Marie Goldsmith
Maria Isidorovna Goldsmith was a Russian-French biologist and anarchist political theorist.
Born in the Russian Empire, she was forced into exile at an early age due to her parents' radical politics. In Paris, her mother influenced her interest in the natural sciences and the political philosophy of anarchism. In the 1890s, she enrolled to study biology at the University of Paris and joined the exiled Russian and diasporic Jewish anarchist movements. While studying for her PhD, she came under the tutelage of the evolutionary theorists Yves Delage and Peter Kropotkin, who influenced her understanding of Darwinian evolution, Lamarckian inheritance and mutual aid. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, she and Georgy Gogelia established the Bread and Freedom group, within which they became two of the first Russian proponents of anarcho-syndicalism.
During the 1910s, Goldsmith published a series of books on evolutionary biology, co-authored with Delage. Together they explored the various different theories of evolution and made a case for cooperation as a more influential factor than competition, in opposition to social Darwinism and the theory of "survival of the fittest". They also defended the theory of symbiogenesis and investigated several cases of symbiosis in nature. By 1915, Goldsmith had completed her PhD and branched out into researching parthenogenesis, tropism, comparative psychology and evolutionary psychology. Her focus was largely on marine biology and the behaviour of fish. After the outbreak of World War I, she took the side of the Manifesto of the Sixteen in the internationalist–defencist schism, and she expressed support for the Russian Revolution of 1917 until the suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion.
Following the death of Delage and Kropotkin in the early 1920s, Goldsmith became isolated from the scientific community and struggled to find stable employment. Her difficulties were exacerbated by her status as an immigrant, a woman and a prominent radical activist. During the late 1920s, she became involved in the anarchist movement's debates surrounding the Platform, which she criticised for authoritarian tendencies. After her mother's death in January 1933, she committed suicide. Her work remained influential within her scientific field, as well as the anarchist movement, into the 21st century.
Early life and activism
Maria Isidorovna Goldsmith was born on, in the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg. Her father was Isidor Albertovich, a lawyer and publisher of a positivist journal; he came from a family of Jewish converts to Lutheranism. Her mother was Sofia Ivanovna, a physician and botanist; she came from a Russian noble family. Goldsmith's parents saw that she received an education from an early age.Both of Goldsmith's parents were involved in radical politics, as followers of the socialist Pyotr Lavrov and friends of the Bakunin family. They were forced into internal exile in the Russian North for their political activism, and had to flee the Russian Empire entirely in June 1884. Still a child, Goldsmith's parents took her into exile in France and settled in Paris. There, Isidor was arrested, imprisoned and soon died from a chronic illness. As her mother was also chronically ill, Goldsmith was forced to enter the workforce at a young age in order to support herself and her mother. She would continue living with and caring for her mother, even into adulthood. Through her mother's influence, Goldsmith became interested in the natural sciences and radical politics.
Her experiences had made her distrustful of the state, and during the 1890s, she gravitated towards anarchism after attending lectures by Saul Yanovsky and Peter Kropotkin. She turned her home on into a meeting place for exiled Russian anarchists, ensuring a strong anarchist presence within the Russian emigré movement in Paris. Goldsmith also began a life-long correspondence with the anarchist activist Emma Goldman. She also made contact with anarchist members of the Jewish diaspora in Paris; although she was not herself a follower of Judaism and had not ever studied Yiddish, she still identified with her father's Jewish roots. She rarely missed the Jewish anarchist movement's events, and it was within this milieu that she began her career of anarchist activism and developed her own anarchist political theory.
Career
Education and early scientific career
After coming of age, Goldsmith enrolled in the University of Paris to study biology. In 1892, she joined the Internationalist Revolutionary Socialist Students, within which she authored pamphlets on anarchist feminism and anti-Zionism. She also joined a Bourse du Travail in Issy-les-Moulineaux, which she represented at the International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress in London; there she was part of the anti-parliamentary faction. After graduating with her Licentiate in 1894, she began working as a member of staff at the University's physiology laboratory, while studying for a PhD under the evolutionary biologist Yves Delage. Goldsmith and Delage became close collaborators and research partners. Delage appointed Goldsmith as general secretary of the scientific journal L'année biologique, which she ran from 1902 to 1924.Goldsmith also became a close friend of the biologist Peter Kropotkin, constantly corresponding with him on scientific and political matters from 1897 to 1917. As Kropotkin was prohibited from entering France, they were unable to meet face-to-face. Like Delage and Kropotkin, Goldsmith became a staunch proponent of the Darwinian theory on evolution and the Lamarckian theory on heredity. Kropotkin entrusted Goldsmith with the completion and translation of his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in the event that he died, as he believed Goldsmith was the only person who shared both his scientific knowledge and worldview.
1905 Revolution
By 1903, revolutionary sentiments were rising in Russia and among the Russian emigré community; Goldsmith predicted that a revolution in Russia was imminent. Together with the Georgian anarchist Georgy Gogelia, Goldsmith established the anarchist-communist Bread and Freedom group, which published a monthly journal from Geneva and smuggled it into Russia. Goldsmith wrote for the journal under the pen name "Maria Korn". Through the journal, Goldsmith and Gogelia became two of the first proponents of syndicalism in the Russian anarchist movement. They extolled sabotage and the general strike as powerful tools by which the working-class could assert itself, at a time when such terms were still foreign to the Russian language.Goldsmith herself upheld the example of the French General Confederation of Labour as a model for Russian anarchists to follow. Goldsmith advocated for anarcho-syndicalism, arguing that revolutionary syndicalist practices were only compatible with the ethics and philosophy of anarchism. The theory quickly spread, with a general strike breaking out in Baku as early as July 1903. The following year, Ukrainian factory workers in Chernigov began looking to establish a revolutionary workers' organisation, along the same lines as what Goldsmith and Gogelia had proposed. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, a general strike spread throughout the country in late October. The events prompted many of the journal's contributors to return to Russia, and it ceased publication in November 1905. According to Goldsmith, the journal was never able to achieve a wide circulation within Russia due to technical and organisational limitations.
Goldsmith and Gogelia were more optimistic about syndicalism than their mentor Kropotkin, who maintained only a qualified support for trade unions. Kropotkin was sceptical about the vanguardist tendencies of syndicalism and warned against Marxist influence within trade unions. Goldsmith recalled that Kropotkin was rather rigid on issues of tactics, and expressed hostility to the idea that "the end justifies the means". As expropriations increasingly led to political repression, she noted that most of its advocates aligned with Kropotkin's opposition to it. Goldsmith was also critical of Marxist and Sorelian forms of syndicalism, which was largely advocated by intellectuals unaffiliated with the labour movement; she believed that syndicalism was an inherently anarchist tradition.
After the suppression of the 1905 Revolution, Goldsmith and her group immediately began preparing themselves for the next one. She established the Paris Group of Russian Anarchist-Communists, which grew to 50 members and met in her home. In 1906, the group began publishing the journal Burevestnik, which Goldsmith wrote for. They organised regular rallies to commemorate the anniversaries of the Paris Commune and the Haymarket affair, as well as on the birth day of Mikhail Bakunin, where Goldsmith and Gogelia both gave speeches. The two also wrote for the Russian-American syndicalist newspaper Golos Truda. Goldsmith and Kropotkin also discussed the creation of a new anarchist newspaper, specifically designed to appeal to the Russian peasantry. After a short-lived attempt to revive the Bread and Freedom group, Kropotkin began writing for the Russian anarchist-communist newspaper Rabochi Mir, although according to Goldsmith, he did not take any greater role in it as he distrusted large organisations. In 1906, she attended a conference of Russian anarchist exiles in London, where she authored reports on anarchist economics, organisation and tactics. In one of the reports, she advocated for communist anarchism and workers' control of the means of production, stating her belief that justice and solidarity in their "fullest form" was necessary for the ethical development of all humans and the creation of a free society.
Scientific publishing
From 1909 to 1917, Goldsmith and Delage co-authored a number of books on evolutionary biology. Their first book, The Theories of Evolution, began with an anti-religious rebuttal of creationism and followed with a lengthy discussion of various evolutionary theories. In the book, Goldsmith and Delage defined Darwinism as a theory that emphasises random genetic variation, the struggle for existence and natural selection as the principle factors of evolution. They then broadly defined Lamarckism as a theory that emphasises individual adaptation to ones' own environment, rather than predetermination, as the precedent for evolution. They contrasted the narrow perspective of Lamarckism with the more systematic focus of Neo-Darwinism, as expressed by August Weismann. According to their view of Lamarckism, inheritance occurs when an adaptation to a certain environmental stimulus becomes independent of it in subsequent generations; they interpreted Lamarckian inheritance in solely descriptive terms, without making assumptions about the mechanisms for the transition between "stimulus-dependent" and "stimulus-independent" adaptations. In a chapter on the origin of species, they discussed the potential role of allopatric speciation and reproductive isolation, although they stressed that they lacked a unified theory that could synthesise adaptation and speciation into a single framework; this proposed theory would emerge decades later, with the development of population genetics. The book then concluded with a summary of Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid as a factor of evolution. Due to the book's overtly anti-religious content, its introduction was reprinted in Jean Grave's anarchist newspaper . The book was well-received by the international press, with The New York Times describing it as a comprehensive account of the contemporary debates on evolutionary biology. Its English translation was handled by the revolutionary socialist André Tridon.In a 1911 article published in the Portuguese anarchist periodical A Sementeira, Goldsmith and Delage drew from Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man to emphasise the role of cooperation and solidarity in evolution. They also rebutted Herbert Spencer's theory of "survival of the fittest" and T.H. Huxley's "struggle for existence", depicting them as corruptions of Darwinism to support existing social hierarchy and unrestrained competition at the expense of solidarity and cooperation. They accused Huxley of oversimplifying Darwin's concept of the struggle for existence by reducing it to a "fight to the death", where they defined it as a struggle by living things against their environmental conditions. Drawing from Kropotkin, Goldsmith and Delage sought to de-emphasise competition and to instead emphasise the importance of cooperation. In a direct challenge to the "survival of the fittest", they proposed that unfavourable conditions such as famine and drought actually weakened the strongest genetic variations, while favourable conditions allowed for new variations to prosper. They claimed that, in extreme conditions, cooperation and mutual aid, as opposed to competition, were essential to survival.
In 1913, they published their second book, which focused on parthenogenesis. In 1915, Goldsmith completed her PhD studies, defending a dissertation on the comparative physiology and psychology of fish. She then began writing for the Comptes rendus of the French Academy of Sciences; she published a number of articles on a variety of topics, including tropism, evolutionary psychology, parthenogenesis and Mendelism. In a review of Paul Portier's 1918 book on symbiogenesis, Goldsmith declared that he had convinced her of the possibility of asepsis, the similarity between bacteria and mitochondria, and symbiotes' relationship to vitamins. She and Delage also investigated symbiosis between legumes and bacteria, trees and fungi, and algae and microfauna. As Goldsmith published her research, she quickly gained a reputation within the scientific community, receiving numerous invitations to lecture in various different countries. She was in contact with many established scientists, including the French physiologist Charles Richet, Russian evolutionary psychologists Nadezhda Kohts and Vladimir Wagner, and Swiss naturalist Arnold Lang. She was also the scientific advisor to Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, who held her in great esteem for her knowledge of biology. In 1919, she took a job as a researcher at the University of Paris Faculty of Science.