The Hidden Story Line of Anarchism in Latin American History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Southern Citadel: A Case Study of Mass-line Anarchism After the Spanish Revolution
Despite for much of the 20th Century being known as the “Switzerland of Latin America” for its peaceable democratic climate rooted in arguably one of the world’s first welfare states under the “radical liberal” anticlerical President José Batlle y Ordóñez from 1910, the small South American republic of Uruguay also produced the continent’s most combative armed anarchist movement. With remarkable political, strategic, and tactical sophistication and verve, the majority of the country’s anarchists waged war on the state as it declined into dictatorship in the period of continental mass-murdering fascist regression in the late 1960s through mid-1980s. But beyond taking up arms on a more ethically grounded basis than their better-remembered compatriots such as the Tupamaros who also engaged in armed struggle, the anarchists built one of the largest fighting mass working class movements of the post-Spanish Revolution era – against the servile reformism of the Uruguayan Communist Party, the continent’s fourth-largest – with an anarcho-syndicalist shaped national union centre some 400,000 strong by 1972, roundly refuting the notion that mass-formation anarchism had died on the barricades of Barcelona in 1939. The unique importance of the Uruguayan experience is necessary to stress: it demonstrated the validity of mass-line anarchism within modern industrial societies decades after World War II; it neatly updated Mikhail Bakunin by cleverly articulating between what it termed the “levels” (or “grades”) of the militants and the masses; and it developed an actively engaged political practice that anticipated what in Latin America today is called “social insertion.” That the very existence of this mass-ranked experiment in libertarian communist counter-power has been airbrushed out of history by anarchists as much as by the usual leftist suspects, the Marxists, is a testament to the troubling potency and pragmatism of its ideas. This paper is a partial extract from my forthcoming book In the Shadow of a Hurricane: Global Anarchist Ideological and Organisational Lineages, which took 20 years’ research in 15 languages.
Rethinking Revolutions, 2023
Parting from the insights of entangled history, we analyze the interrelations between anarchism and indigenous communities in terms of a shared and divided history.Footnote 13 The global entanglements led to shared experiences in different world regions, but nevertheless, this shared history is also divided in terms of race, class, and region. In this sense, entangled history means to articulate the Western European in the age of new imperialism with that of the peripherical parts of the world, acknowledging racism, exploitation, and conquest. But also resistance can be entangled. In our field of research, this means to articulate Western ideas, concepts, practices, and actors of the anarchist movement with peripherical rural regions in Latin America.
The Mexican Revolution: An Uneven Path
International ResearchScape Journal
This study analyzes the peasant and anarchist movement as foundational to La Revolución [the Mexican Revolution] and the revolutionary processes that lead to and followed La Revolución. The study makes the case that unique nature of La Revolución deserves far more analysis. Informed by the work of historian Eric Hobsbawm, La Revolución was born directly out of the world stage; its contradictions were born out of the developing and colonial world. It was during the period of La Revolución, that the fate of the country was ultimately changed by the likes of those who participated in it. The study asks the following research questions: How did the events of La Revolución change the history of Mexico? What sort of events between 1910 and 1940, as well as the laws and regulations that were made during La Revolución affected Mexico during this time, and how did it shape the nation in the end? Finally the study asks how La Revolución changed the thought processes and ideas regarding nationhood and citizenship.
Without borders: reflections on anarchism in Latin America
Eial Estudios Interdisciplinarios De America Latina Y El Caribe, 2011
The complex history of global anarchism is currently undergoing a thorough historical revision. Inspired by the worldwide resurgence of anarchist ideas, methods of struggle, and movements that accompanied the ascendance of neoliberalism and globalized capital, and the collapse of international communism in the 1990s, scholars have recently embarked on a re-examination of classical anarchism (1860s-1920s) from a transnational perspective. This new historiography of anarchism eschews the standard nation-state centered approach and its concomitant interpretation of nationally self-contained anarchist movements. Taking anarchism's principle of internationalism seriously, it focuses instead on supranational and multidirectional flows of ideas, discourses, resources, and activists, and formal and informal organizational and personal connections and interactions. In doing so, it offers a more nuanced historical narrative of anarchist networks, organization, ideological formation, solidarities, spaces, and temporalities. Much of this current literature, however, has been based primarily in a European territorial context. 1 Still, there is reason to be optimistic about a more comprehensive treatment of the history of anarchism. Renewed interest in anarchism's anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles has resulted in several important historical studies that encompass the Global South. 2 Nevertheless, considerable work remains to be done on the dissemination and reception of anarchism in the Global South during the first globalization (1880s-1920s), as carl Levy recently stressed in an incisive literature review. 3 The articles in this special issue significantly contribute to rethinking the history of anarchism in Latin America and the Global South. By utilizing a mul