Fig. 1: A sampling of the worldwide anarchist press, ca. 1930 (Foto-Semo; image courtesy of International Institute of Social History).
Sometimes—in the apologetic version of this judgment—the supposed incompatibility of anarchist content and literary form is confined to the domain of writing. Weir, for one, asserts that “the kind of culture that practicing anarchists preferred”—lectures, performances, songs—“was insistently oral in character,” noting, for instance, “Emma Goldman’s interest in modern drama as an important cultural medium for anarchist ideology.” He goes so far as to argue that “the form of the novel itself” militates against anarchism:
The argument is often made that the novel is the cultural form par excellence for the expression of day-to-day experience in the capitalist nation-state, and it very well may be that the ideological influences that have shaped the novel into its traditional realist form make it an inappropriate medium for the cultural expression of anarchism.… The tradition of the nineteenth-century novel … requires a formal mode of narrative discourse that cannot accommodate the largely oral culture of anarchism.69
It is interesting to contrast this with Goldman’s own assessment, in her introduction to the most widely read collection of her writings, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910):
My great faith in the wonder worker, the spoken word, is no more. I have realized its inadequacy to awaken thought, or even emotion.… Oral propaganda is at best but a means of shaking people from their lethargy: it leaves no lasting impression. The very fact that most people attend meetings only if aroused by newspaper sensations, or because they expect to be amused, is proof that they really have no inner urge to learn. It is altogether different with the written mode of human expression. No one, unless intensely interested in progressive ideas, will bother with serious books.70
Here, Goldman appeals to the traditional association of the spoken word with ephemerality, as opposed to the permanence of the written word, in a way that would not surprise literary scholars who have been trained to suss out the prejudices associated with “the illusion of full and present speech.”71 This illusion, we are told, dates back to the arch-authoritarian Plato, who has Socrates inveigh against the art of writing. Relying on the oral process of dialogue as a means to discover truth, Socrates finds all written texts—presumably including those of his disciple Plato, which claim to present records of his spoken words—to be inadequate simulations of living speech.72 Writing introduces a gap between author and reader, a spatial and temporal void in which the original meaning can be lost, so that when Shelley’s “Traveler from an antique land” shows up to read King Ozymandias’s words—“look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—they have been reversed, undone, rendered irremediably ironic by the sheer passage of time (“Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away”).73 In the absence of the author, the author-ity of the written word is ruined.
We might expect, as Weir imagines, that Goldman would condemn the written word as lifeless and abstract in comparison with the immediacy of living speech; no one worries about the effects of writing “fire” in a crowded theater. Orality does take on a certain importance in anarchist resistance culture, as we shall see—partly, as Weir suggests, because it “gets round the problem of illiteracy that many anarchists faced (especially in Spain).” But this, too, is used to disqualify anarchism, once again depicted as a politics of “primitive rebels,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase—a vestige of the premodern world, without a future.74
It is true that Goldman was a public speaker, a specialist in incendiary speech; perhaps the better part of her militant life was spent in free speech fights, in physical confrontations with hecklers and police over the right to a public audience for subversion, sex, solidarity, and sedition. And yet her brief, in this introduction to her own essays, is for reading, not for hearing:
In meetings the audience is distracted by a thousand non-essentials. The speaker, though ever so eloquent, cannot escape the restlessness of the crowd, with the inevitable result that he will fail to strike root. In all probability he will not even do justice to himself.
The relation between the writer and the reader is more intimate. True, books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them. That we can do so demonstrates the importance of written as against oral expression.…
I am not sanguine enough to hope that my readers will be as numerous as those who have heard me. But I prefer to reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused.75
Goldman was not alone in this conception of the possibilities of writing. A writer for Barcelona’s Tierra Libre, for example, argues that anarchist newspapers are “the strongest, most universal, most effective action for propaganda” precisely because of this “intimate” quality:
The printed word works more and better within the consciousness of the individual; it suggests his own thoughts to him, intimate commentaries that increase the value of the concepts he reads about, and in this periodic conversation between him and the printed page, expanded concepts and new horizons emerge. The suggestion exerted by the press goes so far as to overcome the reader’s indifference or prejudice; then sooner or later, the newspaper becomes his inseparable companion, whom he soon presents to his friends of the workshop, the factory, or the soil, and with whom he identifies like the flesh of his flesh.76
It is important to note the difference, here, between these aspirations and those of, say, Lenin’s conception of vanguard leadership. While Lenin, too, speaks of the desirability of the revolutionary leaders and the led “becom[ing] intimate,” it is only this leadership that occupies the epistemological high ground of “correct revolutionary theory”;77 in effect, it stands out over against the proletariat, surveying it as if from above and outside. The masses cannot see themselves accurately (at best, they can achieve “trade-union consciousness”); they do not possess theoretical truth.78 Like empty vessels waiting to be filled, they must receive this theory from the vanguard. By contrast, the desire to suggest the reader’s own thoughts, to constitute an “intimate commentary,” is a desire not to instruct, to direct,