T-shirts featuring
quotes by famous writers, historical figures, famous
unionists,
anarchist philosophers, and
famous feminists.
In political
science, a
revolution is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political
organization which occurs when the population revolts against the
government, typically due to perceived
oppression (political, social, economic).
Revolutions have occurred throughout
human history and vary widely in terms of methods, duration, and motivating
ideology. Their results include major changes in culture,
economy, and socio-political institutions, usually in response to perceived overwhelming autocracy or plutocracy.
Emma Goldman was an anarchist political activist, writer, and
feminist icon. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and
Europe in the first half of the 20th century. During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking "
rebel woman" by admirers. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including
prisons, atheism,
freedom of speech,
militarism, capitalism, marriage, free
love, and
feminism. Although she distanced herself from first-wave
feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into
anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status
… Read more in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when
feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.
Anarchism was central to Goldman's view of the world and she is today considered one of the most important figures in the history of
anarchism. Goldman believed that the economic system of capitalism was incompatible with
human liberty and she also argued that capitalism dehumanized workers. Goldman viewed the state as essentially and inevitably a tool of control and domination, and as a result of her anti-state views, she believed that
voting was useless at best and dangerous at worst.
Voting, she wrote, provided an illusion of participation while masking the true structures of decision-making. Instead, Goldman advocated targeted
resistance in the form of strikes, protests, and "
direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code". Although she was hostile to the suffragist goals of first-wave
feminism, Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women and is today heralded as a founder of anarcha-
feminism, which challenges
patriarchy as a
hierarchy to be resisted alongside state power and class divisions.
Printed in USA
