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Title: Anarchism as a Nationality Author: Guadalupe Rivera Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: Third World, Mexico, nationalism, identity Source: Retrieved on 2022-04-08 from https://ahuehuete.substack.com/p/anarchy-grivera?s=r Notes: The following essays are a critique of anarchism, but not an academic or theoretical critique, but rather an experiential and propositional contribution, ethnographic if you will, written out of the urgent need to (de)think anarchism from within the [designated] Third World. Since 2006, in these ten years of practicing anarchism, I have found many potholes that I have always pointed out and consider necessary to overcome. These potholes are neither minor nor superficial, on the contrary, they are deep and of primary importance. – Guadalupe Rivera (2017) The following essays have been curated by taller ahuehuete’s Antijuras, Suttkin and Capanegra, all identifying within the heterodox anarchist tradition.
A few years ago, I wrote a small book that took a lot of work to
publish. The text was entitled Notes for a Libertarian Ethics.
In that little book — basic, for beginners, limited, if you will — I put
forward my reflections on the ethical nature of anarchism. I thought,
and I think, that anarchism had a historical horizon that should be
constantly reflected upon, something we are encouraged to do now. But I
also considered that its trajectory must be brought up to the present
day to ask ourselves: who are today’s anarchists? What are they
currently doing? From where and to where are they asserting themselves?
The result of that booklet was political suicide. To think of myself as
an anarchist today is something as important or as useless, for me, as
it is to assert myself as a Mexican. Does it imply the acceptance of a
Nation-State model? Does it imply the acceptance only of the historical
nationality excluding the State form? Does it have any redeemable appeal
to claim a nationality that we did not ask for, that we do not want, a
nationality that was assigned to us by the mere fact of being born in
this geography and at this specific historical moment? To be Mexican is
also to claim a position that excludes and limits you, a position that
also sets you in confrontation against others, that turns you into a
citizen or a foreigner. It places you in multiple situations of
advantage or disadvantage, depending on the case.
Let me give you an example: on a certain occasion I found myself
chatting with a French comrade. After a recent visit to the coast of
Oaxaca, she shared she had been delighted with the beauty of the area.
She also told me that a friend of hers had fallen so much in love with
Mazunte that she decided to buy a piece of land and build a house there,
something that at the time was completely illegal, since by law
foreigners could not buy border or coastal territories.
However, this was not a limitation, since there were paralegal ways to
overcome this legislative criteria imposed by her citizenship. The
comrade who told me this was very upset because she felt that her friend
was colonizing Mexico, and that she was taking land away from the
countryfolk of Mazunte.
Her position seemed purist and limited to me. I believe, and I told her,
that anyone in the world should be able to live wherever they like,
wherever they prefer. I think it is very good that this French girl,
whom I don’t know, can live in Mazunte if she wants to. But I find it
very difficult to think that if a mazunteño wants to buy a house in, for
example, the Côte d’Azur in France, she could do it with the ease of the
French girl, without taking into account the legal paperwork that this
would imply, and despite even having sufficient funds to do it, which of
course is in an incalculable economic dimension for me or for any other
costeña, or so-called Third-World-person who is not a bourgeois.
Taking this as an example, what difference does this categorization
“Mexican” represent to the notion of gender, class or race? All these
categories are determinant and determined. We did not decide to be born
into any of these categories, yet we were born into them.
Recently some acquaintances of ours had a child. One of the parents is
of European nationality, and although he was born in Mexico, this baby,
just by being male, white, educated in a foreign language from an early
age and possessing European nationality, although he is not bourgeois
and although he is half-Mexican, already has, just by the very fact of
being born, more opportunities than the hypothetical girl born next
door: a woman, brown and the daughter of Oaxacan migrants.
To say that “I wish the two new babies the best of luck in life” would
be a hypocritical condemnation since “luck”, or historical precedence,
in this case, has already rolled the dice for these newborns.
In the face of these categories, gender, class,
race/ethnicity/nationality, the label “anarchist” would seem to be like
the house in Mazunte, a wonder. A place where for the first time you can
freely decide for yourself how to be named, from where and where to
direct your life, your praxis, your thoughts. To be an anarchist seems
to be a place claimed from within freedom, from non-determination,
although in reality this implies a contradiction, and we’ll examine how
together.
After much reflection, further reading and more hands-on experience, I
have come to discredit the naĂŻve position that an anarchist is a person
who has decided, with total freedom, to be an anarchist and to claim to
be one. Not only because many decisions in our lives are guided by
unconscious and deep rooted structural factors. Not only because the
world, the system, has forced us to seek to resist on the basis of
anarchism. As far as the urban case is concerned, it seems that we had
no other choice, but also because being an anarchist is not a category
that is alien or distant from the determinations of gender or
race/ethnicity/nationality, as it might seem. As much as one might think
and argue to the contrary, being an anarchist, would rivet each of the
parts of the chain. Being an anarchist, like gender, like nationality,
like class, is first and foremost a historical construct. Anarchism has
not always existed. That in a patriarchal society the male gender is
considered superior is a historically constructed condition.
Being of Mexican nationality is a historically constructed condition, we
are traversed by the history of our families, of the wars of our
countries against others and of the same historical construction of the
Mexican State.
Mexico has not always existed and will not always exist.
Class and race are things that have also existed in various forms
throughout history, and someday they will cease to exist as categories
of social determination and oppression against humanity.
But today, our condition is something that we cannot leave aside, that
we cannot deny, that we cannot pretend does not exist. I have come to
think, and this is not the first place I have pointed it out, that
anarchism is configured in the same way as science, as the legitimately
validated knowledge of the West, and that in the face of this, and this
is a novelty, it configures a kind of nationality, a determining
category if you want to read it this way, and it does so in the
following way.
Anarchism is a historical response to a determined process, it is one of
many responses of the West to the capitalism that was born in its heart.
A more radical response, if one wants to see it that way, but not the
only one. And that in essential terms would not be so different from
Marxism, as many think.
Like the patriarchal discourse of a nation-state, anarchism would have
built upon itself a foundational discourse, an “instituting perspective
of the libertarian horizon” as it is pointed out in the program of the
workshops: a genesis, an Egypt from which the great patriarch of
anarchism set out to liberate the oppressed, and from which he would
pass the baton to the other great patriarchs-and-prophets who followed
him. In the same way as Marxism, or any form of nationalism, anarchism,
the anarchists, like to capture the profiles of their founding fathers
in illustrated genealogies.
It is not difficult to find illustrations of Proudhon, Bakunin,
Kropotkin, to which, in the same way as any national vision, patriarchs
are added or removed according to the line of succession to be claimed.
But despite the differences, one thing will remain the same: all will be
men, all will be white and all will be educated in the West.[1]
Secondly, and this reaffirms the previous point, the genealogy of
anarchism has a directionality, or as they say in the program, it has a
“perspective”.
That is to say that this can be projected as the history of a nation
from the past to the present, but it cannot — because this would be
subversive and unpatriotic — accept that there were many more
emancipatory projects that did not configure the historical nationalist
claim of anarchism. Nor can it accept that there exist, today, movements
of great importance that are not anarchist,[2] because this would
represent an attempt against the purity of the ideals of the homeland,
that is to say, that like all nationalisms, anarchism is ethnocentric.
And chauvinistic.
Up to this point,[3] my argument may seem exaggerated and unconvincing.
But as I have pointed out, this is not a spontaneous reflection, it is
the product of constant, daily and collective learning, which like any
ethical aspect would not be in books but the daily practice of
anarchism, and in the revision of the aforementioned “from what position
do we vindicate ourselves?”.
I do not intend to repeat here my conclusions, suffice it to point out
that the strong bulk of today’s anarchism, insurrectionary anarchism,
is, like historical anarchism, the result of a process of reflection by
men, white, western, and by the way, half-bourgeois, who do not accept
that there is any other movement than their own, who reject any form of
organization that does not align itself with their colonizing thoughts
and in this way, even if they do not accept it, they constitute
themselves in a vanguard.
I am not opting for the easy path of disqualification. I do not believe,
as the bourgeois media or the bulk of fancy people think, including
other anarchists, that these insurrectionalists are not worthy of being
called anarchists, for some purist argumentation. On the contrary, I
believe that they are anarchists. And that today this fashion composes
most of the anarchist activity in Mexico.
It is based on this acceptance, of their anarchism’s validity, that I
have investigated their demands, ideological origins, and positions in
relation to other social movements, and I have come to the conclusion
that this anarchism, this tropicalized version of European
insurrectionalism, is not my path or my perspective of struggle. And
that my place is to situate historically and to describe it to and other
forms of anarchism that I believe should be left aside, neither behind
nor ahead, simply aside.
But what I found is that in reality, this tropicalized expression would
not be an exception. On the contrary, as an undeniable tendency
anarchist nationalism operates within a colonizing, chauvinistic,
patriarchal, rational, spatially, and temporally directed entity
beginning from the European 19^(th) century to the corners of the world
where industrialization was arriving, and not the other way around.
From the West to the Non-West, from the White to the non-White, from the
Rational to the non-Rational, from the Macho to the non-Macho. A very
clear example of this is the structural framework of the program I am
discussing today.
It can be said that I am doing an advantageous exercise and that I am
generating an a posteriori discourse, but let me excuse myself by saying
that the bulk of what I am writing here today is what I have been
mentioning for several years in other forums.
The program is structured from that same historically-directed form. The
same old song. That 100% of the authors proposed to be read in the
anarchist programs are men, white and western, who start from the sacred
“instituting perspective of the libertarian horizon”,
Proudhon-Kropotkin-Bakunin, is the strongest proof of my arguments and
my concerns.
Only in its branches, as accessory and in result to the difficulty to
heal the limitations of the wear and tear of worn-out anarchism is that
new avenues are, I repeat, purely complementary, related as they are
mentioned and not nodal: such as Zapatismo or feminism. It was only when
political correctness required the inclusion of indigenous peoples and
women that they were integrated into the program and not the other way
around. Not unlike the State’s ways, in which governments realize that
is politically incorrect to leave “gender” “issues” out of their
programs and thus, they create a special section to address them.
Anarchism as nationality is made to advance from back to front, in an
evolutionary, linear, and upward movement, from its most incipient to
its most developed stages.
It would seem that it cannot be thought that anarchism is, in reality,
the set of very many divergent strands anchored very deeply in the
history of humanity and that some of them, only some of them, converged
as anarchism towards the middle of the 19^(th) century.
It is idle to look for a “real” anarchism before Proudhon. Idle because
before that time there was libertarian socialism, utopian socialism,
etc., but not anarchism. Anarchism before the 19^(th) century and
outside Europe, “simply did not exist”.
By the same token, we can comment that by integrating them into a
program such as the one we are discussing, the non-European
(sub-national) varieties of anarchism, will be disencumbered, exotic,
forced into a mosaic that will show them more as isolated experiences
than as experiences integrated to the great national trunk.
Going deeper into this, we will realize that anarchism arrives to Japan,
Nigeria or Mexico at the time when industrialization and urbanization
begin to make a dent in those countries. It is not by chance that
Nigeria is the country with the most anarchist activity in Africa, just
as it is no coincidence that Nigeria is the most industrialized country
on the continent. Examine the program, all anarchisms are workerist.
This is neither bad nor good, it is simply a historical condition.
Neither before the 19^(th) century nor otherwise will we find the seed
of anarchism implanted outside Europe. Therefore, it is difficult, very
difficult to find a non-working class anarchism, read agrarian, outside
the European examples. I repeat: the historical tendency is that outside
Europe, anarchism arrives as a response of the artisan-to-industrial
proletarianization. Its impact is fundamentally urban, and it usually
arrives directly imported by European “missionaries” who for one reason
or another are in those countries.
That is to say that the first anarchists in non-European countries, for
example in Latin America, were Europeans.
In Mexico, but not only, the local anarchism also followed the great
strands of anarchism that I have called of a nationalist form. It
followed the same founding fathers, Proudhon and Bakunin, and was formed
in the same way, workers’ circles, mutualists, and unions.
The geography might change, but the pattern was always the same:
imported from Europe, anarchism had an impact on the workers’ struggles
in other countries. But never, never, has it ever been the other way
around.
Never, never, never, never have the ideas of a Latin American, African,
or Asian anarchist impacted “mainstream” anarchism. I invite you to
demonstrate the opposite. This is impossible because it would be a
contradiction in terms, since “evolution does not go backward”.
If non-European anarchists are mentioned it is purely out of exoticism.
Never in history has any Latin-American revolutionary anarchist been
received in Europe, and became an influential organizer and agitator to
such an extent that she impacted the history of the global movement.[4]
The opposite movement did happen, I insist, as a pattern in the rest of
the world. What is worse, in peripheral anarchism few non-anarchist
movements were recovered, vindicated, or even supported.
The case of Mexico is the exception that proves the rule because the
Central Committee of the Mexican Liberal Party did support Zapatismo, an
agrarian, non-identified-as-anarchist, indigenous and local struggle.
This support earned the PLM fierce criticism; “one cannot be an
anarchist and support non-anarchist movements at the same time”. This
statement can be extended even further, and point to the enormous
skepticism and disdain that existed in European anarchism (or gringo
anarchism, which for that matter is the same thing) towards the Mexican
revolution. This disdain was so great that the PLM took on the defense
of the Revolution in the international trenches, and this task justified
the editorial line and how RegeneraciĂłn was published.
But let us return to a question we had pointed out above, why is there
no agrarian anarchism outside Europe? The answer, it seems to me, is
simpler than one might think. If we start from the fact that anarchism
has its historical genesis in the urban transition from artisanal to
industrial production, a phenomenon that became generalized from the
19^(th) century onwards, on the contrary, the struggles for land and for
what today we call “autonomy” are much older – and transcend anarchism
itself.
When, several years ago, I became aware of this historical depth, when I
wanted to know what existed before anarchism, I set myself the task of
capturing what the landscape was before anarchism. I set myself the task
of mapping all the popular struggles that had arisen in Mexico from 1521
to the present day. I must confess that I started from a tremendous
naivety, I had no idea what I was getting into.
The bibliography quickly began to pile up.
I delved into history and the more rebellions I found, shorter or
longer-lasting, were certainly more complex. Finally, the task collapsed
under its weight. Rebellions, insurrections, mutinies, and whatever you
want to call them, there had been all over the length and breadth of the
Mexican geography, from rebellions in Baja California by the Jesuits,
from the unity of Chichimecas, Blacks, and Spaniards who, allied in
interethnic complicity, attacked the silver caravans in Zacatecas; to
the guerrillas of Cimarrones in Veracruz who founded the first free
black town in the Americas, to even the Mayans who had escaped Spanish
colonization and remained hidden in the jungle for hundreds of years.
The map exists, but I do not believe that even 10% of all the rebellions
that New Spain and Mexico experienced from 1521 to 1994 are captured
there.
In that mixture of insurrections, anarchism became just a small star in
a sky flooded with constellations. When in a purely mental act I
transferred that exercise to the continent of Abya Yala, anarchism
ceased to be the center of the universe, the center of the galaxy.
My anarcho-centric vision had been defeated by hundreds, perhaps
thousands of stories of rebellion from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego,
from the Sioux-Lakota to the Quilombos in Brazil.
Stories that often had not structured their discourse in manifestos,
that were not and could not have been anarchist, either because they had
arisen before this ideology or because they were not anarchist.
In the case of agrarian, indigenous, or autonomous struggles, their
historical depth had surpassed the gravitational force of anarchism, and
had transcended it.
The case of Zapatismo is the clearest example of a struggle that is not
anarchist, simply because it is not anarchist simply because it did not
need to be.
The problem is that ethnocentric anarchism neither wishes nor will ever
succeed in integrating all this very dense rebellious experience that
exists in the world. It is a contradiction in terms, if it tries to do
so, then it loses the importance of the anarchist claim and becomes
something else.
The problem is that anarchism is not thought of as another form of
struggle against oppression and that on the contrary, it becomes an
approach that makes a clean slate of the past and that does not even
allow us to understand that, for example, by claiming the anarchism of
the agrarian rebellion of Julio Chávez López in the 19^(th) century, we
are losing the lessons of the other 400 years of struggle for land in
the states of Morelos and Mexico, and that these struggles are important
because they existed, not because there were anarchists in them.
In other words, if a Maori, Mapuche or Ikoot anarchist were to have his
or her anarchism taken away from him or her, they would be “simply” an
indigenous person, valuable in their own right, with a proven
perspective of struggle, with a deep history.
On the other hand, if a Mexican anarchist were to be stripped of her
anarchism, there would be little or nothing left of that person, just a
Mexican, urbanite, proletarian being.
A first warning sign would therefore exist in this ethnocentric
thermometer of anarchism: its incapacity to incorporate experiences of
ethnic, pagan, non-national struggles into the history of its struggle.
I refer to pagans by making a simile with evangelization. For
Christianity, pagans are those people who could not have been baptized
because they lived far from the reach of Christianity, as opposed to
heretics, who did know Christianity and who rejected it. For America,
the black and indigenous movements would be an example of this paganism,
of this non-anarchism that remains anarchism which remains excluded, or
that in order to be incorporated they resort to anarchist indigenism,
that is to say, that these movements are only contemplated if they
obtain homologation or can be incorporated into anarchist national
struggles.
The opinions that different anarchist groups have against the Zapatistas
are clear proof of this. One does not have to look far to find documents
of this style, for example, a letter from the “Ricardo Flores Magón
Insurgent Militias”, an alleged anarchist armed group, to the EZLN. The
letter is a collection of quotes from the great patriarchs of anarchism,
from Proudhon to MagĂłn. The text is little more than this accumulation
of unconnected phrases without a clear sense, which pretend to give a
lesson or reconciliation from anarchism to Zapatismo, with results that
I judge to be pitiful. I emphasize that there are more documents of this
style, you can search and read them, there are in several languages. I
do not intend to deal more with it, because the Zapatistas themselves
have already spoken on the subject. Look them up and check them out,
they are of an unfortunate orthodoxy.
You will also have to excuse me, but I find it very difficult to find,
somewhere in the program, or in my own study of anarchism in general,
conducted over the course of over a decade, that affirmation they make
about “Anarchism throughout history has not been enclosed in its own
tradition, nor is it nourished solely by thoughts, meanings, and
imaginaries that are explicitly situated and recognized as anarchist.”
Similarly to the rationalism that shuts out any knowledge deemed
“non-rational,” Christianity shuts out any “pagan” vision of the world,
as the nationality of a country that despises everything that in its
judgment has not helped forge the mestizo or white homeland, anarchism
shuts out forms of struggle not claimed as an anarchist.
A second warning sign is the (dis)incorporation of feminism. The classic
manifestation of this I have already referred to above: An anarchist
organizer notices how politically incorrect it is not to include
feminism in his event and makes a special section for it. The result is
a program in which the “really important” content is put forward by men
(and white men), either because women are absent from the key debates or
because they have been minimized and are considered theoretically
secondary. If the program were done by female comrades I assure you that
the outcome would be different. Women only have a voice until they are
included in a table, session, or section of “feminism and anarchism”.
A second, more critical and deeper look will reveal that on the contrary
women have not only been there, not only do they make up half the world,
half of everything and that not only have they expressed their critical
opinions for several decades already, yet their opinions have been
minimized, devalued and dismissed. The very existence of
“anarcho-feminism” shows that anarchism by itself did not solve and did
not pretend to solve gender issues. As if that were not enough, the
“classical” anarchists, those mentioned in the “instituting perspectives
of the libertarian horizon”, had misogynist approaches that were in no
way contrary to their anarchism.
We do not have to go very far, in multiple forums I have denounced the
macho character of the Central Committee of the Mexican Liberal Party.
It is enough to realize that the “truly important” positions of the PLM
were occupied by men. Of course, there were women, but their place was
always, as described by the PLM members themselves in their writings,
more that of a comrade who supports the man than that of a militant
fighter. As I pointed out in a brief essay that was not well received in
any circle, the Pelemists, Praxédis Guerrero for example, insist on the
“sweet” and “tender” nature of women and point out that their
subordinate role is the fault of traditionalism and religion, which
historically has been used by anarchists to point out the inability of
women to make correct decisions.
Praxédis Guerrero declared himself against feminism because he
understands it as a bourgeois ideology that pretends to equalize the
roles of men and women in a capitalist society. Likewise, Ricardo Flores
MagĂłn, the great patriarch of Mexican Anarchism, wrote in September
1910, that a woman was a sweet and delicate being. For him, above all,
she is the companion of man: mother, wife, daughter, sister, and in this
sense she would be equally chained to the slavery of the male, that is
why it is her task to “make your husbands, your brothers, your fathers,
your sons, and your friends take up the rifle”. The above are not
isolated opinions, nor mere occurrences of PLM, they are on the contrary
writings founded in the western, macho, and rational tradition that is
anarchism. I repeat it here clearly in case there was any doubt:
Machismo is a founding part of anarchism. Anarchism has the little
honorable merit of having split socialist struggles from feminist
struggles. There was no contradiction between feminism and socialism,
not until the arrival of the father of anarchism, Pierre Joseph
Proudhon. This fact has been hushed up. Virtually no one has dared to
write this truth so directly, only Simone de Beauvoir points it out loud
and clear in The Second Sex:
In general, the reformist [socialist] movement that developed during the
nineteenth century was favorable to feminism because of the fact that it
sought justice through equality. There is one notable exception: that of
Proudhon. No doubt because of his peasant roots, he reacts violently
against Samsonian mysticism; he is in favor of small property and, at
the same time, confines women to the home. “Housewife or courtesan”,
here is the dilemma in which he confines her. Until then, the attacks
against feminism had come from the conservatives, who fought socialism
with the same harshness: Charivari, among others, found in this field an
inexhaustible source of jokes; and it is Proudhon who breaks the
alliance between feminism and socialism; he protests against the banquet
of socialist women presided over by Leroux, he fulminates lightning and
flashes against Jeanne Decoin. In the work entitled La justice, he
argues that woman must remain under the dependence of man; only the
latter counts as a social individual; in the couple, there is no
partnership, which would imply equality, but a union; woman is inferior
to man, first, because her physical strength only represents two-thirds
of that of the male, and, then, because she is intellectually and
morally inferior in the same measure: her value, as a whole, is 2 x 2 x
2 as against 3 x 3 x 3, that is, lbs 8/27 of the value of the stronger
sex. Two women, Madame Adam and Madame D’Héricourt, replied to him, one
with firmness, the second with less fortunate exaltation, and Proudhon
took the occasion to reply with his Pornocratie ou la femme dans les
temps modernes. However, like all anti-feminists, he addresses ardent
litanies to the “true woman,” slave and mirror of man; despite this
devotion, he himself had to recognize that the life he imposed on his
own wife did not make her happy: Madame Proudhon’s letters are nothing
but a prolonged lament.
Did the remainder of libertarianism do anything to dissociate itself
from this position? Not at all, on the contrary, it was reaffirmed.
Towards the end of the 19^(th) century and the beginning of the 20^(th),
this misogynist vision was re-projected, from the perspective of
positivism and reason, advocating the clinical inferiority of women.
[1] «Let us not attempt to correct the equation by arguing that, for
example, Magón is neither white nor Western […]»
[2] Aguilar, Yásnaya. Validation as Capture. Originally written in
Mexican-Castilian on April 19^(th), 2020 for El PaĂs. Translated by
taller ahuehuete in solidarity.
[3] Rivera, Guadalupe. El Anarquismo como Nacionalidad, a propĂłsito del
Taller de Estudios Libertarios. Second edition: April 2017. Ediciones La
Social, MĂ©xico. Translated and illustrated, in solidarity, by taller
ahuehuete.
[4] Not ideologically, but as an active protagonist, a clear and
celebrated actress illustrated next to Bakunin, a canonical figure in
the anarchist Olympus.