Anarchist order
Sir: Shiva Naipaul (Books, 23 March) reviews Alice Wexler's biography of Emma Goldman from a position of blissful ignorance. Whatever he may suppose, anarchism does 'really exist' and does contain 'a body of doctrine coherent enough to constitute a canon', though by its nature an informal one. There is a series of forerunners (Godwin, Stirner), pioneers (Proudhon, Bakunin), classics (Kropotkin, Malatesta), heretics (Tucker, Arshinov), revisionists (Landauer, Goodman), fellow- travellers (Tolstoy, Read), moderns (Com- fort, Ward), post-moderns (Bookchin, the Situationists). There is a set of polarities between whose extremes debates are con- tinued (individualism and collectivism, re- volution and reform, violence and non- violence). There has for more than a century been a continuous movement in the Western world, which has played a significant part in the labour movement, in the Mexican, Russian and Spanish revolu- tions, and later in the peace, youth and women's movements.
As for Emma Goldman, she never claimed to be an original thinker, but saw her part as proclaiming throughout the United States for three decades the moder- ate form of anarchism communism advo- cated by Peter Kropotkin — though she actually added valuable individualist, feminist and aesthetic elements. She was really much more significant than Wexler shows or Naipaul sees — if only as one of the first well-known people on the Left to recognise and publicise the truth about Communist Russia, which she did on the firm basis of her anarchism.
Nicolas Walter
Hammersmith Hospital, Du Cane Road, London W12
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