Richard Kempton documents this legacy in his recently released, Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt, the first book-length history of the group in English. He traces the emergence, highpoints, and decline of the Provos, in addition to providing tangential but interesting appendices on topics such as the relationship between the Provos and the Situationists, the history of anarchism in Amsterdam, and others. He does a good job at placing the group in the context of the radical currents from which it emerged and at relating the Provos’ trajectory to some of the political peculiarities of the Netherlands. While a deeper examination of the group’s ideas and internal organization would have enriched the book, I found it to be thoughtful, informative, and fun to read. (For a quick introduction to the Provos, you may wish to check out this article as well as this one.)

Kempton illustrates the Provos’ extraordinary ability to expose the contradictions of the liberal democratic society in which they lived while making authorities look absurd in the process. Of their many feats that he records, their “White Bicycle Plan” is surely the most famous. It began as a response to the traffic jams and air pollution plaguing Amsterdam: instead of passively accepting the automobile’s toxic domination of urban life, the Provos pressed the municipal government to give out vast numbers of unlockable, white bikes throughout the city. These cycles–easily identifiable due to their color–would be available to any passerby who felt like riding one. He or she could take it to his or her destination but, once there, would be obliged to leave it for other citizens. This ingenious plan was clearly a sensible, low-cost, and environmentally friendly way to meet at least some of Amsterdam’s transportation needs.

The Provos distributed fifty bikes at their own expense to jump start the program but immediately ran into problems with the police, who objected to their attempt to socialize the means of transportation. In fact, the cops impounded the bikes furnished by the Provos on the pretext that doling out unlocked bicycles “encouraged theft.” In other words, they took bicycles to prevent them from being taken!

The Provos were naturally delighted to find the police offering Amsterdamers such a concrete lesson in the bankruptcy of the criminal justice system: thanks to their unintentional complicity in the Provos’ scheme, the city became a classroom in which attentive residents could learn a lesson normally buried in obscure anarchist pamphlets and disquisitions: the cops’ primary objective is not to serve the people but rather to protect the status quo, no matter how noxious and irrational it might be.

The “White Bicycle Plan” was one among multiple Provo “plans,” all designed to push people toward cooperative, ecological solutions while undermining the legitimacy of the established order. They outlined many of these in a brochure entitled What the Provos Want , which they released in 1966, shortly before successfully competing for a seat on Amsterdam’s City Council (“Vote Provo for a Laugh!” was one of their campaign slogans). Kempton summarizes key points:

• The White Bicycle Plan: In an effort to address traffic congestion in the center of the city, white bicycles would become the common property of all the people of Amsterdam. Automobiles would be excluded from the center of the city.

• The White Chimney Plan: A mandate that chimneys have special built-in incinerators to combat air pollution; with fines for infractions.

• The White Chicken Plan: Amsterdam’s police force should be recast as unarmed friendly social workers with candy and band-aids in their pockets.

• The White Dwelling Plan: In an effort to ease the city’s housing shortage the city government would publish a weekly list of empty buildings so people without homes could squat them.

• The White Wives Plan: Developed by Irene Donner-Van der Wetering, this plan called for sex education for young people. Among other things it mandated information on contraception, medical clinics for young girls, and teaching family planning.

• The White Schools Plan: Students would have a say in expanding opportunities for democratically organized study and discussion.

• The White City Plan: Amsterdam would become the first urban area committed to implementing Constant Nieuwenhuis’s New Babylon.(1)

After reading these “plans,” I found myself surprised to realize that today, approximately forty years later, many of their demands (“plans”) have become non-controversial elements of mainstream social policy. For example, numerous cities have experimented with free bicycle programs (such as Portland, Madison, and Barcelona), and bike paths and restrictions on vehicular traffic are common in American cities. Likewise, controls on air pollution are pervasive; young people often receive some degree of sex education; and students frequently play a role in setting academic policy at the college and sometimes high school level. Obviously, aspects of their program remain unrealized–I know of no city that publishes lists of squatable buildings, for instance–but, nonetheless, much of the Provo platform has lost its controversial, provocative quality.

This raises a difficult question about the meaning of the Provos’ legacy. What if the Provos (and corresponding groups like the Yippies in the United States) ultimately need to be understood less as anarchist instigators than as the avant-garde of a more lenient, culturally flexible, and ecologically friendly capitalism? While it’s true that they set stodgy authorities into a frenzy four decades ago, it may be that those authorities were simply anachronistic obstacles and that the Provos actually helped modernize capitalism by undermining their legitimacy.

Issues such as these are beyond the scope of Kempton’s book and, for that matter, most works on the history of anarchism. However, I believe that they are worth pursuing and I hope that the publication of this long overdue book on the Provos indicates that a more serious, complicated engagement with our past is on the horizon.

And now we can add a new film to the catalogue: Lucio, directed by Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga. This Spanish language documentary tells the dramatic story of Lucio Urtubia, a sort of anarchist Robin Hood whose militancy brought him into contact with some of the most significant events of our era. Although the film does not have subtitles, English readers can check out its synopsis (which I have translated and copied below) and watch its trailer (which has subtitles and is also below).

SYNOPSIS: LUCIO

There have been–and are–many anarchists. Quite a few of them have had to commit robberies or manufacture contraband for the cause. A much smaller number have talked strategy with Che or helped Eldridge Cleaver (the leader of the Black Panthers). But there is only one who, in addition to all of the above, put the world’s most powerful bank on the ropes by producing massive amounts of counterfeit Traveler’s Cheques while also not missing a single day at his bricklayer’s job. His name is Lucio Urtubia.

Lucio presently lives in retirement in Paris. During his life, he witnessed–and often participated actively in–some of the most important events of the second half of the 20th century. He experienced the tumult of May ’68 from within, actively supported the Castro regime during its initial stages, and engaged in a whole range of anti-Franco endeavors. However, his biggest “job” took place in the latter part of the 1970s, a time when he was known in the press as “the good bandit” or “the Basque Zorro.” He defrauded the First National Bank (now Citibank) of 3,000 million pesetas in order to finance causes that he supported. Amazingly, his “career” only cost him a few months in prison.

The film’s official site, which contains photographs and other information, is here.

The volume of anarchist literature will likely grow significantly in the next several years as authors who came of age during the anti-globalization movement (1999 – 2001) publish their works.

For instance, there is David Graeber’s forthcoming Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, which is sure to challenge and captivate (AK Press, September, 400 Pages). AK Press describes the book in the following terms:

In this new collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Written in an unpretentious style that uses accessible and entertaining language to convey complex theoretical ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground, including the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions in rural Madagascar, and the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests. But they’re linked by a clear purpose: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken, or might take in the future.

Anarchism is currently undergoing a worldwide revival, in many ways replacing Marxism as the theoretical and moral center of new revolutionary social movements. It has, however, left little mark on the academy. While anarchists and other visionaries have turned to anthropology for ideas and inspiration, anthropologists are reluctant to enter into serious dialogue. David Graeber is not. These essays, spanning almost twenty years, show how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy.

Another instance is Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (Pluto Press, November, 2007). The publisher offers this description:

Anarchy Alive! is a fascinating, in-depth look at the practice and theory of contemporary anarchism. Uri Gordon draws on his activist experience and on interviews, discussions and a vast selection of recent literature to explore the activities, cultures and agendas shaping today’s explosive anti-authoritarian revival. Anarchy Alive! also addresses some of the most tense debates in the contemporary movement, using a theory based on practice to provocatively reshape anarchist discussions of leadership, violence, technology and nationalism.

This is the ideal book for anyone looking for a fresh, informed and critical engagement with anarchism, as a mature and dynamic political force in the age of globalization.

Of course, anarchism has a long history. One particularly troubled and troubling chapter in this history is the state-sponsored murder of Sacco and Vanzetti. A new book has just been appeared on the topic, whose publication coincides with the eightieth anniversary of their executions: Bruce Watson’s Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind. The publisher states:

In the first full-length narrative of the case in thirty years, Bruce Watson unwinds a gripping tale that opens with anarchist bombs going off in a posh Washington, D.C., neighborhood and concludes with worldwide outrage over the execution of the “good shoemaker” and the “poor fish peddler.” Sacco and Vanzetti mines deep archives and new sources, unveiling fresh details about these naïve dreamers and militant revolutionaries. This case still haunts the American imagination. Authoritative and engrossing, Sacco and Vanzetti will capture fans of true crime books and everyone who enjoys riveting American history.

Finally, Spanish readers will want to check out: Sergio Grez Toso’s Los anarquistas y el movimiento obrero. La alborada de “la Idea” en Chile, 1893-1915 (in English: The Anarchists and the Workers Movement: The Dawn of “the Idea” in Chile, 1893-1915). As the title implies, this book explores the origins of the anarchist movement in Chile. Its release is noteworthy because Chile has largely been neglected in the literature on anarchism in the Americas. Hopefully this publication will prompt the emergence of a fuller depiction of the movement’s legacy.

Edited by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, the publication includes a book of essays and 10 fold-out maps in a slipcase. It will be published in October
2007 by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, Los Angeles, at a cover price of $30.00. Participants include mapmakers / essayists:

An Architektur / Sebastian Cobarrubias, Maribel Casas-Cortes on migration in Europe; Center for Urban Pedagogy / Heather Rogers on garbage flows in New York City; Ashley Hunt / Avery Gordon on the global prison-industrial complex; Institute for Applied Autonomy on surveillance and ³tactical cartography²; Pedro Lasch / Alejandro DaCosta on migration in the Americas; Lize Mogel / Sarah Lewison on geography, gentrification, and globalization; Trevor Paglen & John Emerson / Visible Collective on extraordinary rendition; Brooke Singer / Kolya Abramsky on the contradictions of cheap energy in the US; Jane Tsong / Jenny Price, D.J. Waldie, et al, on human impacts on LA¹s water ecology; Unayyan / Jai Sen on mapping the unintended city in 1980s Calcutta.

2.
An exhibition of the publication’s mapping projects (and others) is currently touring.

Venues include: Firehouse 13 Gallery / Providence, RI / July 2007 LACE / Los Angeles, CA / September 26 ­October 28, 2007 Storefront for Art and Architecture / New York City, NY / February 2008 ThINC / Syracuse, NY / March 2008 Art Gallery of the College of New Jersey / Ewing, NJ / Fall 2008

And others in the works! Please email info@an-atlas.com for more information.

3. An Atlas of Radical Cartography is an independent publication, created, produced, and distributed by artists. It has been a collective effort, and so we ask for your help in raising $5,000 in small donations to cover part of our printing costs. Your support will make this project possible, and is hugely appreciated!

Please visit http://www.an-atlas.com/donate.htm to find out how to help.

All donations are tax-deductible. Contributions received before August 25 will be recognized in the publication itself. Minimum donations of $35 receive a complimentary copy of the publication.

And thank you to everyone who has supported us so far!

+ + +

For more information please visit http://www.an-atlas.com

The An Atlas exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the LEF Foundation.
An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

You can watch film’s trailer here:

* * * New book: Autonomedia has announced a June publication date for Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt by Richard Kempton.

Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolts isthe first book-length English-language study of Holland’s legendary insurrectional movement. In an introduction and eight chapters, Richard Kempton narrates the rise and fall of Provo from early Dutch “Happenings” staged in 1962 through to the so-called “Death of Provo” in 1967, including Robert Jasper Grootveld’s anarchist anti-cancer campaigns, the riots against Princess Beatrix’s marriage to an ex-Nazi, and the famous White Bicycle program. Then, in seven appendices, he comments on parallel contemporary and near-contemporary movements, including Dada and Situationism; studies Amsterdam’s previous anarchist traditions; chronicles the spread of Provo through the Netherlands and the development of the Kabouter (Gnome) party; and offers an existentialist critique of Provo and other anarchist movements of the 60s. This unique book is based on extensive primary research and includes a selective bibliography of the Dutch-language sources.

* Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side by Clayton Patterson (Editor) (New York: Seven Stories Press, April 2007)

This 624 page, large format anthology is a real treasure. It documents the radical history of the Lower East Side, focusing particularly on the 1980s, one of the most dynamic and least documented periods in the history of urban opposition. The book is divided into six sections (history, housing/squats, Tompkins Square, media, biography, and AIDS). Many of the contributors will be familiar to participants in and students of rebellion in the Big Apple: Bill Weinberg, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Seth Tobocman, Sarah Ferguson, and others make an appearance.

Here’s a quote from the Foreword by Jeff Farrell:

Rarely does a book come along with politics as vivid as its people. Clayton Patterson and the many contributors to Resistance pull it off. With a fine mix of fondness, humor and critique, they document the hodgepodge of incendiary politics and interpersonal engagement that defined decades of New York’s Lower East Side. More to the point, they show us that for the Lower East Side at its best the people were the politics. Making your way through Resistance, you might as well be wandering the political landscape of the neighborhood back in the day, stopping to dig the street players, putting up a poster or pushing a copy of the Shadow newspaper, pitching in to defend a squat or collective garden, cutting through the crowd in Tompkins Square Park, sidestepping a junkie or a cop. Resistance swarms with the movement and emotion of the Lower East Side’s people, revealing a politics invented out of the daily battles with police, landlords, developers–hell, sometimes with each other. Reading the book, you feel like a flanuer, lost to the rhythms of the neighborhood streets and learning something new at every turn.

* The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror by Beverly Gage (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

This book explores a key moment in the history of social discontent in New York City: the 1920 bombing of Wall and Broad streets, which killed 40 people and injured hundreds more. Though no one was ever charged with the crime, Paul Avrich and many other historians believe that Mario Buda, a local anarchist of Italian extraction, bore responsibility. (This incident is the source of the title of Mike Davis’s new and interesting book, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York: Verso, 2007).)

by Chuck Morse

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy
by Russell Jacoby. 240 pp, New York, Basic Books, 2000

The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere
by Carl Boggs, 310 pp, New York: Guilford, 2000

There is no doubt that the thinkers and activists who shaped the anarchist tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries expanded our sense of social possibilities in ways that still seem vital today. Even now, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is hard not to be inspired by Proudhon’s polemical wit, Kropotkin’s generous radicalism, or the deep social reconstruction carried out by the Spanish anarchists.

But there is also no doubt that circumstances have changed radically since their time. A contemporary anarchism must be much broader than the old thinkers and activists imagined and we must contend with new barriers to the creation of an egalitarian, cooperative, and decentralized society. We would be ill-advised – to put it mildly – to try to build a movement on the works of a Proudhon or a Kropotkin (etc), but we can and should emulate their example by fighting the forces that hinder the realization of existing liberatory potentials.

Fortunately there is a vast literature that can help us in this task. Although we will often be disappointed by the lack of radicalism or absence of nerve in much of it, there are nonetheless many works that can help us build an anarchist critique for today. The two books I review here have instructive contributions as well as shortcomings. They are Carl Boggs’s The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere and Russell Jacoby’s The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy.

In different ways both Boggs and Jacoby want to confront an obstacle of serious concern to anarchists: the political and intellectual forces that obstruct the development of a radical opposition in America. Jacoby grapples with the decline of a utopian spirit among intellectuals and academics, whereas Boggs examines forces in our political culture that undermine the emergence of a challenge to the status quo. Although Jacoby and Boggs offer pessimistic appraisals of our current situation – as indicated by the titles of their books – they clearly hope that their critical diagnoses will play some role in the development of a remedy.

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy
Jacoby’s objective in The End of Utopia is to describe the loss of a utopian commitment in American intellectual culture and to indicate the negative consequences this yields for theory. He is concerned specifically with the fact that social thinkers are no longer driven by the conviction that “the future could fundamentally surpass the present . that history contains possibilities of freedom and pleasure hardly tapped.” (XI-XII). Although Jacoby weakly asserts that we should be worried by the demise of the utopian spirit because its radicalism gave liberalism its backbone, serving as its oppositional “goad and critic”(p. 8 ), it is clear that what really disturbs him is the disappearance of leftwing utopian social critics who oppose capitalism and yet remain democratic in culture and politics.

Jacoby begins his discussion of the retreat from utopia by chronicling the reconciliation to capitalism that is so common among today’s self-styled ‘left’ intellectuals. He cites numerous cases in which supposedly radical theorists either counsel us to accept the market as the ultimate determinant of economic life or advance ameliorative measures that are really forms of acquiescence (‘we should create responsible corporations’, etc). He paints a portrait of cynical ex-Marxists and Ivy League policy wonks who urge conciliation with capitalism to rationalize their own relatively comfortable positions within the social hierarchy. This makes for good but macabre reading, although Jacoby’s point is that by abandoning a confrontation with capitalism these theorists not only relinquish the struggle against the left ‘s historic adversary, but also the very idea of an alternative social order.

Jacoby’s discussion of the rapprochement with capitalism sets the stage for the rest of the book, in which he analyzes an intellectual culture that becomes increasingly adrift as it moves further and further away from a radical stance. Jacoby takes aim at a multiculturalism that descends, in the absence of any larger transformative vision, into estimable but prosaic exhortations (e.g., ‘we should respect people who are different’) or claims of ‘subversiveness’ that lack political content. Jacoby expands upon this by castigating academics for allowing the democratic critique of mass culture to devolve into a celebration of consumer culture (for example, he contrasts Dwight McDonald’s anti-authoritarian cultural criticism with contemporary authors who write appreciatively about things like soap operas and MTV). Jacoby points out that this gradual de-radicalization is accompanied by changes in the relationship of intellectuals to society. He treats the chilling professionalization of intellectuals along with trite claims of ‘marginality’ made by well-paid, high-status academics. If professionalization integrates intellectuals into the market, then claims of marginality often boil down to a demand for better salaries or more prominent teaching positions (that is, ‘market share’). Jacoby also takes issue with forms of cultural study that trade objective for subjective standards of truth, and thus abandon the utopian capacity to assert truths and universals against the existing social order. He argues that relativistic trends in academia facilitate a turn toward conservatism by discarding the right (and obligation) to pass judgment upon the world. Jacoby concludes his book by trying to refute common arguments against utopianism and pleas with us, as Theodor Adorno once urged, to ‘contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.’

Jacoby’s book is a trenchant indictment of left academics and he gives substance to a feeling shared by many (including myself) that the whole academic establishment – even its purportedly radical wings – is deeply conservative. It is certainly refreshing to see celebrated thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, and bell hooks taken to task for a lack of vision, self-indulgence, or accommodation. This is good material for anarchists who would like to see the reemergence of an embattled anti-authoritarian intellectual culture, especially those of us who have spent some time around the university.

But there are also real problems with Jacoby’s book. While he shows the consequences of the retreat from a utopian commitment – the absence of critical standards, accommodation to injustice, inanity, etc. – he lacks a utopian vision of his own. He faults others for lacking affirmative ideals, but Jacoby doesn’t advance any either. Jacoby wants to see a utopian left – an Antonio Gramsci, a Herbert Marcuse, groups with a bold critique and a politics for realizing it – but all he really gives to this project is his bitter elegy. Unfortunately the power to complain is not also a creative power.

Jacoby not only fails to advance a utopian vision but also abandons the terrain upon which one could be formulated. Utopianism asserts that the existing society can be criticized according to the standards of reason and ultimately rendered rational. It thus assumes a strong connection between the realm of ideas and the world as a whole: it criticizes ‘the real’ for failing to embody ‘the ideal’ and fights to reconcile the two. Jacoby could have helped legitimate this strategy by theorizing the relationship between the intellectual culture that he describes and larger social structures. This could have affirmed, at least implicitly, the possibility that ideas and the world can be brought into accord through a utopian synthesis. Although Jacoby does not deny a connection between ideas and other dimensions of social existence – and clearly believes that they are connected – he does not formulate this in any way. Jacoby’s defense of utopia thus neglects the basic precondition of a utopian stance. For this reason his book is more of a protest than an act of vision and, while valuable in many respects, it will ultimately disappoint anarchists who are committed to both critique and reconstruction. We can only hope that in the future Jacoby will join those of us who want to reconstruct a strong affirmative vision and apply his formidable intellectual skills to this task.

The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere
Boggs shares Jacoby’s preoccupation with the loss of cultural resources in America that would enable a confrontation with the status quo. Whereas Jacoby focuses on changes in the realm of ideas, Boggs focuses on politics. He contends that Americans have become mired in a political culture (or anti-political culture) that prevents us from challenging the sources of our social and ecological problems, despite the fact that we enjoy greater access to information and education than ever before. Whereas Jacoby points to changes in the intellectual arena, Boggs traces this development to the expanded influence of corporate power and economic globalization. Boggs’ effort to connect the diminution of the political culture to larger changes in the social structure renders his project a little more ambitious than Jacoby’s.

Boggs alleges that economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power produce two related crises for those who want to build a democratic movement against social injustice. First, the corporate invasion of social life turns American party politics into a façade, undermines the capacities necessary for civic engagement among citizens as a whole, and produces a mass media that consistently conceals or avoids substantive social issues. This leaves us with a hyper-alienated political consciousness structured by a hyper-antagonistic social order. Second, Boggs explains how this produces cultural and quasi-political trends that militate, at their essence, against a real confrontation with power. Boggs explores things such as therapeutic fads that cast self-actualization in utterly asocial and anti-political terms, collective outbursts of anger (such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots) that lack real political direction, and post-modern intellectual orientations defined by a spirit of withdrawal and pessimism.

These related developments shape what Boggs describes as a wholesale retreat from the public sphere, something Boggs seems to imagine as a common arena in which citizens can openly discuss shared problems and develop common solutions. It is only here, according to Boggs, that citizens can begin to confront the world’s problems, and the loss of this realm suggests bleak outcomes. Moreover, the major ideological tendencies of the past – liberalism and Marxism – are incapable of facilitating a recovery of the public sphere. The liberal emphasis on private strivings over the general interest and the Marxian reduction of politics to economics gives these traditions a deeply anti-political character that renders them more impotent than critical.

Boggs makes a powerful statement against our contemporary culture, and one that should resonate with many anarchists. While his description of the joke that party politics has become and the complicity of the mass media is common coin among most Americans, his critique is nonetheless a welcome corrective to the omnipotent calls for ‘renewed citizen’s participation’ bandied about by academics who refuse to acknowledge the deeply undemocratic and corrupt character of our political system or the endless emptiness characteristic of American political discourse. Likewise, his treatment of anti-political cultural fads should speak to those of us who believe that our personal development could be linked directly to a project of political transformation.

Boggs also treats anarchism rather sympathetically in several sections of the book and he clearly wants to align himself with popular movements against social injustice, although unfortunately he never fully commits himself to this project. The ambiguity of his commitments is first apparent in the difficulty he has defining the public sphere, a difficulty so grave that it is ultimately impossible to determine exactly what he means by the term. For example, he tells us that corporate behemoths “restrict the development of an open, dynamic public sphere”, which seems feasible, but then on the same page he tells us that these huge corporations start “to constitute a new public sphere of their own”(69). But, wait, what about the “decline of the public sphere” mentioned in the subtitle? This sort of confusion is compounded when he states that he wants “an enlarged public sphere”, that “the public sphere is broken down into a host of rival interest groups”(233) (so, how could you enlarge it?) or, in other places, that we need a “recovery of the public sphere”(135) or a “reopening of the public sphere”(113). Is the public sphere declining, broken up, lost, closed, or being refashioned? It does not seem unreasonable to demand that Boggs provide a better treatment of an idea so central to his book.

However, it ultimately becomes clear that his equivocations camouflage the retrograde nature of his political proposals. While he would like to side with radically democratic social movements, his conception of politics is utterly state-centered. In fact, it appears that what he means by the decline of the public sphere is only the decline of a political space through which citizens can influence government policy. For Boggs, government is the one public arena “that can effectively resist corporate hegemony”(258) and hence the solution to the expansion of corporate power and globalization. Boggs does not defend or explain this view of government, but merely asserts it and evidently believes that such a declaration alone is sufficient. That there has never been a just state, one that genuinely represented the will of the people, even according to the liberal democratic standards, is a fact that Boggs neither acknowledges nor denies, but yet it remains a mystery why he thinks the historic character of the state might suddenly be transformed. But, besides this, his argument that the state is the only institution capable of restraining global capital is hardly affirmative: nuclear war could also stop globalization, but does this make it desirable? And, even if a state-centered politics was attractive for some reason, it is far from evident that the state can in fact restrain the power of global capital. I happen to believe that only popular anti-statist movements can muster the deep strength necessary to confront the forces of capital. In any case, his panegyrics for the state make a morbid spectacle and it is here that those of us with truly democratic convictions must part company with Boggs.

The End
Both of these books struggle with important issues for anarchists, issues that we will have to confront in the course of building an anarchism for today. Surely we will have to transform the disposition of the intellectual culture if anarchist ideas will ever be fairly evaluated, not to mention embodied in popular movements. Likewise, anarchists will have to contend with the forces in our political culture that frustrate collective resistance and empowerment if we are to become a serious presence on the political landscape once again.

The failures of Jacoby and Boggs’ books are instructive. It is not enough, like Jacoby, to critique without also reconstructing. Works of this sort may exert a spirit of tragic intransigence in the face of an unwanted world, but such posturing offers little to those who want to build an alternative. It is also inadequate, like Boggs, to damn our political culture while remaining so restrained in one’s affirmative ideals. It is up to anarchists to build a radical social criticism that is grounded in the real world and yet deeply utopian. If we do this, then we will have emulated the most exemplary aspects of the classical anarchist tradition while also making an invaluable contribution to the realization of new liberatory potentialities. ~

Review by Chuck Morse

Mexico under Siege: Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism
By Ross Gandy and Donald Hodges
London: Zed Books, 2002

Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico
By Bill Weinberg
New York: Verso, 2000

- – -

Everyone knows that Mexico has a long and vibrant revolutionary tradition. This fact is easy to discover, whether you read Wall Street preoccupations about Chiapas or crack open any given left-wing magazine.

What is more challenging is to understand the inner logic of the tradition, both historically and in its contemporary manifestations. It is also essential: U.S. activists need to develop a substantive grasp of this tradition to build meaningful alliances with comrades south of the border as well as a movement in the United States that embodies the best aspects of the political traditions brought by the millions of Mexican immigrants.

Ross Gandy and Donald Hodges’s Mexico under Siege: Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism and Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico provide excellent points of entry into this topic. Both books offer a comprehensive introduction to the Mexican revolutionary tradition and thus should be read by all U.S. activists seeking to develop a more international perspective. Their problems are also helpful because they indicate some of the difficulties we will face while envisioning a revolutionary movement in the Americas.

These books should be especially attractive to anarchists given that the authors all share a genuine connection to the anarchist tradition. Weinberg is a longtime participant in New York’s anti-authoritarian milieu, and Gandy and Hodges have their own links to the movement; for example, Hodges is the author of Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), and Gandy describes himself as a participant in anarchist collectives (among other things) in the “About the Authors” section of Mexico under Siege.

Mexico under Siege: Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism

Mexico under Siege chronicles the popular opposition to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party that governed Mexico through a web of violence, corruption, and deceit for seventy years under the pretense of democracy. (This mix of authoritarianism and democratic fiction led Mario Vargas Llosa to label the PRI’s Mexico as the “perfect dictatorship.”(1)) Mexico under Siege can be read profitably as a companion to Gandy and Hodges’s Mexico, the End of the Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), which analyzes the course of the Mexican Revolution from its beginning in 1910 to its disappearance from the political scene as marked by Vicente Fox’s election in 2000.

The Mexican Revolution was one of the most far-reaching revolutions of the twentieth century, and its victory heralded major conquests for economic and political democracy. Mexico’s 1917 Constitution promised government support of popular movements for social justice, the nationalization of economic resources, the formation of cooperatives, and the spread of collectivism against capitalism. It offered land reform to the peasants as well as the right to unionize, strike, and share in employer profits to the workers. In other words, from the ruins of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and bitter years of civil war, a new social contract emerged between the people and state guided by a joint movement toward democracy and equality.

Yet this social contract disintegrated quickly, and people came to understand that the government was not an ally of the revolution but its opponent; Mexico under Siege tells the story of those who rose up in revolt. It describes the emergence of movements against the status quo along with their strategies and personages, and evaluates them comprehensively. Its introduction is structured around the revolutionary novels of B. Traven—a German anarchist who settled in Mexico after fleeing a death sentence due to his participation in the 1919 Bavarian soviet—and, from there, describes post-revolutionary resistance movements up to the contemporary period. It chronicles the militant labor protests of the 1940s, the revolutionary peasants’ movements of the late 1940s and 1950s (which provide the link between Emiliano Zapata and the guerrilla movements of the 1990s), the massive teacher and railroad workers’ strikes of the late 1950s, the guerrilla movements of the 1960s, the student movements of 1968 and 1971, the radical labor and peasant movements of 1970s, and of course the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.(2)

This book has no parallel in English or Spanish. Although there are many works on specific movements in Mexico and some on particular aspects of the Mexican Left’s broader trajectory—such as Barry Carr’s Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico and Jorge Castañeda’s Utopia Unarmed: the Latin American Left after the Cold War—this is the first comprehensive treatment of Mexican popular resistance movements as a whole. Although this is a small book (256 pages) and thus overlooks important movements as well as crucial aspects of the movements that are considered, Gandy and Hodges demonstrate a consistent and evolving legacy of opposition. They do so not only by examining the historical evolution of the movements but also by providing a feeling of the organic continuity between them (wherein different tendencies and individuals interacted with and influenced one another). They also supply biographies of many of the leading activists and offer some unprecedented documentation to the historical record; for example, included in the appendix is a translation of The Plan of Cerro Prieto, a program distributed by peasant revolutionary Rubén Jaramillo before an uprising he led in 1953. This translation is based on the sole surviving mimeograph of the original document.

Gandy and Hodges’s panoramic study of the opposition ends on a sober note: the Mexican resistance failed to realize its primary goal of breaking the PRI’s stranglehold on political power. Although it is true that the PRI was dislodged from power through (relatively) clean elections in 2000, they point out that this was not an achievement of the popular resistance but primarily the result of many different forces and pressures (including pressure from the Right).

Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico

Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas is an excellent complement to Mexico under Siege. While Gandy and Hodges analyze the Mexican popular resistance, as shaped by the legacy of the Mexican Revolution and in engagement with the state, Weinberg provides a topical exposition of the social dislocations and revolutionary movements that have emerged with Mexico’s integration into the global economy (particularly as represented by NAFTA). Homage to Chiapas and Mexico under Siege overlap in many key areas, but Weinberg’s work is much more international and contemporary in focus.

Although the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas frames the book, Weinberg’s work is really more than an “homage to Chiapas.” His book, which also begins with a Traven quote, is divided into five parts. The first describes the long history of exploitation and indigenous resistance in Mexico generally and Chiapas in particular (from colonization, to the Mexican Revolution, to NAFTA). The second section (“A War Cry from Chiapas”) shows how this history exploded to produce unfathomable suffering as well as a revolutionary movement that has inspired millions in Mexico and across the globe. The remaining three sections (roughly the latter half of the book) place the first two in a much broader context: they analyze peasant movements throughout Mexico and the circumstances that have catalyzed them; the insidious confluence of political corruption, violence, and crime (especially drug trafficking); and the connection between misery in Mexico and the miserable schemes hatched by U.S. elites.

Weinberg is a journalist (for High Times magazine and Native Americas) and he wrote this book in a journalistic style. His analysis is not shaped by academic debates or concerns; for instance, he does not contest prevalent theories of social movements or speculate on the meaning of ethnicity in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, his goal is to tell the story—in a straightforward, entertaining way—of the various crises and historical trajectories that have pushed Mexico into a maelstrom of distress and revolt. And he is remarkably successful at this task. Weinberg not only does an excellent job of tracing the sometimes obscure (and sometimes not so obscure) forces and personalities that have shaped the present but also skillfully weaves this together to depict a country torn between five hundred years of colonization, militant indigenous resistance, and new forms of conflict that are radically transforming the social and ecological fabric.

Weinberg’s journalism is clearly a form of activism for him, and his commitment to radical social and ecological reconstruction gives him a sensitivity to issues that are often invisible to others. For example, he is exceptionally attentive to the ecological dimensions of Mexico’s current crisis: he illustrates how anti-ecological and anti-democratic practices come together to create a desperate present for the poor, and knowledgeably describes the very different relationship between nature and culture found among indigenous people. Likewise, his anti-authoritarian commitments are reflected in his ability to portray social movements that have radically democratized community life and to distinguish these from movements that merely claim such priorities. As strong as his commitments are, however, he completely avoids the temptation to sanctify the opposition or gratuitously demonize elites. For instance, he conveys Subcommandante Marcos’s charismatic genius, but also represents him as a bit of a playboy. Similarly, he shows the heinous role of many individuals and groups, but does not saturate them in derogatory adjectives. Weinberg’s restraint, willingness to be critical, and desire to let the facts speak for themselves renders his work much more compelling than it would be otherwise.

Critique
Mexico under Siege and Homage to Chiapas offer a broad picture of the Mexican resistance in its past and present-day forms. They do so on the basis of original historical research and express a genuine enthusiasm for popular revolutionary movements. Nevertheless, these books both have instructive limitations for those who want to build on their accomplishments.

Although Mexico under Siege studies popular resistance to the Mexican state, it is unfortunately not anti-statist enough. There are three reasons why this is the case.

First, Mexico under Siege is very much a political history of the leaders, organizations, and programs that guided the resistance to PRI and not a history of the emergence of oppressed classes or groups into historical subjects. For instance, their chapters on the 1958 teacher and railroad worker strikes focus on the organizations and leaders, not on changes in the constitution of the Mexican working class. Likewise, their chapter on the Zapatistas focuses overwhelmingly upon Marcos—his history, political style, and so forth—instead of the development of a revolutionary identity among indigenous people in Chiapas. Although such a political history needs to be told—and certainly the leadership and organizations are important—this approach has a tendency to diminish the political subjectivity of the very people the opposition claims to represent (and who give these organizations meaning).(3)

Furthermore, the treatment of the organized opposition in isolation from the classes or groups they represent tends to enable those in power to define the key moments in the history of popular resistance. In other words, if the emphasis is on the evolution of a revolutionary class consciousness among workers or an insurgent sensibility among peasants, then events of historical significance occur when this group’s radical identity is either fortified, diminished, or transformed. For example, Gandy and Hodges cite an interview with Marcos in which he discusses the moment when the Zapatistas substantively joined the indigenous community of Chiapas: this was an enormously portentous event for Chiapas, and yet completely invisible to the state and its local agents. But what is a historically crucial event for the organized opposition when it is understood outside of its relation to oppressed classes or groups? In many cases, the state is permitted to define what is or is not significant: that is, the movement becomes important when the state decides it is worth repressing. Unfortunately, this approach is evident in Mexico under Siege, which can be read as a long list of clashes between disenfranchised people and the system. But, really, what kind of history do we want—a history of us standing up or them beating us down?(4)

Finally, the isolation of the organized opposition from those it claims to represent tends to diminish the centrality of ideological commitments—particularly a commitment to democracy—in the resistance. This question simply loses significance when the people are not theorized as historical actors. Unfortunately, this problem is also evident in Mexico under Siege: Gandy and Hodges treat democratic movements and Marxist-Leninist movements as more or less continuous with one another, despite the fact that there is a vast difference between groups that want to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat and those fighting for popular self-organization. This distinction is vital for members of the opposition as well as the state being opposed because movements that want to democratically reconstruct political life pose a much greater challenge to the state than those that merely want to confront it. Indeed, this is revealed in the history of two movements treated by Gandy and Hodges: the student movement and the Zapatistas. The student movement sought to radically democratize political life with its counterculture and advocacy of participatory democracy and, even though the movement has passed into history, the state is still burdened by its legacy in the form of an enduring political sensibility and ongoing inquires into its repressive actions against the movement. The Zapatistas have also made crucial attempts to radically democratize political life (through their autonomous municipalities and democratic consultas, for instance) and of course their uprising has troubled the state for more than eight continuous years. By contrast, the Marxist-Leninist groups have utterly disappeared from the political scene and their memory does little to trouble those in power.

These problems with Mexico under Siege illuminate the vast difference between fighting the state and empowering the people, and underscore the necessity (and potential) of integrating this difference into theory.

If Gandy and Hodges can be criticized for some theoretical failings in their conception of the opposition, Weinberg dispenses with theory altogether by choosing a journalistic approach to the subject. As a journalist, his job is to report the facts and tell a story, and as such, he is not permitted to leave the realm of facts. While Weinberg is good at his trade—his book is both entertaining and exhaustively documented—his profession prevents him from speculating on the deeper logic of events or making assertions about the character of social institutions as such. In this sense, even the worst theory is more ambitious than the best journalism, for at least it endeavors to grasp the underlying principles that organize social affairs. And this is an important difference for anarchists: we need to be able to say not only that the Mexican state (for one) is barbaric and irrational but also that these are essential characteristics of states as such. Weinberg’s work provides great raw material for such arguments, yet he does not and cannot make them.

Conclusion
These books’ problems are related: Gandy and Hodges employ a theoretical structure that does not encompass the breadth of the movements they treat—implicitly, they step away from the history of popular self-organization in Mexico—whereas Weinberg avoids theoretical questions entirely. Even though both books offer nuanced and unprecedented studies of a much neglected history, our collective imaginations will need to be pressed further to grasp the fullness of the revolutionary tradition that has unfolded south of the border.

On the one hand, the demands of theory cannot be avoided. The emergence of a common movement among Mexican and U.S. radicals requires the ability to make claims about the social order—claims that do more than indict a particular story of a particular injustice. And indeed, to incorporate the lessons of the Mexican resistance into U.S. radical movements, one needs to be able to grasp what is universal about its accomplishments.

But the history of the Mexican resistance also needs to be understood in a way that emphasizes the centrality of ordinary people in the process of social change, whether they have risen up in arms or simply tried to keep food on the table. In short, our theoretical premises must (and can) be as radical as our political convictions.

These books provide valuable material for understanding the full breadth of the Mexican radical tradition—a tradition far deeper than normally indicated by the mainstream or Left media—and their contributions and shortcomings indicate some of the challenges we will face while envisioning a new revolutionary movement in the Americas.

Footnotes:

1. Vargas made this comment at a televised conference in Mexico City in September, 1990.

2. Anarchists are not a factor in the popular movements examined by Gandy and Hodges. Although a mass anarchist movement existed in Mexico for many decades, anarchists became marginal in the 1930s. For a discussion of an attempt to revive the anarchist movement, see Chantal López and Omar Cortés, El Expreso: Un Intento de Acercamiento a la Federación Anarquista del Centro de la República Mexicana (1936–1944) (México, D.F.: Ediciones Antorcha, 1999).

3. For a different approach, see John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). This book explores the tradition of resistance and independent organization among urban poor and workers in Mexico City from the 1910 revolution into the early 1920s. It also has valuable commentary on anarchist activity during this period, particularly that associated with the Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker).

4. An emphasis on popular self-organization would draw attention to the massive earthquake of 1985. This disaster killed more than ten thousand people and ruined vast portions of Mexico City. The state’s response to this calamity was profoundly inept and often cynical, whereas self-organized citizens’ groups emerged to play a vital role in the rescue. The combination of state incompetence and popular self-activity dealt a withering blow to the legitimacy of the PRI—with more lasting consequences than many of the Left groups examined in Mexico under Siege—and ignited a militant urban movement. Bill Weinberg comments on this by noting that since the calamity, “Mexico has seen a renaissance of popular movements linked to neither the ruling nor opposition parties” (Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico [London: Verso, 2000], 202).