Moving
forward by a few decades in my exploratory journey through the great figures of
the anarchist tradition, I’ve hit across Emma Goldman, particular the book of
essays she published in 1910. Anarchism as a political movement in Europe and
America had taken a particularly violent turn by that point, articulating
itself most notably as a series of assassinations. Self-identified anarchists
had, by the time this book was released, successfully killed Czar Alexander II
of Russia, King Umberto I of Italy, and American President William McKinley.
Goldman
herself was hounded by the law enforcement agencies of the United States for
this last assassination, even though McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, had no
material connection with her. This circumstance of an intellectual leader in a
movement persecuted for terrorist activities in which that leader played no
part would repeat in the case of Antonio Negri’s being declared responsible for
the murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro nearly eight decades after the
McKinley assassination.
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| Emma Goldman, one of America's most prominent anarchist activists, a woman who should be properly legendary. |
While I am
thinking further about the identification of the anarchist movement with
violence, and how this continued, I’d prefer to talk about another curious kind
of historical repetition I found in her work. One of the essays in the
collection I’m reading is about the serious need for prison reform. Goldman is
intensely concerned that the prisons of America are becoming overpopulated, fed
a steady diet of people who are so badly mistreated during incarceration, all
in the name of punishment, that their recidivism is inevitable.
Goldman is
incensed that prisoners are made to perform forced labour for which they are
pathetically reimbursed, for the benefit of a corrupt collusion of state
governments and contracting private enterprises. She is also extremely
concerned that the state is spending such a terrible amount of money on prisons
every year, a sign that the priorities of the government are severely
schizophrenic at best, and outright hostile to the people it ostensibly serves
at worst. The annual expenditure that worries her is $1-billion per year.
It is, to
make the biggest understatement that I think I possibly could in the
circumstance, a sad state of affairs that nothing has changed regarding the
pathetic nature of American imprisonment. In fact, the problem has grown so
terrible that it is an objective worry that the United States has become a
police state in some regions, with 1% of its population currently living in
prison. The problem has grown worse, but the majority still believe that
incarceration is necessary.
More than
this depressing analysis of a state of society that has only grown to more
catastrophic proportions since then, Goldman makes a philosophical analysis as
well. I’m quite impressed with how she has combined philosophical analysis with
the blistering language of modern polemic. It’s a style that I think most philosophers
who are interested in the political effects of their concepts should develop.
The heart of
her analysis of why we all believe so deeply in the necessity of prisons lies
in our need for revenge. She shares this notion with Friedrich Nietzsche, and
has in other places mentioned her debt to his philosophical mind. But Goldman,
whether rhetorically or sincerely, says that most people in our society have
lost the nerve and fortitude to carry out an act of violent revenge ourselves.
So we entrust the state to do it on our behalf, rationalizing its behaviour
through the impersonal machinery of law and the excuses provided by
philosophical argument.
Robert
Nozick once argued that Nietzsche’s idea made little sense because one could
build a concept of retributive justice that could stand on its own without
having to be justified by virile desires for revenge. However, this was
precisely not the point. Nietzsche’s and Goldman’s arguments are not about what
can be justified. Goldman herself mocks the notion that retributive justice has
its own argumentative justification as precisely missing the point about the
ubiquity of the need for punishment in our own justice system.
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| Clayton Lockett's execution in Oklahoma unfortunately let spectators see how much he suffered as he died. Like cowards, we were appalled at his pain. |
You can use
the mechanical arguments of philosophy to justify any moral or political
position. What matters politically is what actually lies at the heart of the
motivation to punish. Revenge is the essence of the punishing soul which dry
philosophical arguments for the rightness of retributive models of justice
coldly permit. Just as most of us no longer have the stomach to pull the
trigger of the gun that blows a hole in the head of the man who murdered our
spouse,* most of us can no longer face that, despite all philosophical
chicanery, the visceral motive of retribution and punishment is that we crave
vengeance and blood.
* And we are
even so squeamish that we no longer allow death penalties by firing squad or
other bloody methods, but use poison gas or injections so the dying man appears
more peaceful and we can believe the lie that he’s dying painlessly. That way,
we can feel sanctimoniously merciful as we condone the state-sanctioned killing
of a fellow citizen.
As well,
Goldman identifies an aspect of the philosophical arguments and concepts that
justify retributive justice that I find similarly disgusting. . . . To Be Continued.
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