by Peter Rashkin

In December I made a three-week journey around America by railroad, and I'll be reporting on it extensively in the months to come. Right now I want to tell you about two anarchists I met in Chicago.

I didn't have an official stopover in Chicago, but I changed trains there twice and I had long layovers. The first, on my way east, was about four early evening hours. I arranged to meet Anthony Rayson for dinner.

Anthony had written to me after reading about The Dagger in FactSheet Five. We swapped zines. His were strongly anti-racist and radically pro-union, and I liked where he was coming from. I told him to look for a guy with a green and red Zapatista baseball cap. I looked for a guy looking for a guy with a baseball cap. We found each other easily and drove to a downtown Mexican restaurant for beer and burritos and a good talk. Then we went over to the Autonomous Zone, an anarchist bookstore and meeting place with a big selection of leftist books and pamphlets.

We talked about anarchism, labor, race and class in America. It was Chicago, so of course the Haymarket came up. I had only a vague recollection of the event; Anthony filled me in on the details.

It was 1886. There was a lot of labor strife in Chicago, and a big move for what was then a radical idea: the eight-hour workday. A big demonstration was planned for May 4 at Haymarket Square. Some strikers had just been killed, and tempers were flaring. The police tried to disperse the crowd. A bomb was thrown, some cops and some demonstrators were killed.

Virulent anti-Red hysteria followed. More than 30 anarchist leaders were arrested. Eight were tried and convicted of the murder of the policemen, although only two had even been present at the event. (Doesn't that remind you of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow-activists in Nigeria?) The following year, four of them were hanged (another committed suicide in his cell): the Haymarket Martyrs.

HEADING WEST a couple of weeks later, I had five hours to kill between trains. I spent them walking around downtown Chicago. In a thrift store, for a half a buck, I picked up LIVING MY LIFE by Emma Goldman.

I knew the name. She had been mentioned in the movie "Reds," and I even had a pamphlet by her on Anarchism, but I hadn't read it yet. I had no clear sense of who she was. After reading the first volume of her autobiography, she has definitely moved to the top of my list of icons.

She was 18 and a new immigrant when the Haymarket Martyrs were hanged. They inspired her to learn about the movement, and she became a passionate activist. In her autobiography, she talks about what that meant for her in real and personal terms. "Chicago had been significant in my life," she writes. "I owed my spiritual birth to the martyrs of 1887."

I CAN'T SAY enough about this great book, and I'm not ashamed of my adulation. I think we need saints, people who have led exemplary lives in service of an ideal, who can show us a good way, and possibly intercede on our behalf, even with NoGod. I'm always happy to add a new one.

But what of her ideas? Are they valid? Is there something in the theory of anarchism that serious people should consider?

Emma asks us to look past the fundamental paradigm of capitalist society. Government, private property, religion...Emma says they are not the necessary organizing structures of society. We could have something else. We could have something better.

I don't know. I keep getting back to one thing: Without government and the complex structure of legal and property it enables, how can you stop an evil corporation from dumping toxic waste into the water supply?

But then I have to ask, just how good a job does government do in this regard?

LIVING MY LIFE is not a polemic. You won't find an orderly exposition of anarchism here. But reading her LIFE, you get a clear sense of her vision and ideas. I don't remember if she ever comes out and says it, for example, but it's clear that she is against the Wage System.

A couple of times she starts small businesses: an ice cream parlor, a massage studio. She closes the studio rather than hire employees. She'll work for someone if she must, but she won't have anyone work for her.

Isn't this crazy? Isn't it absurd to think that we could structure society so that no one would have to work for anyone else, but instead be free to make his own decisions about how to spend his productive life? Isn't it crazy?

But wait a minute...isn't it crazy to support arms races, fossil fuel-burning environmental degradation, the incessant buying and selling of trivial distractions, to support all of this insanity just so we can make more jobs? Isn't that a little crazy, too?

And I tell you, in a deep visceral way, I've never felt it was right to have a job. It's an invasion of personal sovereignty. Work to do what you need to do to survive and have a better life? Of course. Work with your hands, work with your mind. Work with your community. But it should be voluntary, springing from your own understanding, needs and desires. At least that's what it feels like on a deep visceral level!

Although this critique emerges from the story of Emma's life, she also states it explicitly, as when she talks about the McNamaras, accused of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times:

Simple trade-unionists, the McNamaras did not realize that the conflict between capital and labor is a social issue embracing all life, and that its solution is not a mere matter of higher wages or shorter hours; they did not know that the problem involved the abolition of the wage system, of all monopoly and special privileges.

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