Emma Goldman wants you to dance in the revolution
It’s International Workers’ Day! Let’s look at Emma Goldman!
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was a radical anarchist who is MOST famous for some variant of “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” Did she say this? Well. Kind of.
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
Essentially, if you want to say that popular quote is Emma Goldman’s, you should go for it. Because it’s an excellent DISTILLATION of what she says in her 1931 book Living My Life.
That she still felt this way after years of persecution, arrest, and ultimately deportation by the United States post-WWI shows how much she held to this belief. If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, Emma Goldman is not coming. So say we all.