My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I originally read this book back around 2004/2005. A good friend lent me her copy and I cruised through it quickly. I just reread it. While I still am not an anarchist (I believe in the value of the state), I thoroughly enjoyed her essays and encourage others to read this book. Just like my recent rereading of several of Karl Marx’s works, Emma Goldman was a prescient author. Writing over 100 years ago at times, she nails today’s political, economic and gender issues. Sadly, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I enjoyed her take on religion and how it has been more of a gloom/tears/blood experience rather than what it professes to be. She expertly covers the impact of labor and capital on workers and their families. She explores the intersection of art/culture and capital, and how capital looks to simply commodify art without looking at any intrinsic value. She covers the emptiness of politics and how it is easier to titillate rather than advance analysis and real policy changes. It’s also funny, to this reader, that her take on Republicans over 100 years ago is still valid today.

Her essay on “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty” is spot on and worth buying and reading this collection of essays in and of itself. To quote at length: “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.”

Even better, in that same essay, she comments on what I call “boners for blood” that has been rampant ever since the first Gulf War. “We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.”

I enjoyed thinking about her suggestion that a draft creates skepticism of the military (finding ways to get out of service and questioning authority) while a volunteer force propagates the belief in militarism and a blind faith in military leaders and patriotism.

Overall, a very good critique of current (late 1800s, early 1900s and 2011) events that should make you think. While I am not an anarchist and don’t subscribe to her comments on why anarchism is the only path, her analysis is spot on.