“Emma Goldman has some very firey literature that is very good.”
I really liked “Anarchism: What it Really Stands for”, although it didn’t add anything to my actual understanding of anarchist theory, did she write anything else of interest?
I clearly have to improve my writing, because that wasn’t what I meant… Well, enjoy your books.
I think I may have come to the conclusion that the de facto left is no longer relevant. I think it is dying, and all we are dealing with is the large “priestly language” and some residual fashionable / socially polite causes it has left behind.
If you really look at the list, Marx (who is now absolutely discredited) is the only one who really tried to seriously say anything - and from what I can make of him Foucault may be the only other canidate to actually say something - but I’ve a hunch, there is not much that a classic liberal is going to disagree with on Foucault (there is probably good reason why Sartre called him something like the “last defender of the bourgoise”) - the rest seem just too irrelevant to me and I would say the rest of the relevant world at large; when they spea it is more about arbitrary aesthetics or empty psychologisms, or geneologies/ histories that don’t matter - in other words a dance around anything relevant.
I think what the “real” conflict may be is between us continental / classic styled liberals vs left / progressive styled liberals - and that is nothing more than taking a bunch of econ and math classes in school. Either way liberalism wins / has already won, we just have to figure out exactly what it is saying
Goldman’s bibliography is the most interesting part about her. There’s not much she said that hadn’t been said before her, until she goes into criticisms of marriage and social hierarchies. Her feminism is her remarkable theory because it filled a void that had been ignored for quite some time in anarchist circles. Other than that, she was just a figure that couldn’t be ignored. So when she rephrases Kropotkin, she not only does it in a much more eloquent way, but she says it with much more force than he ever could.
Now is this just a matter of aesthetics? Maybe. But seeing as how Goldman probably made more anarchists than any of her Russian counterparts (and probably every American combined) before her, there’s probably something to it.
On Marriage is, I think, the name of the essay where she starts disassembling the nuclear family, before the nuclear family was the nuclear family.
“Specters of Marx, by Derrida, is supposed to be a good deconstruction of Marxist communism.”
Not so much a deconstruction of Marx, but the idea that Marx still exists and may be ready to reassert itself. The specter part is the idea that Marxism still exists even after the Cold War, even though it has none of the support that it had by governments for so long. Marx said in the communist manifesto that there was a spectre haunting Europe. Derrida thinks that Marx is more relevant than ever, because he thinks that we live in the worst time in human history. And this is the fault of capitalism and liberal democracies.