Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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In Uruguay, the anarchist movement developed in a similar way as had happened in Argentina. But since the country was less industrialized and Italian and Spanish immigrants were fewer, it did not prove such a threat to the State. As early as 1875 the Regional Federation of the Eastern Republic of Uruguay affiliated with the Bakuninist anti-authoritarian International which emerged from the split at the Hague Conference. From this time anarchism in Uruguay held sway in the workers’ movement and revolutionary circles until the end of the 1920s.
The anarcho-syndicalist Uruguayan Workers’ Regional Federation (FORU) was formed in 1905 and most of the important trade unions affiliated. It adopted the same line as the Argentinian FORA:
Our organization is purely economic and is unlike and opposed to all bourgeois and worker political parties in that they are organized to take over political power while our aim is to reduce the existing legal
and political state forms to purely economic functions and to replace them with a free federation of free associations of free producers.
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It became the only workers’ organization in the country and concerned itself with social questions like alcoholism as well as rationalist schools and workers’ libraries. Anarchist intellectuals gravitated to the Centro International de Estudios Sociales which issued many publications. There was a continuing and unresolved debate between the ‘finalists’ pushing for the social revolution, and those who pursued immediate aims. Direct action, in the form of the boycott, sabotage and the general strike, was seen as the chief means of struggle.
The Mexican Revolution was supported warmly by the Uruguayan anarchists and contact was made with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) of the brothers Flores Magón. FORU reached a high-point in 1918 with a membership of twenty-five thousand. But the success of the Russian Revolution won the support of most of the revolutionary workers and finally led to a split in FORU in the early twenties. The introduction of a Welfare State and a more democratic constitution further led to its decline.
In 1956 however the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) was formed. After a split in the early 1960s it became a semi-clandestine organization based on workers’ groups with influence over several important unions within the Convención Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT). The CNT was founded in 1964, bringing together almost all the workers’ movements. It specified that member-unions should be independent of the State, political parties, and unions (although there was some provision for local industrial councils). Unlike the Argentinian anarchists, the FAU also defended the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s. The other major anarchist grouping in Uruguay has been the
Comunidad del Sur
which sees the commune as the basis of the new society and tries to prepare the way for a change in human relationships.
Like Argentina and Uruguay, anarchism in Brazil became the dominant radical ideology by the turn of the century. The movement was developed mainly by immigrants or immigrant families who arrived between the 1880s and the First World War from Portugal, Spain, and Germany, but above all from Italy.
The anarchist movement first began as early as the 1870s when the ideas of Proudhon and Bakunin reached the New World. It was further galvanized by news of the Haymarket Massacre in 1887 in the United
States. Kropotkin’s version of anarchist communism grew stronger in the 1880s, and in 1890 Dr Giovanni Rossi, an Italian agronomist, founded in the famous Cecilia colony in Paraná one of the first anarchist communities in Latin America.
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As in Portugal and Spain, anarchism in Brazil tended to be highly ascetic and intense, embracing anti-clericalism and vegetarianism and rejecting the use of tobacco and alcohol. The self-educated anarchist workers not only engaged in strikes and rallies, but founded libertarian schools and organized concerts, plays and lectures for themselves and families.
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The movement included such colourful characters as the Italian Oreste Ristori who founded the weekly
La Battaglia
in São Paulo and who was deported twice; the Spaniard Everardo Dias who edited the free-thinking
O Livre Pensador
, and the Portuguese intellectual Neno Vasco who edited
Aurora
(Dawn) and
A Terra Livre
(Free Earth). More controversial was the Brazilian poet and philosopher José Oiticica who threw in his lot with the anarchist cause, calling for the ‘aristocratization of democrats’.
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By the beginning of the First World War the anarchists controlled the Brazilian Confederation of Labour (founded in 1906) and mounted a series of strikes from 1917 to 1919 which seriously disrupted the industrial centres. At first, they welcomed the Bolshevik insurrection and even condoned the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, until news began reaching them in 1920 of the repression of their anarchist comrades, the rout of the Kronstadt rebellion, and the growing tyranny of the Soviet government.
The labour movement continued to be predominantly anarcho-syndicalist well into the 1920s. Although the Brazilian Communist Party, inspired by the apparent success of the Russian Revolution, came to dominate the trade unions, it remained comparatively libertarian until the Stalinist thirties. Internal disputes between anarchist communists and syndicalists, government repression, and the growth of the Communist Party all contributed to anarchism’s decline. Small anarchist groups survived beyond the Second World War in the main centre São Paulo and to a lesser extent in Rio de Janeiro. Although the military dictatorship which took power in 1964 all but quenched their fire, the flag of anarchy still flies.
Elsewhere in South America, anarchism has never found such a strong foothold as in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Peru followed the familiar pattern. Anarcho-syndicalism took root along industrialized centres on the coast and the period after the First World
War saw the greatest agitation. In 1918 the anarchist-led struggle for an eight-hour day led to many strikes and the formation of the Regional Federation of Labour which intended to ‘do away with capitalism and substitute for it a society of free producers’. Manuel Prada, founder of the National Union and Director of the National Library, fought for the abolition of all State and private property. One of his associates Victor Haya founded in 1921 the popular University for Workers and Indians. The anarchist movement in the country was suppressed soon after, although it left a remarkable collection of popular poetry.
In Chile, apart from a few journals, there was little anarchist activity until 1919 when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed as ‘a revolutionary organization fighting capital, the government and the church’. It was represented at the Syndicalist Congress in Berlin in 1923, claiming a membership of twenty thousand. Because of its late appearance, it had always to vie with the other communist trade unions. After 1931, it exerted little influence.
In Bolivia, the Labour Federation of La Paz affiliated with the IWMA and anarchist ideas reached the tin-workers. In Venezuela, a Regional Labour Federation was set up in Caracas by the CNT after the Spanish Civil War. But elsewhere on the Latin American continent anarchism made little inroads.
In the Central American Republics, the US ‘back-yard’, periodic visits by American marines ensured that their man remained in the Presidential Palace. In Nicaragua in the 1920s, the anarcho-syndicalist Augustino Sandino led a popular revolt, but although the revolutionaries in the eighties called themselves ‘Sandinistas’, they had all but forgotten his form of libertarian socialism. Only in Mexico and Cuba have anarchists participated in making successful revolutions.
Mexico differed markedly from the anarchist movements in Argentina and Uruguay. From the beginning mere were two trends, one in the urban labour movement and the other amongst the peasantry. The first anarchist group established in Mexico seems to have been organized by Plotino Rhodakanaty in Mexico City as early as 1863. He was to have a profound influence for the next thirty years.
Rhodakanaty was a Greek immigrant who had been influenced by Fourier and Proudhon (whom he had once met), and a professor of philosophy. He moved in 1865 with Francisco Zalacosta to Chalco in the extreme south of Mexico where he opened an Escuela Moderna y Libre for peasants. They men founded a group called La Social in 1871 which soon spawned more than sixty similar anarchist groups; they even sent a delegate to the
Saint-Imier conference of the International in 1877. In their journal
La Internacional
, the editor Zalacosta defined its programme as ‘social anarchy, the abolition of all government, and a social revolution’.
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Towards the end of the century, Spanish immigrants started to spread anarcho-syndicalism in the towns and cities. The urban-based labour movement soon became predominantly anarcho-syndicalist.
In the mean time, anarchist ideas reached the ‘bandits’ who were waging a constant guerrilla war against the landlords of the vast semi-feudal estates known as
haciendas.
Traditionally, in many parts of Mexico the land around each village, the
ejidos
, was held and worked communally. There were no deeds of ownership since they had not been considered necessary. Under the military dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz from 1884 to 1911 these lands were seized by large landowners with private armies. The peasants, as well as a growing number of Indians, looked to the ‘bandits’ in the hope of getting their land returned and of winning a degree of local autonomy.
In 1869 Chavas López, a former pupil of Rhodakanaty’s free school, started in Chalco an insurrection which soon spread to several neighbouring towns before he was captured and killed. Rhodakanaty and Zalacosta issued a
Manifiesto a todos los oprimidos y pobres de México y del Universo
in which they called for a ‘Universal Republic of Harmony’ which would give freedom to the people ‘to unite under the form they estimate to be the most convenient’ and ‘to sow in the place that suits them without having to pay tribute’.
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Zalacosta went on to engage in a running battle with government troops until his death in 1880 when the movement collapsed.
At the turn of the century a
mestizo
called Ricardo Flores Magón emerged as an eloquent and impassioned propagandist against Díaz’s dictatorship. As a boy in Oaxaca State, Ricardo was able to see at first hand a primitive form of anarchist communism in which the peasant community worked the land in common and shared its fruits equally. A reading of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Jean Grave and Malatesta added a theoretical framework to this experience. From 1900, Ricardo with his brothers Jesús and Enrique began publishing their anarchist journal
Regeneratión
in Mexico City, which reached a circulation of nearly thirty thousand. In 1904 they were forced into exile but they continued to edit the journal from across the border in the United States. Ricardo was never to return to his native land, and spent more than half of the rest of his life in prison.
In 1905, the brothers helped form the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). It was not so much a ‘party’ in the traditional sense but more of an association of like-minded people. For Ricardo, the choice of the name of the ‘party’ was a question of tactics. He wrote from an American jail soon afterwards: ‘we will continue to call ourselves liberals during the course of the revolution, and will in reality continue propagating
anarchy and executing anarchistic acts.’
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Amongst its demands (many of which were met in the 1917 Mexican Constitution), the PLM called for the return of communal and uncultivated lands to the villages, the protection of indigenous Indians, and the transformation of prisons into reform colonies. The PLM became the most serious threat to the Díaz regime. The attempts of the Magón brothers and the PLM to incite rebellion in 1906 and in 1908 not only helped prepare the way for the Revolution of 1910, but pushed it in an egalitarian and libertarian direction.
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In the following year, they issued a manifesto calling for the expropriation and socialization of all wealth and began to form an alliance with Emiliano Zapata.
Under the banner of
Tierra y Libertad
(Land and Liberty), they directly inspired a revolt in Baja California which established short-lived communes at Mexicali and Tijuana. After the capture of Mexicali, Jack London sent Flores Magón the following message: ‘We socialists, anarchists, hoboes, chicken-thieves, outlaws and undesirable citizens of the United States are with you heart and soul in your effort to overthrow slavery and autocracy in Mexico.’
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Long before the 1910 Revolution, Emiliano Zapata had been active in his home state of Morelos, a small, densely-populated sugar-growing area in the South. Many villages had been destroyed and the land of the peasants seized to make way for great plantations or
haciendas.
Zapata had been involved in the struggle of one such village to reclaim a well, and was condemned to forced labour. When the Revolution broke out in 1910, the peasants in Morelos began taking back their stolen lands and occupied the main towns. Zapata soon emerged as a leader of the movement, rather like Makhno had done in the Ukraine, but he continued for a while to listen to the politicians and to believe in legal means. He was denounced by the press as a bandit, a ‘modern Attila’ no less. When a government force was sent to crush the rising in Morelos it was defeated instead by Zapata’s forces.
They became known as the ‘Agrarians’ as well as the ‘Liberating Army of the South’. They swept down from the mountains and eventually reached the gates of Mexico City, killing government officials and dividing up the
haciendas
on the way. In the liberated regions, the peasants were free to work the land together with the landlords and government off their backs. Zapata’s forces would help turn the plough and gather in the harvest. Although primarily an egalitarian movement which sought the redistribution of the land and the right to be left alone, they resembled the peasant anarchists of Andalucía during the Spanish Civil War in their moral purity and contempt for politics. They had a deep-grained suspicion of all authority, and distrusted in particular the clergy and politicians.