Inspiring quotes by political activists, anarchist philosophers, and famous writers.
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.
Abstentionism is a term in election procedure for when a participant does not go to vote. Abstention must be contrasted with "blank vote", in which a voter casts a ballot willfully made invalid by marking it wrongly or by not marking anything at all. An abstention may be used to indicate the voting individual's ambivalence about the measure, or mild disapproval that does not rise to the level of active opposition. Abstention can also be used when someone has a certain position about an issue, but since the popular sentiment supports the opposite, it might not be politically expedient to vote according to his or her conscience. Some non-voters claim that voting does not make any positive
… Read more difference. "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal," is an oft-cited sentiment attributed to anarchist Emma Goldman. In addition to strategic non-voters, there are also ethical non-voters, those who reject voting outright, not merely as an ineffective tactic for change, but moreover, because they view the act as either a grant of consent to be governed by the state, a means of imposing illegitimate control over one's countrymen, or both.