When the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001, many were surprised by the factory takeovers and neighborhood assemblies that resulted. But workers’ control and direct democracy have long histories in Argentina, where from the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, anarchism was the main revolutionary ideology of the labor movement and other social struggles.

Most histories of anarchism in Argentina tend toward dry analyses of labor politics, lists of union acronyms, and the like. For Juan Suriano, that’s just one part of the story. Paradoxes of Utopia gives us an engaging look at fin de siècle Buenos Aires that brings to life the vibrant culture behind one of the world’s largest anarchist movements: the radical schools, newspapers, theaters, and social clubs that made revolution a way of life. Cultural history in the best sense, Paradoxes of Utopia explores how a revolutionary ideology was woven into the ordinary lives of tens of thousands of people, creating a complex tapestry of symbols, rituals, and daily practices that supported-and indeed created the possibility of-the Argentine labor movement.

Without partisanship or didacticism, Suriano creates an innovative panorama that gives equal weigh to the strengths and weakness of anarchism in Argentina, effective strategies and grave mistakes, internal debates and state repression, all contextualized within the country’s broader political, economic, and cultural history.

(The book is stupidly expensive and hard to find in any library, although I purchased the author’s dissertation for $34 online. I believe that it is identical to what Peter Lang published).

Illegitimate children of the Enlightenment: anarchists and the French Revolution, 1880-1914

The early years of Third French Republic (1880-1914) saw multiple political factions vying for the legacy of the French Revolution. This book examines one of those factions, the anarchist movement, and the role played by the French Revolution in its political thought and action. The French Revolution became a vital, if not well recognized, tool of the anarchist movement to popularize and legitimize its revolutionary activity while engaged in a struggle with other political forces of the Republic to claim ownership over the Revolutionary heritage. The anarchists of the Third Republic wrote histories of the Revolution that reflected their own political orientation. They asserted themselves as part of the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment, which they believed had helped spark the Revolution. The anarchists appropriated the music and popular culture of the French Revolution in their own propaganda. Moreover, they orchestrated revolutionary action and political theatre on the day most associated with the Revolution, July 14. In the Revolution, the anarchists saw glimmers of hope, precursors to their own movement, as well as an effective means to present their message to a wider audience as they also offered models for others to imitate.

The Author: C. Alexander McKinley received his Ph.D. in comparative history from Brandeis University in 2006. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at St. Ambrose University. McKinley has written on French history as well as on the history of radical movements in Europe.

The truth is that they were quite active and made important contributions to the battles being waged against the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. While their efforts are largely not reflected in the historical record, this omission says more about biases among historians, and the fear of disclosure that many survivors have inherited from the era, than anarchists’ real significance to the march of events during those terrifying decades.

This is why the recent publication of Verónica Diz and Fernando López Trujillo’s Resistencia Libertaria is such a good thing. Their (Spanish-language) book is the first comprehensive study of Resistencia Libertaria (RL) in any language and will hopefully help bring anarchists into the picture. RL was a clandestine Argentine anarchist organization founded shortly before the Argentine military seized power in 1976. It was active in the student, labor, and neighborhood movements of the time and also had a military wing with which it defended and financed its activities. The group had between 100 and 130 members at its peak as well as a much larger circle of supporters. The state crushed the organization in 1978 and 80 percent of its militants suffered the dictatorship’s concentration camps and torture chambers.

López and Diz qualify their work as a “first approximation” of RL’s history. Their book covers the origins of the group, some of its activities prior to the dictatorship, and the generalized crisis that erupted after the 1976 military coup. It also has five appendices which contain relevant historical documents as well as related articles.

The authors: Fernando López, a historian, is one of the few surviving RL members and author of Vidas en rojo y negro: Una historia del anarquismo en la década infame (Letra Libre, 2005). Verónica Diz is a journalist and professor of history whose work has focused on the relationship between anarchism and feminism.

English readers interested in learning more about Resistencia Libertaria should check out an interview that I conducted with López in 2002: “Resistencia Libertaria: Anarchist Opposition to the Last Argentine Dictatorship.” Spanish readers might wish to download the prologue and first chapter of López and Diz’s book from the publisher’s website. Those interested in contemporary Argentine anarchism may be interested in López’s “Some Notes on the Argentine Anarchist Movement in the Emergency“; for the movement’s early years, see the growing archive of Latin American anarchist material on this site.

Below is a short video documenting the creation of a mural in honor of disappeared members of Resistencia Libertaria. The mural was a project of Argentina’s Organización Socialista Libertaria and the muralists were known as the “Unidad Muralista Hermanos Tello,” a name evoking the memory of the three Tello brothers, who were leading members of RL and are all disappeared.

The publication will be unique not only because of its length but also because of its extensive coverage of the global anarchist movement: it is scheduled to contain a total of 200,000 words (i.e., hundreds and hundreds of pages!) on the topic. It will include entries on the movement in specific countries, biographies of individual anarchists, discussions of key events and themes in the movement’s history, as well as explorations of various tendencies, tactics, institutions, and organizations. Jesse Cohn, author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, is the Associate Editor in charge of anarchist content.

Encyclopedia editors are still looking for writers to pen entries on many of the anarchist-related topics that they intend to treat in the book. I recently agreed to write entries on anarchism in Argentina, Mexico, and Puerto Rico (respectively), but many topics remain unassigned. Below is a list of unclaimed entries as of December 18, 2007. Please contact Jesse Cohn if you are interested in taking on one of them.

(Note: The editors are on a tight schedule. Initial drafts of 250 word entries are due on January 14, 2008; 500-1000 word entries need to be in by January 29; and entries of more than 1,000 words must be received by February 25. Production is slated to begin on May Day, 2008.)

Tom Goyens’s forthcoming Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914 will be attractive to anyone with an interest in anarchism, New York’s radical history, and/or oppositional culture generally (University of Illinois Press, September 2007). The publisher writes:

Understanding an infamous political movement’s grounding in festivity and defiance, Beer and Revolution examines the rollicking life and times of German immigrant anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914. Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held. Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists’ message and the majority of American workers.

Those interested in the state’s impact on oppositional culture, or oppositional culture’s impact on the the state (of Massachusetts), may want to check out Christine Bold’s Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writer’s Project in Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). The publisher writes:

The Works Progress Administration (1935–1943) housed America’s largest arts funding program ever, part of the New Deal’s foray into nationwide work relief. In Massachusetts its acronym could well have stood for “Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists,” in tribute to the state’s distinctive contribution to the writers’ wing of the program. Beginning in 1935, the Massachusetts writers’ project took a huge range of white- and blue-collar workers off the breadlines and put them to work as government writers. This motley group produced approximately two dozen state, regional, and community guides, which included stories that ran the gamut from the quirky to the disturbing. WPA writers in the state were routinely accused of being “plumbers” and, after publication of the state guide, the project was accused of supporting anarchists and other subversives.

The Massachusetts writers’ project was often mired in dramas and scandals. The most notorious concerned the censorship of guidebook copy on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the true story of which remained hidden for almost seventy years. Struggles also broke out over the representation of people of color, as the guides shifted the state’s image away from an ethnically homogeneous “cradle of the nation” to a much more culturally diverse and politically volatile society.

Making excellent use of the extensive surviving records, Christine Bold offers a unique glimpse into what New Deal pieties meant in practice for the “worker-writers” in its employ. As the first book to pursue the WPA writers’ project in a single state, this work probes the Massachusetts experience to discover the consequences of New Deal patronage for writers-in-the-making, for community image-making, and for minority groups attempting to achieve cultural citizenship in America.

I recently translated Abel Paz’s unabridged and revised biography of Durruti, which AK Press will publish in the next month or two. It’s very long–it will probably exceed 800 pages when complete–but it will give English readers the opportunity to explore his life with a level of detail that was heretofore impossible. Follow this link for more information.

For now, may we always remember his achievements, emulate his fortitude, and dedicate ourselves with equal passion to the anarchist cause.

Buenaventura Durruti, RIP. We will never forget you.