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RE: Lucy Parsons: Forgotten Radical Heroine
Wow! What an amazing human! Thank you for introducing her to us.
I am coming to realize that "anarchism" means different things to different people, and it can be layered over other ideologies. For instance, Lucy wanted fair treatment of workers, which would tend to make her communist, but she was trying to accomplish her goals outside of the state mechanism, which makes her more anarchist. I don't think there was a shift from one to the other, she was just complex.
She was incredibly powerful, and you're absolutely right that she was quite complex, and I love that. It's never so simple as a label. There are the syndicalist anarchists that see the worker as sort of the core of the anarchist society, but of course the labels weren't so intricate at that point. Anarchism can be taken in so many different directions. I have recently been discovering that too. Even in her time, she put a lot of effort into dispelling myths that anarchists were just crazy, lawless, lovers of violence. It seems there's a lot of us who are digging into all these different ideas. Hopefully we're formulating something that will allow us to move forward from the current madness.