Imagine two revolutionaries walking into a burning house. One insists that the only way to save the home is to take control of the firehose, seize command of the firefighters, and coordinate everything from a central operations room. The other bursts through the smoke and shouts, “Forget the control room — put out the fire together! And while we’re at it, maybe stop building houses out of gasoline-soaked wood.”

In a way, this is the story of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman.

Two brilliant minds.

Two diagnoses of the same crisis.

Two radically different prescriptions for human liberation.

And, as history has shown us, Goldman’s warnings about freedom, power, and the dangers of revolutionary authority were not only accurate — they may explain why the world has never seen a real attempt at the socialism Marx actually imagined.

Because every time people tried to build it, something got in the way.

The state.

The same state Marx believed could be temporarily commandeered for liberation.

The same state Goldman insisted would always corrupt and choke any revolutionary process.

This is the tragic twist of modern history:

We haven’t seen true socialism fail. We’ve seen states fail socialism.

Exactly as Emma Goldman predicted.

A question we still haven’t answered

What if the revolutions of the 20th century didn’t disprove socialism — they merely proved that Goldman was right about power?

What if the world kept trying to bake bread from a recipe Marx wrote, but used the wrong ingredients every single time?

This is the paradox Emma Goldman understood more clearly than almost anyone — including Marx himself.

When Two Thinkers Look at the Same Monster

Both Marx and Goldman looked out on a world that was devouring people.

They saw:

• Workers treated as disposable parts
• Inequality expanding like a crack in the foundation
• An economy run by a tiny elite
• A society in which human beings were measured by their productivity

They agreed on the diagnosis: capitalism was a system built on exploitation.

But they disagreed on the cure — and especially on how to deliver it.

Marx believed the state could act as a revolutionary engine.

Goldman believed the state is the enemy of engines, gumming up every gear with hierarchy and coercion.

Marx imagined a transitional period of worker-controlled governance — a chrysalis stage before true socialism.

Goldman, ever the skeptical realist, looked at the chrysalis and said:

“Cocoons don’t grow butterflies. Butterflies grow cocoons — and nothing inside breaks free.”

Her insight was simple:

Power corrupts every revolutionary process that tries to pass through the state.

Which is precisely why every so-called “socialist” experiment became authoritarian long before it became socialist.

The core divergence: Marx needed power. Goldman needed people.

Karl Marx believed revolutions required coordination, discipline, and a strong center. The state, he argued, was historically a tool of elites — but tools can be repurposed. In his view, if workers seized this machinery and used it for themselves, it could guide society through a necessary transition toward equality.

Emma Goldman believed this was the most dangerous assumption of all.

Her core insight was humanistic and historical:

The state cannot be repurposed. Its purpose is power.

And power reshapes every hand that holds it.

Modern political scientist Brian Klaas has shown just how accurate this intuition was. His research demonstrates that power is not neutral — it corrupts, and even worse, it attracts people who want to be corrupted. As Klaas puts it, positions of authority pull in those who seek dominance, control, and status, not those who seek cooperation or liberation. This means that any system built around centralized power — even a revolutionary state — inevitably becomes a magnet for the wrong personalities.

Goldman understood this long before it could be measured.

She didn’t just theorize it — she witnessed it.

She arrived in Russia full of hope, expecting to see socialism in action. Instead she saw the opposite: a state growing teeth, claws, and paranoia. She watched idealists become bureaucrats, bureaucrats become enforcers, and enforcers become rulers. Not because they were bad people from the start, but because the state itself demanded obedience, hierarchy, and control.

Her conclusion remains one of the most important political insights of modern times:

“The State has no soul. It has only machinery.”

And machinery does what machinery does: standardizes, disciplines, enforces, and controls.

Brian Klaas’s work reinforces this perfectly. The moment a group takes centralized power — even with good intentions — two things happen:

1. Power attracts those who enjoy controlling others.

2. Power corrupts those who didn’t originally seek control.

This double effect ensures that Marx’s transitional state cannot remain transitional. It becomes permanent. It consolidates. It protects itself. It turns revolutionaries into administrators, administrators into gatekeepers, and gatekeepers into a new ruling class.

Which is why Goldman argued that we have never seen a society built on voluntary cooperation, free association, or collective ownership.

Not because such a society is unrealistic — she believed deeply that it is possible — but because states intervene long before it can emerge.

Every time people try to build bottom-up socialism, the state — whether capitalist or “socialist” in name — steps in to regulate, contain, or crush it. Because the one thing the state cannot tolerate is power it does not control.

This is why she believed Marx was wrong about the state, and why Brian Klaas’s insights support her case:

You cannot centralize power without creating the conditions that destroy freedom.

And the people who gravitate toward such power will always be the least suited to protect it.

Goldman saw this with clarity..

Where their ideas part ways

Let’s unpack their key differences — now with a clearer argument for why Goldman’s predictions proved true.

1. What is freedom?

Marx: Freedom arrives later — after the revolution reorganizes the economy.

Goldman: Freedom must appear during the revolution, or it will never appear at all.

She argued that a revolution that postpones freedom — even temporarily — digs its own grave.

Not because freedom is decorative, but because freedom is the only thing that keeps power in check.

This isn’t idealism. It’s political physics.

2. What is the state?

Marx: A neutral tool. Dangerous in the wrong hands, transformative in the right ones.

Goldman: A structure of hierarchy, regardless of who commands it.

Where Marx saw the state as a lever, Goldman saw it as a trapdoor.

History sided with Goldman.

Every time a revolutionary state formed, it:

• Crushed dissent
• Centralized authority
• Justified violence as “necessary”
• Replaced one elite with another
• Shut down the very freedoms the revolution promised

Not because “socialism doesn’t work,” but because the state does not permit people to build socialism.

You can’t build a horizontal society on top of a vertical institution.

3. What does a real transition look like?

Marx: A disciplined working-class party takes power and reorganizes society.

Goldman: Communities build the new society themselves — through councils, cooperatives, mutual aid, and direct democracy.

This is the key insight: Goldman rejected the “transition state” because she understood that transition shapes destination.

If a revolution centralizes power in its early stages, it will centralize power forever.

Which is exactly what happened.

Again and again and again.

Why Emma Goldman was right — and why we’ve never seen true socialism

Every attempt at Marx’s transitional state produced… another state. Not socialism. Not communism. Not workers’ control.

Just state control.**

The Soviet Union wasn’t a “failed socialism.”

It was the failure of state-led socialism, a project Goldman insisted was doomed from the start.

China under Mao?

State-led authoritarianism — not worker self-management.

North Korea?

A monarchy draped in Marxist language.

Cambodia?

A nightmare spawned from centralized power.

Even Cuba and Vietnam — more complex and socially supportive in many ways — are still more state-driven than worker-driven.

These were not examples of Marx’s dream failing.

They were examples of Goldman’s warning being fulfilled.

The state extinguishes socialism long before socialism begins.

Real socialism — collective, democratic, self-governed — has simply never been tried at scale, because every attempt was routed through an institution designed to prevent it.

Which is why the few places that did attempt bottom-up, stateless, community-led experiments have shown far more promise:

• The Zapatistas
• Rojava
• Participatory democracies
• Worker cooperatives
• Community land trusts
• Horizontal social movements

These are imperfect — but they are real.

And importantly, they are not states.

This is exactly the distinction Goldman foresaw.

Why this matters today

The Marx–Goldman debate lives on in every climate movement, every housing struggle, every democratic fight, every environmental campaign, every debate about political power and collective responsibility.

Goldman’s insight matters because:

1. Our crises demand cooperation, not central authority.

Climate collapse won’t be solved by a small group of powerful decision-makers.

It will be solved by millions of communities taking action together.

2. Social movements today are increasingly decentralized.

The world is becoming “Goldmanist” by necessity.

3. People no longer trust centralized institutions — for good reasons.

4. A future beyond capitalism must also be a future beyond hierarchy.

Otherwise, we simply trade one master for another.

Goldman was right because she understood that liberation is not something you can enforce.

It is something people create together.

A call to curiosity: What if the real revolutionary question is not about the economy, but about power?

What if the world failed not at socialism, but at resisting the gravitational pull of the state?

What if true socialism is still ahead of us, still possible, but only if we stop trying to force it through the bottleneck of centralized authority?

Marx gave us the critique of capitalism.

Goldman gave us the critique of power itself.

Put together, they reveal a path we have barely begun to explore:

a world where people govern themselves, directly, freely, collectively — without waiting for permission from a state.

And that’s the question Goldman leaves us with, glowing like an ember:

What kind of liberation are we trying to build — one that frees people, or one that governs them in new ways?

If history is any guide, Emma Goldman is still whispering: “We have not yet tried true socialism. We have only tried the state. And the state will never set us free.”

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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Sources: 

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1.Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics, 1990. (Original work published 1867.)

Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.