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Title: Latin American Anarchism Author: Chuck Morse Date: February 2003 Language: en Topics: Latin America, anarchist movement Source: Retrieved on February 15, 2015 from https://web.archive.org/web/20150215034648/http://www.newformulation.org/3morse.htm Notes: Published in New Formulation, Vol. 2, No. 1
There are important reasons for anarchists in English-speaking parts of
North America to study the history of Latin American anarchism.
One reason is political. We need to form principled, collaborative
relationships with our Latin American comrades to fight global
capitalism globally and, to do so, we obviously need be able to identify
our real comrades among the countless groups in the region that make
claims upon our solidarity. Should we “defend the Cuban Revolution” or
toast Lula’s social democratic victory in Brazil? Should we adopt the
Zapatista ski-mask as our emblem or devoutly align ourselves with small
anarchist groups? A genuine confrontation with these questions requires
a deep appreciation of the history of Latin American opposition and
certainly the anarchist movement has played a significant role in this
history.
Another reason is more theoretical: it is necessary to develop a vision
of a worldwide anarchist movement that takes into account the very
different conditions that exist in “underdeveloped” parts of the world
(such as Latin America) as opposed to Europe or the United States. It is
necessary to understand how these conditions affect the form and content
of anarchist activity. For example, clearly Belgian and Bolivian
anarchist movements will have different characteristics, but exactly
what type of differences and why? Certainly a good way to begin
exploring these questions is by looking at the actual experience of
anarchist movements in Asia, Africa, or, in the case of this review,
Latin America.
Finally, the Latino identity is central to economic and cultural
contradictions in the United States. Of course it is a positive source
of community, tradition, and sense of self for millions of Latinos
within U.S. borders and it is also used as a negative signifier to
justify exploitation and racism. The constantly changing meaning of the
Latino identity is highly dependent upon ideas about the history of
Latin America and radicals can encourage the most expansive, utopian
elements of this identity by making sure that liberatory historical
experiences in the Americas are not forgotten.
Unfortunately those who try to research the Latin American anarchist
tradition will immediately discover that the historical literature on
the movement is remarkably poor. There are no books on the topic in
English or Portuguese and only five in Spanish, of which one is an
anthology and another is a very brief overview.[1] The paucity of
studies does not reflect the significance or dynamism of the movement
but rather that social democrats and Marxists, who have produced the
richest literature on social movements in the Americas, are hostile to
the anarchist tradition and have attempted to erase or diminish its
presence in this historical record.[2] Both groups need to construct the
revolutionary Left as fundamentally statist to justify their social
projects: the Marxists to defend their authoritarian regimes and the
social democrats to present their free-market policies as the only
socially conscious alternative to Marxist authoritarianism. Of course
the existence of the anarchist tradition—a revolutionary,
anti-authoritarian alternative—complicates their assertions.
Thus contemporary anarchists are obliged to undertake a major
reconstructive effort to restore anarchism to its proper place in the
history of the Americas and the three books reviewed here are among the
best on the subject. Their authors defiantly and unanimously assert that
the anarchist movement was a vital actor in early twentieth century
social history. Louis Vitale, in a sentiment echoed by the other
authors, observes that “anarcho-syndicalism was the dominant current in
the Latin American workers’ movement during the first two decades of the
twentieth century.”[3] They also all assert that anarchists were leaders
in the creation of early labor unions, cultivated a strong working class
militancy, and achieved many concrete gains for the working class.
Indeed, between the revolutionary unions, schools, daily newspapers, and
other projects, these authors paint a picture of a profoundly dynamic
anarchist movement, especially in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay.
Alfredo Gómez’s Anarquismo y Anarcosindicalismo en América Latina
(Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in Latin America) treats anarchism in
Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Gómez focuses on anarchists’
role within the revolutionary labor movement and attempts to draw
conclusions about the classical anarchist project based on the
comparative study of the anarchist movement in these countries. GĂłmez,
who is an anarchist, wants to both document the history of the movement
and defend it in theoretical terms.
For GĂłmez, anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism (he does not distinguish
between the two) is linked fundamentally to the labor movement. He
regards anarchism as a theoretical expression of workers’ capacity to
organize themselves and potentially run society without the interference
of capitalists or statists. In other words, anarchism allows workers to
become conscious of their power as workers, defend their immediate
interests, and fight to revolutionize society as a whole.
In each country he treats, GĂłmez charts the emergence of a combative
working class and the influence of anarchist groups on this class. His
study of Colombian anarchism, which makes up nearly half of the book, is
a welcome contribution given that Colombia has received scant attention
in existing studies of Latin American anarchism. Here he documents major
strikes, such as the anarchist led banana workers’ strike of 1928, and
also the activities of anarchist groups such as Bogotá’s Grupo
Sindicalista “Antorcha Libertaria,” the Via Libre group, and others.[4]
However, his emphasis lays upon the working class and its capacity to
fight directly for its own interests rather than specifically anarchist
activities per se. This is partially because the anarchist movement was
less developed in Colombia than in other countries, but also because
Gómez regards a direct action based workers’ movement and anarchism as
essentially two sides of the same phenomenon (practice and theory,
respectively). In Brazil, GĂłmez shows us how anarchists led a massive
and nearly revolutionary wave of strikes from 1917 to 1920. In
Argentina, which had one of the most mature anarchist movements in the
Americas (and the world), GĂłmez focuses on the relationship between the
anarchist FederaciĂłn Obrera Regional de Argentina and working class
struggles. In Mexico, GĂłmez examines the anarchist Ricardo Flores
Magón’s intervention in the 1910 Mexican Revolution and also treats the
Mexico City based Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker),
which was a center of anarchist organizing and labor radicalism.
The double book released by Chile’s Ediciones EspĂritu Libertario
contains Cronica Anarquista de la Subversion Olvidada (Anarchist
Chronicle of Forgotten Subversion) by Oscar Ortiz and Luis Vitale’s
Contribución a una Historia del Anarquismo en América Latina
(Contribution to a History of Anarchism in Latin America). These books
document the history of anarchism in Latin America but have a special
focus on the movement in Chile.
Vitale is a renowned Trotskyist author of Chilean citizenship who
participated in the anarchist movement in his native Argentina as a
young man. He states in the prologue that his book is an attempt to
repay a debt he incurred to the anarchists, who presumably introduced
him to revolutionary politics, and who gave him the Ă©lan necessary to
survive the nine concentration camps in which he was interned during
Pinochet’s dictatorship.[5] His short (47 pages) and overwhelmingly
laudatory work is divided into four sections. The first treats the
origins or pre-history of anarchism in Latin America (i.e., utopian
socialism) and the second discusses the influence of anarchism on the
workers and students’ movements and culture of Latin American between
1900 and 1930. This section, which is the longest part of the book,
contains brief commentary (sometimes no more than three or four
paragraphs) on anarchism in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Mexico,
Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Costa Rica, and
Colombia. The final section analyzes the history of the anarchist
movement in Chile from the end of the 19^(th) century to the 1960s.
Although Vitale also places anarchism squarely within the labor
movement, his focus is slightly different: he understands anarchism less
as an expression of class interests and more as a utopian movement that
seeks to reconstruct society along radically democratic, communitarian
lines. Accordingly, he locates anarchism at both the beginning and end
of industrial capitalism. He sees it as an articulation of the
communitarian elements present in capitalism’s early artisanal phase,
when small workshops and many pre-capitalist practices were the norm, as
well as the utopian sensibilities that emerged with the decline of
industrial capitalism around the period of the New Left (expressed by
thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse). In this sense, Vitale’s concern lay
on the anarchist movement’s capacity to advance democratic sentiments
against capitalism as opposed to its role within the development of
class contradictions in the capitalism system.
Vitale shows how anarchists not only fought for the immediate interests
of the working class but also created a broad culture of resistance that
challenged the fundaments of the social order with a deeply democratic
politics. For example, in addition to their contributions to the labor
movement, Vitale emphasizes anarchist support for women’s liberation. He
writes that “not only were [the anarchists] the most consequent fighters
for the equal rights of women in the workplace, but dared to frankly
pose [the issue of] free love, questioning the patriarchical servitude
of marriage, advocating the egalitarian relation among the sexes in all
aspects of the daily life.”[6] He highlights the important role played
by anarchist women in the movement and specifically mentions
anarcha-feminist activities (such as the first anarcha-feminist
periodical in the world, La Voz de La Mujer, which was published in
Buenos Aires from 1898 to 1899). Vitale also notes that anarchists were
leaders in anti-militarist campaigns, the first to oppose compulsory
military service, and among the first on the Left to collaborate with
militant neighborhood organizations. In the realm of culture, Vitale
emphasizes anarchist’s literary contributions, as well as struggles to
democratize the university. He not only notes leading anarchist thinkers
such Manuel Gonzalez Prada of Peru (who was one of the first on the Left
to take up the “indigenous question”) and Mexico’s Ricardo Flores Magón
but also lesser known writers who radicalized the broader cultural
environment of their countries, such as Alejandro Escobar y Carvallo,
the author of the first essays in sociological history in Chile,
Argentina’s tango lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo, and others. As for
university struggles, Vitale notes that the movement for university
reform was led by anarchists in Chile and in Argentina and that
anarchists were also leaders of the first (1918) process of university
reform in Latin America. As a whole, he paints an image of a movement
engaged in the broadest possible opposition to the status quo and one
that struggled to democratize all aspects of social life, from the
economic to the cultural realms, from the private to the political
arenas.
Oscar Ortiz’s Cronica Anarquista de la Subversion Olvidada, which makes
up the greatest part of Ediciones Espiritu Libertario’s double book, is
a collection of seventeen short, historical essays chronicling various
important events and personages in the history of Chilean anarchism from
the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1970s. Ortiz combines a
narrative flare with an academic rigor, and thus his essays are both a
pleasure to read and rich in a scholarly sense (although the book is an
anthology of his essays and, hence, not particularly systematic).
David Viñas’s Anarquistas en América Latina is also an anthology of
sorts. It consists of short excerpts from texts written by and about
anarchists during the period of anarchism’s heyday and contains no
sustained analysis except for a 30 page introductory essay. The
excerpts, which are organized by country, cover Mexico, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, Brazil, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia,
Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. Although Viñas provides some
editorial comments, there is no attempt to offer a history of the
movement or additional resources for interested researchers. The book is
really a montage of quotes and seems more like the preparation for a
book than a finished book per se.
Although Ortiz and Viñas do not advance strong theories of anarchism,
claims about the nature of anarchism are present nonetheless. They also
locate anarchism within the labor movement, but they are concerned
primarily with its cultural elements, particularly its ability to
provide the cornerstone of a productive counter-culture around which
revolutionaries and dissents could gather.
Ortiz’s study of key moments in the history of Chilean anarchism allows
him to illustrate a revolutionary counter-culture made up of militant
workers and idealistic bourgeoisie who were unified by a common
anarchist axiom and the vicious persecution visited upon them by the
ruling class as a result. Ortiz focuses on anarchists who transformed
Chilean culture in various ways and, more often than not, anarchists who
transformed the culture not through their explicitly anarchist
activities but through activities that were somehow linked to their
political convictions. For example, he devotes a chapter to the working
class anarcho-Tolstoyian painter, Benito Rebolledo. Rebolledo, a
committed anarchist who was immersed in the working class culture of the
time, transformed Chilean painting by bringing poor people into his art.
This accomplishment was of course innately connected to his anarchism,
and he was celebrated and loved by the poor for his contributions.
Likewise, Ortiz has a chapter treating Juan Gandulfo, who was both a
militant anarchist and pioneer of socialized medical care in Chile.
Gandulfo’s medical contributions were also directly wedded to his
anarchist commitment to improving the health of the working class.
Ortiz’s approach allows one to see anarchism as a broader social
project: one that was not only embedded in working class struggle but
also one that had the capacity to transform multiple areas of life.
Viñas’s clearest statements about anarchism are present in his
introductory essay. Here he describes anarchism primarily as a romantic
protest against modernity waged by men and women who refused to accept
the brutality of contemporary life. He refers to the “anarchist drama”
that unfolded upon the stage that he describes as the social Darwinist
city of the early twentieth century. Viñas’s work offers a less
consistent picture of the nature of anarchism—given that his book is
really just a compilation of quotes—but one can surmise that the very
form of the book indicates his conviction that anarchism is an
essentially fragmentary project that rallied against the status quo.
All of these authors agree that anarchism disappeared as a mass movement
in Latin America around 1930 and all agree that vicious state repression
was a significant cause of its decline. For example, GĂłmez notes that
the Argentine government declared a state of siege against the workers’
movement for the first time in 1902 and another four times in the
following eight years, with a total duration of 18 months.[7] Also,
citing Abad de Santillán, Gómez notes that the Argentine anarchist
movement suffered around 500 deaths and accumulated more than a half
million years of prison sentences in three decades of activity.[8]
Likewise, Ortiz details brutal tortures and imprisonment suffered by
Chilean anarchists. And Viñas reproduces letters that Flores Magón wrote
while in prison in the United States, as a victim of repression directed
by both American and Mexican authorities. Clearly, the anarchist
movement was a threat.
But why did the anarchist movement fail to overcome the vicious state
repression and regain its footing as a mass movement.[9] What was it
about anarchism that prevented it, as a project, from adapting to the
new challenges and flourishing?
These authors’ different emphases allow them to highlight different
internal problems that precipitated the decline of the anarchist
movement. Of the four authors considered here, GĂłmez offers the most
sustained critique of anarchism and devotes an entire chapter to
“Reflections on the Decline of Anarcho-Syndicalism” (as an anarchist, he
expects the most of the doctrine and, accordingly, is the most
critical). GĂłmez argues that the anarcho-syndicalist project was
essentially unable to articulate a coherent alternative to the social
order it confronted. He sites “rationalist messianism” as one problem,
wherein the anarchist faith in progress doomed anarchists to
overestimate the potentials to educate humanity into a rational society
and also discouraged them from acting in solidarity with other
oppositional groups whom they deemed immersed in “metaphysics” (such as
Zapata’s army in Mexico, which anarchists disparaged for their
Christianity). He also sites the tendency of anarchist organizations to
become ends in themselves (as opposed to the means for creating a
revolution) and thus to ossify into stilted and basically conservative
bureaucracies. For example, GĂłmez points to the tendency towards
bureaucratic dogmatism in Argentina’s Federación Obrera Regional de
Argentina. He cites the 1907 attempt to institute the doctrine of
anarcho-communism as the basis for unified action with other unions, the
ideological purges of 1924 (in which organizational support was
withdrawn from those not considered properly anarcho-communist), and a
gradual decline in organizational democracy (reflected in the
diminishing frequency of congresses and a general language of
organizational control). GĂłmez believes that these events indicate the
growth of a regressive, dogmatic sentiment within the organization. He
also shows how the tendency toward bureaucracy in anarchist unions
dovetailed with the rigidly, para-statist organizations advanced by the
Marxist-Leninists, both of which drew workers away from
self-organization and a commitment to direct action.
Viñas and Ortiz offer less material about the decline of the movement.
However, Viñas intersperses his book with citations from
Marxists-Leninists who argue that anarchists failed to develop a
coherent approach to the issue of political power. Presumably this is
his view. Ortiz gives the impression that the militant working class
counter-culture developed by the anarchists was simply unable to contend
with changing cultural and economic circumstances and thus faded into
history (becoming “the good old days”).
Vitale is the least critical of anarchists and, by detailing the history
of the movement up to the 1960s, implies that it may not have declined
as radically as is normally supposed. But of course he does note a
decline, and advances two reasons to explain this. First, he asserts
that anarchists were unable to respond to changing economic
circumstances in which old quasi-artisanal structures were superceded by
the concentration of workers in enormous factories and, second, he
argues that the emergence of populist governments inclined to negotiate
with workers undermined the appeal of anarchist’s strident, oppositional
stance.
Of the four authors, GĂłmez offers the most cogent critique of the
anarchist movement in Latin America, whereas Vitale and Ortiz offer the
most compelling arguments for the continuity of anarchism.
These books all present different aspects of the rich history of Latin
American anarchism, whether as a tendency in the labor movement, a force
for democratization, or a counter-culture. They belie the political
motives at work in the exclusion of anarchism from the historical
record. As in Asia, Europe, and the US, the Latin American anarchist
movement was a mass revolutionary movement that mounted a radical
challenge to the existing order. Its significance can only be ignored at
the cost of fabricating history.
But these works also have significant limitations when evaluated as
potential resources for contemporary anarchists.
First, these books share a limited focus which makes it difficult to
analyze the course of the anarchist movement in the context of the
broader history of Latin American opposition. There is the implicit
assumption that economic contradictions are at the center of history and
hence an excessive focus on the labor movement to the exclusion of other
forms of radicalism. This is expressed most clearly in Gómez’s book, but
it is evident in the other works as well (which always prioritize the
labor movement, even if they construct anarchism in different ways).
Thus, the authors hardly relate the anarchist movement to the other
forms of resistance that took place during anarchism’s heyday. For
example, the authors fail to connect the anarchist movement to
communitarian movements among indigenous people in any significant way
(GĂłmez touches upon this in his commentary on the relationship between
the Mexican anarchists and the original Zapatistas, but does not develop
the point). Likewise, Vitale notes the link between anarchists and the
feminist movement but, again, the point remains undeveloped.
Second, they are also limited when evaluated as possible resources for
understanding the development of anarchism in “underdeveloped” parts of
the world. For example, none of the authors make a comparison between
the Latin American anarchist movement and anarchist movements in Europe
or the US. And, furthermore, these books imply that the anarchist
movement was not particularly conditioned by circumstances of
underdevelopment. Gómez’s book, for example, was initially conceived as
a study of anarchism in Colombia alone, but he expanded the work to
include Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico precisely because he believes the
anarchist movement followed a similar trajectory in these countries,
despite their very different economic and political conditions.
In addition, there is a striking absence of a truly Latin American
perspective. Indeed, while all of the books treat anarchism in Latin
America (except for Ortiz’s, which focuses exclusively on Chile), it
would be more accurate to say that they analyze anarchism in several
Latin American countries, rather than Latin American anarchism per se.
Although differences between individual countries make a
country-by-country analysis important, it is unfortunate that the
authors fail to situate anarchism within broader social and political
trends in Latin America as a whole.
And there is also no attempt to explore the relationship between
anarchism and the Latino identity. Is there a distinctly Latino
anarchism? It is tempting to argue that there is not, given the pivotal
role played by European immigrants in the Latin American anarchist
movement and the early labor movement generally. For example, GĂłmez
mentions that five and a half million European workers arrived in
Argentina in the half century prior to 1924 (whereas the country’s total
population was 6 million in 1890).[10] Among these immigrants was Diego
Abad de Santillán, a Spanish born anarchist who became a leading
participant in the Argentine anarchist movement and later returned to
Spain to become a major figure among anarchists in the Spanish Civil
War. Was he a Latin American anarchist or a European anarchist in Latin
America? The possible meaning of a distinctly Latin anarchism remains
unexplored.
These books all make important contributions to fleshing out a history
that has been suppressed and must be reclaimed if the anarchist movement
is to flourish once again in the Americas and in relation to the
Americas. Their failings indicate the relatively low level of
scholarship on the movement, although their strengths suggest points of
departure for more thorough and critical studies that must come in the
future.
[1] In addition to those reviewed here, the other two books on the
subject are: El Anarquismo en America Latina, ed Angel J. Cappelletti
and Carlos M. Rama (Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1990) and
Angel Capelleti, Hechos y Figuras del Anarquismo Hispanoamericano
(Madrid: Ediciones Madre Tierra, 1990).
[2] For a good example of the social democratic omission of anarchism,
see Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After
the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Castañeda, Mexico’s former
Foreign Relations Secretary, excludes anarchism entirely from his
sweeping study of the Latin America Left. The Marxist hostility to
anarchism is noted in nearly every study of anarchism in Latin America.
[3] Luis Vitale, Contribución a una Historia del Anarquismo en América
Latina (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Espiritu Libertario, 2002), 155. All
translations are mine.
[4] The banana strike was immemorialized in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One
Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).
[5] Luis Vital, Contribución a una Historia del Anarquismo en América
Latina, 148.
[6] Ibid., 157.
[7] Alfredo Gómez, Anarquismo y Anarcosindicalismo en América Latina
(Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1980), 152.
[8] This figure comes from Diego Abad de Santillán, La FORA: IdeologĂa y
Trayectoria (Buenos Aires: Editorial ProyecciĂłn, 1971), 23; cited in
Gomez, Anarquismo y Anarcosindicalismo, 155.
[9] South Africa’s ANC is an example of a movement that was able to
withstand terrible repression.
[10] Gómez, Anarquismo y Anarcosindicalismo en América Latina, 146.