At times, it could seem that Goldman’s anarchism led her to be against more than she was for. She opposed capitalism, religion, and the State most of all, since it reinforced the social and economic arrangement that enslaved individuals. She wrote in “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” that, “Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and the Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.”[9] Despite her contrarianism, Goldman did articulate a vision for a world devoid of State-sponsored violence, militarism, and hierarchical economic relations. At times she spoke of an ideal “free communism,” and outlined her version of anarchist-syndicalism in which people are free to pursue their passions without the hegemonic control of a capitalist class.[10] Her true belief was in a natural harmony inherent to humanity, but, as she argued, this harmony is disrupted through the force of governments. Anarchism, according to Goldman, would not result in chaos, but rather a natural form of cooperation and organization, a “beautiful ideal.” She writes, “the Anarchists are therefore justified in assuming that Anarchism—the absence of government—will insure the widest and greatest scope for unhampered human development, the cornerstone of true social progress and harmony.”[11]
Like most “individualist anarchists” in America, and even some classical liberal critics, Goldman perceived democracy as a political ruse that used taxation and economic exploitation to steal from the masses while enriching elite political and capitalist classes. She would have agreed with William Graham Sumner’s characterization that democracy is when “A and B decide what C shall do for D.”[12] However, unlike Sumner, Henry Adams, or other conservative contemporaries, Goldman’s antidemocracy did not stem from elitism or aristocratic cultural values.[13] On the contrary, Goldman did not think the masses were unworthy of democracy, but that democracy did not actually liberate the masses. In this way, her criticism of liberal democracy in America comes from a place of extreme egalitarianism. All of the industrial and political problems she witnessed around her—working conditions, corruption, censorship—antagonized the otherwise natural harmony inherent to mankind. “The organized activity of free human beings endowed with the spirit of solidarity [will] result in the perfection of social harmony,” she wrote in one of her more famous essays, “What I Believe.”[14] Political democracy, then, even the expanding democracy of the twentieth century, was not a step toward human liberation, but an impediment to social and economic freedom.