no quick fix to complex political and social dilemmas, and that change will come only when they put their shoulders to the wheel of progress instead of throwing sticks in the axle.