Emma Goldman Told Lenin the Revolution Was Already Wrong

Lex Fridman opens his 200th episode by calling Michael Malice an author, anarchist, and friend who makes him smile, think, and wonder why he always sounds sleepy. He then asks a farmyard question from *Animal Farm*: if they lived in Orwell's barnyard, which creature would Malice rather be? Malice reaches for Milton. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, so he would be a pig, and at the top of the pile, Napoleon.

He quickly widens the book. *Animal Farm* can be read as 1917, he says, but Orwell's target was broader: Mussolini, Hitler, any revolution that seizes power in the name of the animals and becomes the new farmer. The right, he adds, should notice the courage of three unmistakably left-wing figures who were among the strongest enemies of totalitarian communism: Emma Goldman, Albert Camus, and Orwell himself. People on the left like to throw Orwell's own line back at conservatives, that every word he wrote should be taken as a defense of democratic socialism against totalitarianism. History, Malice says, does not sort cleanly into left-good and right-bad.

Goldman is his first exhibit. Deported from the United States with Alexander Berkman after Berkman's attempt on Henry Clay Frick, she was told, in effect, that if she wanted socialism she could choke on it in Soviet Russia. She went. What she saw horrified her. She walked into Lenin's office and said this was not the point of the revolution: the individual, free speech, people working together. Lenin answered that free speech was a bourgeois contrivance, and that a revolution could not afford it. When she later told British socialists, including the Fabian crowd, that she had seen the future and it was worse than the tsar, a standing ovation drained into a room where you could hear a pin drop. Fighting your own camp, Malice says, is the kind of courage that gets you called a traitor.

Fridman presses the practical question: in Animal Farm, or in fascist Europe, what is the heroic act for someone with a mind? Malice is wary of the Western habit of braiding heroism to martyrdom. Camus, he notes, kept returning to a motto shared by people of conscience: let justice be done though the heavens fall. Do the right thing even when the consequences will not be pretty. That, loosely, is his definition of heroism.

Then he tells a story he saw on Twitter, and twice regrets not remembering the man's name. In the line at Auschwitz, a Nazi guard asks a mother how old her child is. Fourteen, she says. No, he tells her, twelve. She insists. He says twelve again. She understands, and the child lives, because below a certain age the selection sent you to the gas. Heroism here is defiance in an unsupervised second, a small lie that pulls one name off a death list. It will not make a statue. The guard himself might be dead the next day. It still happened. Malice adds a limit: pick your battles. A bullhorn on a platform would have saved no one.

Totalitarian states, he says, understood the next move. If they cannot break you, they turn to your family. Stalin made children fourteen and older eligible for the death penalty on certain charges, so NKVD interrogators left a child's death warrant visible on the desk. You will confess to anything. Kim Il-sung's North Korea still punishes class enemies for three generations, often without a trial or even the name of whoever caused the ruin. It is easier to be brave in your own skin. Every man, Malice says, becomes a coward when it is his child. Writing in *The Guardian* that he does not vote, by contrast, costs him nothing. That is not courage. Courage would be refusing to vote in the Soviet Union, and even then it would change almost nothing.

Camus is Malice's lighthouse, a model of conscience. Americans hear that he joined the Communist Party and stop listening. Malice clocks the date: the Party was then the main force fighting fascists in France, and Camus used it as a way into the Vichy underground. He was not a committed communist. The famous line attributed to him, that it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners, was actually Howard Zinn. Camus's Nobel speech said something kin to it: the writer's job is to keep civilization from destroying itself. Sartre, the existentialist who accepted the label Camus refused, defended the Soviet Union and said that even if the gulags were real, they should not be discussed. Human minds, Malice notes, can hold contradictions and still sleep.

Camus's essay *Reflections on the Guillotine* attacks the death penalty without claiming that murderers are nice or that killing them is always wrong. Lock a person in a room, tell him you will murder him in two years, and keep him there: we would call that man a monster. The state does the same thing and calls it justice. Camus spent a career fighting the idea of evil, Malice says, while asking a harder question: do we want to be the kind of people who, in any other context, we would call torturers?

Fridman asks how absurdism, which sounds a step from nihilism, can still talk about conscience. Malice answers that Camus's philosophy is explicitly a response to nihilism and an attack on it. Cynicism, for both of them, is the worst quality a person can have. Malice's own line, from *The New Right*, is that he would rather be naive than a cynic, because a cynic is a hopeless man projecting his hopelessness onto the world. The image he finds most useful is a blank canvas on an easel at the foot of a mountain. One kind of person only asks why it is there. The other sees infinite choices: the river, the bird, friends, himself. That is a gift, not a threat.

He ties it to yeshiva. Life is a gift; God wants you happy, morally, to the fullest. He once fumbled a church question about the Jewish afterlife, then remembered the banquet: steaks, chicken, sushi, wine, every soda you want, and someone turning to the chef to ask what is for dessert. Eat the meal. If this cook can deliver this table, dessert will be fine. Camus was an atheist, but the shared claim is that meaninglessness is an opening: you get to look for value, truth, and happiness. A young man who had tried to kill himself a year earlier wrote to Malice from a meth house childhood, now trying standup. Even washing dishes, Malice says, is heaven next to the alternative. Cynicism is not a worldview. It is a lie that happiness is impossible unless you sell your soul.

Fridman cannot shake a wartime song about 22 June 1941, the morning Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. It names the hour: at exactly four o'clock, Kiev was bombed and the radio announced that the war had begun. The precision haunts him. Any ordinary life can be cut off at a minute on the clock. Both men come from Russian Jewish families. Malice's people were in Lviv, in western Ukraine, where the German advance was so fast that if the army arrived, you and every relative would be murdered. No probability, no story you can tell yourself. Vietnam, he says, could go badly for Americans without Vietnamese soldiers arriving to kill them in their homes. For Soviet Jews, if the Red Army failed, slaughter was certain, and often not a clean bullet.

His grandmother talked about hunger so complete that the mind would not allow any other thought: food, food, food, and children thinking the same thing while knowing they would not get it. Imagine being a parent watching that. In the 1990s it happened in North Korea; Malice interviewed a refugee who watched his father starve to death. Fridman is quiet. Malice later says Fridman is the first person to make him cry on a podcast: a robot made him cry, what is going on. Last night in Austin the shops were closed and he could not buy protein powder. That, he says, is the extent of his suffering around food.

Then a family story that still hurts. In a close call, perhaps with something overhead, his great-grandmother threw herself on his grandmother's brother and not on his grandmother. Her name is Sophia. She felt, for the rest of her life, that her mother had chosen the brother. In *Five Chimneys*, an Auschwitz memoir Malice cites, the worst part is not only slaughter but the absence of reason: Czech prisoners treated better than Jews, then killed in a day; children walked in snow until they froze because the killers would not, or would not bother to, shoot them. Grass grows at Auschwitz. Birds hop for worms. You stand there knowing what happened, and the scene looks normal. Plenty of places on earth, he says, would still kill the two of them on sight and be proud of it.

Malice talks about North Korea because Westerners, he thinks, file Asian suffering under otherness, as if the people were Martians. A Westerner speaking makes it easier to imagine it could have been us. His takeaway on human nature is that people are animals, and animals run the whole range: apes grooming one another, cats raising orphaned puppies, orcas killing calves for fun. He does not think *Lord of the Flies* or Hobbes is the last word. What he has seen, especially among Soviets, is the mediocre person who stands between you and your daughter's medicine and loves making you dance. Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, he says, is more common, and in some ways more disturbing, than the SS guard who can pretend the finger is not connected to the victim.

Nicolae Ceaușescu is his exhibit. Stalin was a bank robber; Lenin and Trotsky were powerful intellects with huge wills. Look at Ceaușescu and you imagine the postal clerk baffled because your ID says Street and the system says Avenue. He looks like a simpleton, then he is taught to the country as a historic genius, forces people to breed because he wants them taller, and builds the People's Palace for himself while the rest of the city has no electricity. In another society he would have been a mediocre clerk who hurt no one. With power he produced secret police, prison, and mass death. Weak, ordinary people handed strength for the first time, Malice says, will take it out of your hide.

Fridman wants the opposite moral: almost everyone has a glimmer, a tiny protest against bureaucracy, a wink in the Starbucks line that says we are in this together. Malice disagrees. He thinks a lot of people are not capable of that leap; some, he says harshly, effectively do not have souls in the sense of bringing critical thought to a risk. He cites *Scare Tactics*, a 1990s hidden-camera show. One setup hired a mark as an overnight security guard. People in rags burst out of a factory saying they were prisoners, beaten, worked around the clock. One guard shoved them back in: he was there to do a job. The thought that something was wrong never entered his head. Fridman says people have not had the chance, the way he has never tried LSD or DMT. Malice's reply is quick: two minutes earlier Fridman said everyone has the chance, every day, to do the right thing. They do not settle it. They land on a shared question: how do you build a society that produces more free actors?

Malice tells a 1990s TV story. A woman describes a football player who tormented her every day in high school and once threw pickles in her hair. Twenty years later they bring the man out. He is a dad. He barely remembers her. She cries about the pickles, and Malice has never seen a face that wanted to die more clearly: total knowledge that he did wrong, and that he cannot undo it. Malice tries to do right, he says, not because he is inherently good, but because he will feel it for a very long time. Doing wrong to a good person tells you what kind of person you are. He snaps at his friend Bitstein for mentioning that *Ego & Hubris* was on torrent, then learns Bitstein had already bought it. Years later he apologizes; Bitstein has no memory of it. He apologizes again on this episode.

Online, he tries to keep aggression as a counter-attack. If you go personal, he will not necessarily hold back, but he does not think pile-ons are normal just because they are common. Sometimes he posts something inane about bubble gum and gets a paragraph of invective. In those cases he may reply, and mean it: I wish your parents had been kinder to you. Someone taught this person that this is how you answer the world. He does not need their kindness. He wants them to ask whether this has to be the default, or a weapon they pull out only when it is warranted.

Fridman refuses childhood diagnosis. He thinks almost everyone goes through a stage of enjoying derision, and he will not let himself think badly of the people waiting for him to fail, hoping the man who talks about love is privately a Cosby. Malice's explanation runs through black pills and white pills. If you have decided everything is finished, a counterexample is not a person. It is a threat to the whole hypothesis. Seeing someone you rate as mediocre succeed asks a painful question: then why haven't I? The cheap fix is to prove he does not deserve it. People mocked Andy Warhol for painting a soup can and getting rich. If it is that easy, Malice asks, why aren't you painting? If he walked up with a million-dollar check for one can, what would you be waiting for?

Asked for a recent moment of joy, Malice offers a bad restaurant. You wait forty-five minutes, starving. The waiter ignores you. The water has a hair in it. The food is wrong, then wrong again and cold. At some point you realize you are living an anecdote you will tell for years. The worst thing happening is an hour for a meal cooked badly. That, he says, is joy: holding the idea that happiness and thriving are possible even while everything in the moment is going the wrong way. Fridman asks whether every moment has that capacity. Yes, Malice says, the miserable ones and the good ones.

Viktor Frankl's *Man's Search for Meaning* is the extreme case. In a camp, unexpected food, or even thinking about food, is joy. So is telling a child a joke and taking five minutes off his pain. People hear love and think romance. Malice thinks of two dogs who look at each other, then at the thing they both care about. The ruined dinner works the same way: you and a friend notice, without conspiring, how awful it is. That glimmer is what makes life beautiful.

He is planning a trip back toward Lviv with Chris Williamson, a close friend he has never met in person. Fridman left Russia at thirteen and remembers it; Malice left at one and a half and remembers nothing. He wants to stand on streets where family was rounded up, and to feel the jolt of a woman who visited Auschwitz and said only that grass grows there. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian, which will be a problem. Russians, he jokes, will unsolicitedly tell him how to live. Seeing Lenin's body, the man Goldman yelled at, will not, he thinks, feel like nothing. He has a forthcoming book titled *The White Pill*. Testimony, for people still under those regimes, is part of what dodging the bullet is for.

Malice's *The Anarchist Handbook* gathers essays from the 1790s to 2014. What the writers share, he says, is the illegitimacy of government, the malevolence of state actors, and the search for non-state alternatives. The black flag comes in many colors. They disagree about what they are for; they agree about the nature of the state. The tradition has been swept aside with a grow-up. He wants readers to see how long people have treated freedom as the thing to maximize.

Leo Tolstoy is the surprise name: a Christian anarchist who came to despise government for deceit and violence and took nonviolence as a Christian duty. Malice is tired of corporate Martin Luther King, but he credits King with forcing people to watch the consequences of Jim Crow: men and women in suits set on by dogs and fire hoses for sitting at the front of a bus. Pacifism is easy to mock and hard to answer when the person being beaten will not hit back. After Stalin died, some gulag guards killed themselves, Malice heard on *Trigonometry*, because they had believed the prisoners were there for a reason. Non-retaliation, at its best, makes the wielder of force look at what he has become.

Fridman objects that people naturally form hierarchies, so how can there be no hierarchy? Malice grants the first half and rejects left-anarchist talk of fully non-hierarchical relations, which he cannot even picture. People are taller, stronger, smarter, richer. The issue is forced hierarchy: whether anyone has the power to impose his will. Anarchism, he repeats, is not a location. It is a relationship. This is Fridman's show; Malice can leave, Fridman can kick him out. A lawyer advises; the client decides. John can be Stephanie's lawyer and Stephanie John's doctor, each with ostensible authority in one room and none in the other. That, he says, is the default of human life, not a utopia. The United States, asked whether it is just a hierarchy that grew in anarchy, was built by force and fiat. Still, the slogan he puts in the book's introduction will return later: you do not speak for me.

Fridman asks in what way the United States imposes itself. Forty percent of his money, Malice says. If you don't like it, leave, is the usual reply, as if outrunning a mugger made the mugger moral. The anarchist claim is that the mugger and the government differ only by an air of legitimacy. Murray Rothbard's *Anatomy of the State*, the essay that converted Dave Smith, says the state is the only agency that gets its goods by force: not a producer, a parasite. Jeff Bezos cannot send an army into a house. Andrew Cuomo, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama can.

Could tax be reframed as payment for services you actually want, like buying insurance from the government? Malice sees one decisive difference. He can list *Ego & Hubris* on eBay for $500 or Amazon for $3,000 or a million dollars. The seller's tag means nothing until a buyer clears it. Tax is by fiat: he can decide Lex pays 40 percent and Joe 45, and neither can say the price is too high. For employees the money is taken before they see a check. Every service the state provides, he claims, the market would provide better, with more choices. Fridman calls that a hypothesis. Malice says it is very likely.

Centralization, he argues, is not the historical trend. Record labels once decided the Billboard 100; now anyone can go direct. Television went from three networks to cable to satellite to infinite YouTube. Dean Kamen's soda machines offer dozens of Cokes. Lockdowns, in Carol Roth's *The War on Small Business*, produced a huge transfer from shops and laundromats toward Target and Amazon, because Bezos can get Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell on the phone and the Etsy sock-maker cannot. Ludwig von Mises's calculation problem is the theoretical core: Detective Comics #26 and #28 at $1,000, #27 at $50,000, and you need not know it is Batman's first appearance to see scarcity. A monopolist setting prices blinds the whole system. Imagine UPS skimming 20 percent of FedEx and DHL with no work in return, or a podcast automatically taking 20 percent of everyone else's views. Incentive dies.

War, they agree, is the state at its worst. Children are taught it is a last resort; the corporate press, Malice says, treats it as a first response, shows American caskets, and does not even pretend to care about the people overseas. He will grant a narrow case for government if the alternative is mass starvation, food stamps, school lunches, even if Nabisco lobbies Oreos onto the tray. Private charity would be more efficient, but at that point he does not care about efficiency. Fridman keeps hoping government can shrink, outsource, and improve like a firm. Malice's answer is that the state never backs off: the Postal Service still competes with FedEx and UPS, who pay taxes that fund the rival.

Malice's essay says he will not vote this year or any year. The simplest explanation: he does not vote for the same reasons he does not take communion. However admirable the pope, he is not the steward of Malice's soul, and no president is the leader of his life. Fridman asks whether voting is our best way of hiring a representative. If a lawyer screws up, Malice says, you fire him. If you vote, you may not get the person you wanted; you get the person the neighbors wanted. Representation means speak for me. Voting means I will take what I can get, and I get it whether I show up or not.

A referendum is more coherent. Brexit is a yes-or-no about an idea, not a person. Voting for Joe Biden, by contrast, claims that one man speaks for you on abortion, taxes, the environment, immigration, and war, and that he will deliver and has the power to deliver. Unless you are a complete NPC, those odds are near zero. Elites still frame the questions, as Burnham, Pareto, and Mosca described. Even so, Malice and Fridman converge: let people campaign and debate a tax rate, then vote the issue, not the mascot. Add no wars, and decriminalize victimless trades. Sex workers, he says, need access to security more than almost anyone; lumping a cocaine seller in with a child rapist is a confusion of evils. Hunter Biden could describe buying crack in *The New Yorker* without consequence. Kamala Harris could talk about college weed. George W. Bush overcame a cocaine habit. Poor kids do not get that leniency.

Goldman, unlike Tolstoy, was more open to violent opposition. Her mentor Johann Most published dynamite instructions as a way for workers to level a field of batons. She and Berkman later split with Most after Berkman's failed attack on Frick, which was supposed to spark revolution and instead got Berkman thirteen years. When Leon Czolgosz killed McKinley and named Goldman as his radicalizer, she was on the run from a man she said she did not know. Berkman called McKinley a party hack, a symptom; Goldman thought the act might be defensible even if not justified. After Russia she still was not against revolutionary force, but force by the state against the masses was an obscenity to the principle. Violence, Malice warns, sings its own song. Goldman's best was elsewhere: ask for work, then bread, and if they will not give you bread, take bread. When property rights stand between a starving person and food, even a property anarchist finds the case hard. His reply is that free enterprise made obesity the problem. She did not have that data.

Malice is leaving New York for Austin, the hardest and easiest decision of his life. Hard because he has lived there since he was two, aside from college; the city trained his sense of what a city can be, and his chosen family has been whittling away. Easy because the remaining friends dismantled every excuse. Matt will pack the library by hand. Someone will take driving lessons with him. Others will walk apartments, take pictures, and ask him to trust their judgment. Then Matt suggested a furnished rental for a few months so he would not have to buy under pressure. New Yorkers, he says, are the most provincial people on earth. He assumed Austin would be 80 percent of New York prices. For $700,000 he is looking at houses that would be $3.5 million there, with a yard, a dog, and a legal gun.

Fridman, renting month to month, treats buying as a hit on freedom. The kind story is that you make a home. The unkind story is that you get stuck and stay longer than you should when a wilder chance appears. He praises Malice's talent for meeting a guest where they are, whether Dave Rubin, Alex Jones, Joe, or Fridman himself. Malice, an introvert who still cannot believe people pay him to talk, prepares a few points and then tries to make cerebral people a little silly without making them into buffoons. When Elizabeth Spiers, a friend with corporate-journalist politics and a Gawker past, came on his show, his audience wanted blood. His job as host, he says, was not to punish her for showing up somewhere she did not need to be. As a guest, his job is to make the host look good and not feel like it is work. He does not care what his friends' politics are. He cares whether he can call them on a bad day.

Alex Jones had just been on Malice's show and talked about human-animal hybrids as the conspiracy that should wake people up. Malice was not surprised. On Tim Pool's program he had been the translator of Alex-ese, the calm voice turning a performative rant into something discussable. On his own show he wanted to sort which claims have a basis and which do not. His phrase: take one red pill, not the whole bottle. If you decide everything in the media is a lie, the weather forecast is a lie, and the position collapses. Jones felt he had been too aggressive on Pool's show; Malice had not taken it personally. The promise of good behavior let him talk to Jones as a person instead of a cartoon.

Ask ordinary people whether powerful people often meet to twist rules and keep power, and more than 90 percent will say of course. Ask whether they believe in conspiracy theories and they will say that is for lunatics. The concepts, Malice says, are identical, and the single label is a gift to the powerful. It covers Tuskegee and Operation Mockingbird, which have archives, and the claim that 9/11 was holograms, which does not. Power-elite analysis is another name for the first kind. Living in the second kind, the abyss Jones described, can wreck a mind: if unknown people control everything, you get powerlessness. Malice's counter is that the people in public charge are nowhere near as crafty as the myth. Watch senators and Harvard professors tweet.

If he died today he could die happy, though a deep-sea submersible still tops the bucket list, to see what a friend calls God's mistakes in the dark. Getting stopped on the street is new and, with one awkward exception, has been decent. Fridman says two big names wanted episode 200, and he chose someone he loves instead. Respect, Malice answers, is not what people say. It is Josh and Zoe asking him to witness a City Hall wedding. If someone does right by you, thank them: a candy bar, a soda, something that shows you did not take it as your due. Looking at the camera, he says to be kind to yourself, because a lot of you deserve it. Fridman closes with Kerouac on the mad ones who burn like Roman candles. The canvas at the foot of the mountain is still there. Some people only ask why. Some people start to paint.