Caity and Dan welcome Keith Preston back to the show for a very interesting conversation about anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman. We begin by chatting about Emma’s life and ideas and why they are still relevant today, the Haymarket affair, Alexander Berkman, if anarchists are born and not made, the difference between activists and theorists, the type of person who can popularize unpopular ideas, feminism and the suffragette movement, why the state is the real problem, working conditions in the early 20th century and the differences between relative and absolute poverty and the expansion of the nanny state.

We move on to what one has to give up to be a full time activist and why many of the anarchist women of Emma’s time gave up the norms of marriage and motherhood to be full time activists, Emma’s opposition to war, the assassination of president William McKinley, genuine anarchist terrorism and police infiltration in the radical political movements and how they love to divide rival factions.

We go on to talk about free speech, how it was under threat then as it is now and what Emma may have made of the modern world.

Download (right click save as)

Originally published @ http://www.greeningoutpodcast.co.uk