Thematic Review: Goddess of Anarchy

Lucy Parsons' self-presentation was fluid. She was a former slave who passed and presented as all sorts of racial stereotypes. Jones recreates Parsons' racial reinvention through birth certificates, newspaper innuendo and period phrenological speculation. Albert's politics also has a strain of convenient affiliations which began. His heterodoxy manifested as republicanism when he was in Waco. The same trait presented as socialism and anarchism in Chicago. Jones describes his kempt self-presentation as an an inversion of radical proletarian stereotypes. Goddess of Anarchy, a biography of both Parsons, portrays the couple's shifting adherence to social mores as a product of periodic changes in resistance (abolition, unions, and progressivism) and shifting strategies for survival (camouflage, solidarity, camouflage and revolution). The evolving strategies show that the Parsons were iconoclasts but not doctrinaire.

Lucy's public Victorian femininity is also part of this self-presentation. Her public appeals to monogamy and motherhood are not part of her private lifestyle. This is evident in her convoluted domestic arrangements before Albert in Waco and after in Chicago. It is also evident in her public disagreements with later free-love anarchists like Emma Goldman. The convenience of Lucy's femininity politics might be explained by the income she earned as a Haymarket widow or through sales of Albert's memoir. Lucy's selective theory explains the ironies and inadequacies of her broader philosophy.

One of the more shocking episodes of Goddess of Anarchy is Albert Jr.'s attempted military enlistment. Lucy uses the court system to have Junior committed for the rest of his life. Anarchist jurisprudence is a recurring irony that Jones identifies in much of Lucy and Albert's story. Jones speculates about Parsons' motivation for condemning her son to die in an asylum but doesn't settle on an explanation. Maternal anarchist Lucy leveraged state power against her child. Accepting Lucy's lifetime of pragmatism helps to explain the fundamental contradictions of her actions.

Lucy Parsons' failure to resolve the internal contradictions of anarchist jurisprudence is part of a broader theoretical inadequacy shared by her peers. Most's attentat is a political act of violence that is supposed to startle the population. Radical revolutionary change is possible in the wake of this political act. The internal contradiction of attentat is that consciousness of a bourgeoisie law is a prerequisite for breaking it. A small revolutionary act is an anomaly compared to a lifetime of rule-following.

From a bourgeoisie perspective, bad politics doesn't reveal the failure of the social system. It actually reinforces the system. Citizens who have had social or psychological breaks to become anti-social don't require a new social system. They a require a socially-sanctioned solution. The deportation, imprisonment or execution of conflicted dissenters is possible because these people understand the system, live within it and benefit yet they choose to use it improperly.

Lucy's trans racialism and bourgeoisie dress were used to access places that were off limits to former-slaves. With access she believed her oratory and theory would compensate for her lack of authenticity. Albert believed he would get a fair trial after Haymarket even though the system was corrupt. He also believed he could use the execution to address his followers. Believing he was entitled to justice while violating mores was naïve. Goldman and Sanger believed they were entitled to the bourgeoisie controlled postal service resulting in Comstock. Bakunin believed the trade unions were a revolutionary ally in the First International until they kicked him out. Luxembourg and Liebknecht wasted so much post-war revolutionary energy looking for allies in bourgeoisie nationalist politics.

Leftists from Thoreau to Chomsky have advocated tax strikes during times of conflict. This does nothing to prevent the army from forming, marching or declaring war. Refusing to pay taxes after the war has started only takes weapons off the battle field while the war in Mexico or Vietnam continued. In the twenty-first century conflicts the military budget deficit isn't made up by ending the war. In fact, the military is sent to fight with inadequate equipment. When military spending increases it is not linked to higher taxes but rather lower domestic spending.

Parsons might have seen Junior's committal as a pacifist and internationalist attentat. Non-violent, state-sanctioned anarchist propaganda is the antidote to the violent dynamite and assassination regime of Johann Most, Alexander Berkman and Leon Czolgosz. A mother condemning their child to the asylum is every bit as shocking as blowing up mining equipment or killing a president. State sanction intensifies the propaganda like it did in the Occoquan Workhouse, Bull Connor's Birmingham or Abu Ghraib. An obvious downside of Lucy's fetishization and attentat of her adult child is the loss of Junior's freedom. An other downside is the deconstruction of Lucy's public persona. The real contradiction is an appeal to the state's monopoly on force.

There are few mothers so dedicated to a radical philosophy that they would sacrifice their offspring to it. A socialist, anarchist, communist (and environmentalist) critique of capitalism questions the parental role of creating more workers and soldiers to populate the market. The family, in historical context, is an economic unit that has adapted to many different mode of production and can be used in the transition to a new epoch. The biological relationship between mother and child is not wholly explained by social development. The self-sacrifice of someone like Debs (Thoreau or Chomsky), who is imprisoned for international pacifism, develops a biological aspect when it targets the next generation.

Offspring supply new labor for capitalist exploitation and fodder for generals. Socialists like Jane Addams use offspring (especially children) for reformist moral appeals. Anarchists like Goldman radicalize the children in "Sunday schools" and employ them in public actions (like bread riots). Under this rubric, Lucy Parsons' politicization of Junior's enlistment and committal are dislodged from domestic conceptions of Victorian motherhood and reframed as a social act of propaganda. This is still attentat because it is a violent political act. It is different than an assassination or bombing because the anarchist isn't violating any social or legal rules.

Attentat direct action used by anarchists. Propaganda is one way to explain Junior's committal. Jones includes other suggestions like conflicts over money, suitors, physical violence and state-sanction for Lucy's suit against her son. These explanations center an interpersonal conflict between mother and son. This narrative centers personality over Victorian conceptions of motherhood. This fits because Parsons has a history of fluid and pragmatic use of gender (and race) in service of iconoclast philosophy. The impersonal explanation, offspring attentat, transgresses public perceptions of motherhood for shock value. Any romantic misgivings concerning a mother selling her child upriver ignore the scientific socialist fact that all humans under capitalism are market commodities. Marxism explains how the commodities (concepts like proletarian class, labor saving machines and fiat currency) can be reappropriated for anti-capitalist purposes. This includes offspring.

Albert Parsons' defense during the Haymarket trial is based in the first amendment and plausible deniability. His legal team thought Parsons speech was protected by the Bill of Rights. They also thought his entourage at the event, Lucy and the children, was proof that he didn't expect violence. This defense emphasizes parental responsibility and discounts class obligations. This is how Albert was convinced to to come out of hiding and face the trial. So did his trust of anarchist jurisprudence and state-sanctioned attentat. He planned, without irony, to use his legal rights to deconstruct the system. To proto-leftists like Goldman and Eugene Debs, Haymarket revealed a judicial system based on jury rigging, arbitrary detention (and injunctions). Show trials are attntat that undermine a radicals belief in the progressive nature of the rules based order. This state-sanctioned epiphany invites radicals to emphasize other incongruities between social-democracy and market liberalism. But using the contradictions is different than dismantling them. The result of brown-red and brown-black alliances is often eventual ascendance of the fascist browns and the obliteration of their leftist allies.

The other part of Parsons' defense, about not wanting to endanger Lucy or the children, is also flawed. This becomes obvious during the trial over Junior's sanity. Using the court system to take Junior's freedom is a state sanctioned act based in sanity laws, judges, and a state asylum. There is a similar propaganda value to children killed by police, see Tamir Rice et al. Lucy Parsons fluid version of anarchist femininity could explain the sacrifice of her child at the altar of anti-imperialism. Looking backward from the committal of Junior to the Haymarket affair suggests that Albert Parsons' defense, based in paternal responsibility, is inconsistent with the propaganda value of condemning ones offspring to state sanctioned violence. An anarchist who appeals to state rules shouldn't expect to be treated fairly.

Lucy and Albert probably didn't want their kids to be killed by police during the Haymarket affair. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have considered the attentat value of such a tragedy. The proposition that Lucy sacrificed her son for anti-imperialism supports a the claim that Albert (or Lucy) knew of the bomb, expected violence and were willing to capitalize on harm that would befall their kids in the wake of Haymarket. The assumption that Lucy would protect her offspring from state-sanctioned terror ignores her future action regarding Junior.

Anarchist philosophy has adopted the scientific socialism idea that the bourgeoisie creates the tools of its own demise in the proletariat. This is because of classical economy's conflicts between socially necessary labor, surplus value, developing technologies and private property. Anarchist attentat doesn't fit in the scientific Marxist paradigm. The former is emotional and the later is eventual. Parsons' anarchism is based on a triggering psychological reaction which unhinges the proletariat from capitalist society. Neither is counter-revolutionary but the anarchists sacrifice scientific predictability for romantic immediacy.