An article marking the launch of Mother Earth in March 1906, debunking some of the myths which have been spread about it and its politics. It includes comments on the paper’s “Observations and Comments” section which show its communist-anarchist orientation clearly. It appeared in Black Flag Anarchist Review (Spring 2026)
Remembering Mother Earth
Forever linked to Emma Goldman, Mother Earth was America’s leading anarchist magazine from its launch in March 1906 to August 1917 when state repression saw its monthly run end. It published articles by American and European writers and activists on a variety of anarchist topics, including the labour movement, anti-militarism, women’s emancipation, sexual freedom, birth control, Marxism, education, the arts, free speech as well as state and government control. Its contributors included many internationally famous anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Élisée Reclus, Ricardo Flores Magón and Max Nettlau.
Originally to be called The Open Road (after the Walt Whitman poem “Song of the Open Road”), the existence of a journal with that name in Colorado (which threatened to sue over infringement of copyright) meant the new journal became Mother Earth. Goldman later recalled the inspiration for this title:
While visiting the little farm one Sunday, Max and I went for a buggy ride. It was early in February, but already the air was perfumed by the balm of spring. The soil was beginning to break free from the grip of winter, a few specks of green already showing and indicating life germinating in the womb of Mother Earth. “Mother Earth,” I thought; “why, that’s the name of our child! The nourisher of man, man freed and unhindered in his access to the free earth!” The title rang in my ears like an old forgotten strain. The next day we returned to New York and prepared the copy for the initial number of the magazine. It appeared on the first of March 1906, in sixty-four pages. Its name was Mother Earth.[1]
June 1908 saw it reduce to thirty-two pages and Goldman started to lecture again due to its financial situation. The journal continued and grew in influence and readership along with the anarchist movement:
Interest in our ideas was growing throughout the country. New anarchist publications began to appear: Revolt in New York, with Hippolyte Havel as its editor; the Alarm in Chicago, issued by a local group of comrades, and the Blast in San Francisco, with Sasha and Fitzi at its head. Directly or indirectly I was connected with all of them. It was, however, the Blast that was closest to my heart. Sasha had always wanted a forum from which to speak to the masses, an anarchist weekly labour paper to arouse the workers to conscious revolutionary activity. His fighting spirit and able pen were enough to assure the Blast vitality and courage.[2]
The journal effectively ended after Berkman and Goldman were found guilty of violating the Espionage Act for encouraging resistance to the draft, although the Mother Earth Bulletin continued until April 1918. The following year saw Goldman and Berkman deported to Bolshevik Russia.
As noted, the journal covered a wide range of subjects – as did Goldman. This has allowed bad-faith writers to present a radically false impression of the journal and its politics (and Goldman, amongst others).
An example would be Carolyn Ashbaugh and her deeply flawed biography of Lucy Parsons and works influenced that it. Ashbaugh’s underlying assumption seems to be – she never clearly states it nor defines the anarchism she is so sure that Lucy Parsons did not advocate – that anarchism is individualistic, lifestylist and not interested in class struggle. This produces “anarchism” (personified by Goldman) which is individualistic and lifestylist while syndicalism (personified by Parsons) is collectivist and class struggle. This was shown in Ashbaugh’s account of different anarchist papers:
“The Liberator’s message was of strikes and industrial conflict, oriented to the class struggle. The other papers [like Mother Earth] dealt with all facets of life and social revolution – sex, women’s emancipation, literature, art, theater – and found their readership in the avant garde of the literary and artistic world.”[3]
Precisely how Ashbaugh determined the readership of Mother Earth is impossible to say but her summation of its contents leaves much to be desired given that it regularly reported on strikes, the labour movement and the class struggle. It also regularly ran articles advocating Syndicalism and its pages saw Goldman’s famous two-part article on the subject which was later issued as a pamphlet. Indeed, its first issue ran the following short article which clearly indicated its politics:
A painting from the “good old times” represents two peasants wrangling about a cow. One holds on to the horns of the animal, the other tightly clutches its tail, a third figure is in a crouched position underneath. It is the lawyer milking the cow, while the other two are quarrelling. Here we have the beauty of the representative system. While groups are bargaining about their rights, their official advisers and lawmakers are skimming the cream off the milk. Not justice, but social injustice is the incentive of these worthy gentlemen.
Human justice, and legal representation thereof, are two different things. One who seeks for a representation places his rights in the hands of another. He does not struggle for them himself, he must wait for a decision thereupon from such quarters as are never inspired by love for justice, but by personal gain and profit.
The working people are beginning to recognise this. It is also beginning to dawn upon them that they will have to be their own liberators. They have the power to refuse their material support to a society that degrades them into a state of slavery. This power was already recognised in 1789, when, at the French National Convention, Mirabeau thundered: “Look out! Do not enrage the common people, who produce everything, who only need to fold their arms to terrify you!”
The General Strike is still at the beginning of its activity. It has gone through the fire in Russia. In Spain and Italy it has helped to demolish the belief in the sovereignty of Property and the State.
Altogether the General Strike idea, though relatively young, has made a deeper impression on friend and foe than several million votes of the working people could have achieved. Indeed, it is no joke for the pillars of society. What, if the workers, conscious of their economic power, cease to store up great wealth in the warehouses of the privileged? It was not difficult to get along with the would-be labour leaders in the legislative bodies, these worthy ones, experienced through the practice of manufacturing laws to maintain law and disorder, rapidly develop into good supporters of the existing conditions.
Now, however, the workingmen have entered upon the battlefield themselves, refusing their labour, which has always been the foundation of the golden existence of the haute volee. They demand the possibility to so organise production and distribution as to make it impossible for the minority to accumulate outrageous wealth, and to guarantee to each economic well-being.
The expropriateurs are in danger of expropriation. Capitalism has expropriated the human race, the General Strike aims to expropriate capitalism.
A new and invigorating breath of life is also felt in this country, through the formation of the “Industrial Workers of the World.” It awakens the hope of a transformation of the present trade-union methods. In their present form they serve the money powers more than the working class.[4]
Yet it is true that Mother Earth did not restrict itself to just discussing strikes and class struggle. However, this does not mean that it ignored these subjects nor considered them as anything else than essential means to achieve anarchy. This can be seen when Ashbaugh, in passing, admits that the likes of Goldman “emphasized cultural revolution as well as class revolution” and that Goldman lectured on “Syndicalism, the Strongest Weapon of the Working Class, a Discussion of Sabotage, Direct Action and the General Strike” Yet these admissions are combined with the claim that Mother Earth “reflected the dissociation of anarchism from strictly class struggle movements” even if such a claim is not supported by the little evidence given. [5]
It would appear that Ashbaugh hoped her readers would turn “as well as” into instead of and “from strictly” to completely from – a hope also premised upon her readers not reading Mother Earth (or Goldman’s writings, for that matter). For if that journal was consulted, the reader would quickly see how far Ashbaugh was from reality – as she herself is forced to do at times with her passing admissions.
Still, such admissions do little to counteract the dichotomy she invents. A less biased (or better informed?) author would conclude that Parsons sold the “pamphlets by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the majority of Kropotkin’s works” and “announced her lecture tours in Mother Earth” due to the similarity in ideas between the communist-anarchists.[6]
Ashbaugh’s biases are easy enough to see. She mentions Parsons’ support for the general strike as blossoming from “the syndicalist germ of thought which she had has in the 1880s”[7] but seems unaware of – or unwilling to admit – it being advocated by anarchists in the First International over a decade before.[8] This reflects a wider issue, namely that Ashbaugh goes out her way to avoid mentioning anarchists when it undermines her case. She writes that “the Anarchist Exclusion Act, passed in 1903” saw “John Turner, the English radical unionist, [being] the law’s first victim.” Turner was, indeed, a leading radical trade unionist but he was also an anarchist of long standing involved with Freedom, which was why he was deported.[9] Likewise, she notes that a “contributor to the French paper Les Temps Nouveau in Paris wrote to Lucy Parsons” and fails to inform the reader this was a leading anarchist paper closely associated with Kropotkin (whom she laughingly proclaims as “the gentle anarchist theoretician of non-violence”).[10]
Ashbaugh’s false dichotomy that “Goldman became interested in the freedom of the individual” while “Parsons remained committed to the freedom of the working class from capitalism” and “believed that women would be emancipated when wage slavery in the factories, fields, and mines of capitalism had ended”[11] cannot be believed if Mother Earth or the writings of Goldman are actually read. Unsurprisingly, Ashbaugh makes no attempt to point her readers to texts which could substantiate her claims for there are none – and ignores the many which refute it.
Of course, distortions are harder to refute when the evidence is hard to gather. Until Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (2001/2012), edited by Peter Glassgold, next to nothing from the journal was easily available. except for a few articles by Goldman in her own Anarchism and Other Essays and Alix Kates Shulman’s collection Red Emma Speaks. This anthology had a comprehensive selection of texts grouped into six parts: “Anarchism”, “The Woman Question”, “Literature”, “Civil Liberties”, “The Social War” and “War and Peace.” Its contents show the flaw in Ashbaugh’s assertions.
More could be written on Ashbaugh’s distortions[12] but enough has been provided to indicate that Mother Earth deserves better. Sadly, such claims have been eagerly repeated by Leninists seeking to discredit anarchism[13] and do need to be debunked. Luckily, that is easy to do if Mother Earth is read for it quickly becomes clear that it was a journal based on the class struggle and its importance in anarchist activism as well as achieving an anarchist society. Yes, it covered other aspects of life alongside this but it is a distortion of immense proportions to claim that these somehow undermined or replaced the class struggle element of the journal.
Anarchists cannot rely upon non-anarchists on anarchism or anarchist history is remembered. Whether it is a product of incomprehension or bad-faith, accounts – even if they appear to influential – can be simply wrong, as Ashbaugh’s claims about Mother Earth show. Remembering Mother Earth, then, is far more than just accurately recounting an important anarchist journal and its contents. It is about remembering and reclaiming anarchism itself from those seeking to distort it and its history.
Mother Earth: “Observations and Comments”
As well as articles on a wide range of subjects, not least on labour struggles, Mother Earth also published a “Observations and Comments” column. While not appearing in every issue, it provided a forum to raise anarchist views on current affairs and developments, including those related to the labour and radical movements such as strikes, the I.W.W. and the deradicalisation of the Marxist movement produced by its embrace of “political action”. Needless to say, the extracts provided here are not all the writings on these subjects published and, of course, the column commented on other subjects as well.
As these writings were not attributed to an individual and a product of contemporary events, they have rarely appeared in anthologies and only sometimes referenced in articles on Mother Earth or its main members (primarily Emma Goldman). However, these writings provide a valuable insight into the politics of those active in Mother Earth as well as its aims and methods. As such, we provide a selection from the journal’s “Observations and Comments” column over Mother Earth’s lifetime to give a favour of the focus of America’s then leading anarchist monthly journal and its advocacy of syndicalist tactics in the struggle for libertarian communism.
End Notes
[1] Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) I: 378-9.
[2] Living My Life II: 567.
[3] Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing: 1976), 221.
[4] “International Review”, Mother Earth, March 1906.
[5] Ashbaugh, 221, 233, 225.
[6] Ashbaugh, 227.
[7] Ashbaugh, 218.
[8] Iain McKay, “Anarchism and the General Strike”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 3 No. 1 (Spring 2023).
[9] Barry Pateman, “John Turner, anarchist union leader”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 4 Number 2 (Summer 2024)
[10] Ashbaugh, 215, 221, 160.
[11] Ashbaugh, 200, 202.
[12] Iain McKay,” Lucy Parsons: American Anarchist”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2022).
[13] Iain McKay, “Emma Goldman, class warrior”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 4 Number 2 (Summer 2024).