o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

128
anarchism: a beginner’s guide
… the man who wins is he with the loudest voice, the readiest flow
of words, the quickest wit and most self-assertive personality.
Immediately it becomes the business of the minor personalities to
drag him down, as the old struggle for place and power repeats itself
with the socialistic societies themselves. 5
With the success of the parliamentary strategy and the entry of
socialists into state legislatures, anarchists reinforced these
complaints. One was that the comforts of office were corrupting and
that parliamentary politics encouraged reformism. Emma Goldman
developed this critique in the light of the success of American
women’s suffrage campaign. Against the claim that women could
improve the quality of public life by their participation, she argued
that women would be swallowed up by the system. It was a mistake,
she argued, to think that the corruptness of politics was a question of
‘morals, or the laxity of morals’. Politics was ‘the reflex of the
business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is
more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled
hand washes the other”’. Women could no more emancipate themselves
through participation in party politics than working men;
their entry into parliamentary legislatures would end in their own
corruption, not the reform of the system. Moreover the scope of
parliamentary politics was simply too narrow to enable women to
tackle the real causes of their oppression: the hypocritical conventions
that constrained them and inhibited their emotional development.
For as long as women clung to the mistaken belief that
parliamentary action was making a difference they would be
deflected from the real task of emancipation. Consequently,
Goldman concluded: ‘woman is confronted with the necessity of
emancipating herself from emancipation’. 6
Traditionally, the anarchist critique of parliamentarism has
extended from the refusal to participate in electoral politics to the
boycotting of elections. Today some modern anarchists are willing to
relax the strict prohibition on the boycotting of elections, pointing
out that abstention can advantage repressive movements. Whilst the
main thrust of anarchism is directed against electoral activity,
anarchists like John Clark argue there is some scope in modern
democracies for anarchists to vote tactically, particularly in
referenda and local elections.
Unlike parliamentarism, vanguardism provides no space for
compromise. The anarchist concern with vanguardism as a form of