Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940

The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution

2010

People :

Author : Arif Dirlik

Author : Anthony Gorman

Author : Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson

Author : Dongyoun Hwang

Author : Lucien Van Der Walt

Sections (TOC) :

• Front Material
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• Preface
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• Introduction
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• Part 1
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• Part 2
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Sections (Content) :

• Front Material

Acknowledgments

This book began as a panel on “Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism in the Global South: Latin America in Comparative Perspective” for the European Social Science History Conference held in Amsterdam in 2006. Subsequent to the conference, we solicited papers from Geoffroy de Laforcade, Edilene Toledo and Luigi Biondi, Aleksandr Shubin, Anthony Gorman, and Emmet O’Connor. We wish to thank all the contributors to this volume for their patience and dedication to this project. The editors are grateful to Marcel van der Linden for making possible the publication of Arif Dirlik’s article. We also extend our gratitude to other colleagues who provided invaluable ideas, critical comments, and encouragement: Bert Altena, Kim Clark, Carl Levy, Thad Metz, James Pendlebury, Michael Schmidt, Nicole Ulrich, and Marcel van der Linden. In preparing this book, we received generous assistance from Nienke Brienen-Moolenaar, Hylke Faber, and Boris van Gool at Brill Publishers. We would also like to thank Sally Liard and the International Institute of Social History for the translation of Aleksandr Shubin’s chapter, and the International Institute of Social History and the University of the Witwatersrand for helping finance this translation. Finally, we want to thank the University of PittsburghGreensburg for defraying the costs of indexing this volume.

List of Contributors

• Preface

Preface

Benedict Anderson
Cornell University

If one decided, in a frivolous moment, to sketch a Borgesian version of Esop’s Fable of the Rabbit and the Tortoise, one would need only to extend their race over the horizon to an ever-receding winner’s tape. The rabbit, even after many naps, would speed past the tortoise again and again. But a rabbit has a short life while a tortoise lives long and will in the end rumble-stumble past his rival’s corpse. Where to? Does he think with Beckett: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”?

Today it is not difficult to find very energetic, even if usually (but not always) small, self-described anarchist (or syndicalist) groups around the world, mostly in urban areas. At the same time, there are only a few places left where seriously communist parties still exist. Explaining the colossal phalanx of police and other security professionals guarding the New York Republican convention which ensured Bush’s second presidential nomination, the commissioner told reporters that the real danger did not come from Communists or even djihadi Muslims, but from violent anarchists. From the early 1990s, scholarly interest in anarchism has produced a minor avalanche of excellent studies.

There can be little doubt that this development arose from the decay and collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, China’s headlong rush down the yellow-brick capitalist road, Fidel Castro passing the reins to his septuagenarian younger brother, and Kim Il-sung to his son, and probably grandson too. This cataclysm, along with the fossilization of “social democracy”, has encouraged many kinds of people on the left to look for hope elsewhere, and also reengage with non-Leninist socialist traditions. All the more so, since orthodox Marxist politicians and intellectuals had long cast anarchism, “utopian” rather than “scientific”, into the dustbin of history, and created a good deal of falsified historiography to ensure it stayed there.

What we are aware of now is that anarchism got an early start with the work of Fourier and Proudhon, and was “passed” by Marx and Engels until Bakunin threatened to take over the First International.

Between Marx’s death and Lenin’s sudden rise to power in 1917, orthodox Marxism was in the minority as far as leftist opposition to capitalism and imperialism was concerned—successful mainly in the more advanced industrial and Protestant states of Western and Central Europe, and generally pacific in its political positions. It was rather anarchism (or anarchisms—the outlook was always highly contested, despite the major contributions of Bakunin and Kropotkin) that stole hearts and headlines, first with the wave of spectacularly successful and failed assassinations of heads of states, top politicians and capitalists (from Buffalo to Harbin) under the rubric of “propaganda by the deed”; then by the rise of syndicalism with its signature theme of the revolutionary general strike, discussed by Sorel but in fact first theorized by the anarchists of the 1870s. In his memoirs, Léon Blum, the peaceable former socialist Prime Minister of France, could write that his generation was saturated with anarchist ideas and values.[1]

Lenin was not exactly a rabbit, but his establishment of a MarxistLeninist regime in much of former Czardom shot orthodoxy far ahead of any competition. This was followed by the establishment of the Comintern, the Communization of much of east and central Europe, Mao’s rise to autocratic power, and so on. In the standard historiography, anarchism made its last heroic and tragic stand in the Spanish Civil War. Europe’s anarchism was on its last legs by the end of World War II, and finished off as a mass movement in the aftermath—for the time being at least.

What were anarchism’s early advantages? Certainly not theoretical. Marx’s towering theoretical contributions were widely acknowledged on the left, not least by Bakunin, who graciously called Marx the “supreme economic and socialist genius of our day” (of their relations, he later wrote, Marx “called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him gloomy, unreliable and vain, and I was right too.”)[2] But in Bakunin and in Kropotkin, and others, anarchism had powerful writers and leaders; in Malatesta it had a charismatic, nomadic political activist.

Its main assets were, I believe, three. First of all was its utopian élan. James Ensor’s masterpiece, the huge painting he completed in 1888 and entitled Christ’s Entry into Brussels, 1889, exemplified this élan, not only by its hectic dates, but by the huge red banner over the popular crowds surrounding the triumphant Christ, emblazoned with Vive La Sociale, meaning “long live the revolutionary new society being born”, and by the enigmatic, grandfatherly face of the Marquis de Sade in the lower right hand corner. About the same time, a group of Italian anarchists persuaded the elderly Emperor Pedro II of Brazil to make over land sufficient to establish utopian colonies where anarchists could live unmolested as they dreamed. (Unluckily the Emperor was soon overthrown, and his brutal republican successors quickly obliterated these colonias). It was surely also this spirit that made anarchism attractive to so many artists and writers, at least in Western Europe.

Second was anarchism’s positive attitude towards peasants and agricultural laborers, who almost everywhere outside northern and western Europe were much larger in numbers than the urban and industrial working classes. Finally, for a long time, anarchism could be said to be more seriously internationalist than its competitor. This attitude partly arose because anarchism rode the huge waves of migration out of Europe that characterized the last 40 years before World War I: Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, Jews and so on poured into the New World, round the Mediterranean, and into the empires being created by the Europeans in Asia and Africa. (Malatesta spent years in Argentina and Egypt, for example, while Marx and Engels stayed in Western Europe).

This internationalism certainly had its theoretical side, but more important, it was a matter of experience and struggle in non-European contexts and terrains. Necessarily these first generation activists found themselves often as “foreigners”, and as such bringing the outside international world with them. If and when they returned to Europe, as many did, especially Italians, they brought that extra-Europe experience back home. The main thing was that they did not only work, but they constantly crossed state borders.

It is just here that we see the estimable contribution of the present volume, which focuses on anarchists in the world outside western Europe (except for the case of Ireland): the Caribbean, Peru, Argentina, South Africa, Egypt, then Korea, enlaced with China and Japan, and the Ukraine.[3] In some cases, for example, the Caribbean and South Africa, the migrants could float in on such imperial, or ex-imperial, languages as English and Spanish. But Italians had to deal with Spanish in Argentina, and in Egypt with Greek, French, Arabic and English. Internationalism was only seriously possible if linguistic communication was successful. One could say that anarchists were the most productive translators of the era—out of need. La Sociale was no less significant.

This book offers numerous and fascinating examples of straightforward political activity and organization—unions, federations of unions, strikes, walkouts, demonstrations, meetings, clubs, even occasional participation in electoral politics. But these activities and organizations were also understood as the social bases of the good society to come: mutual help, mutual sociability, loyalty to the comrades, a common vocabulary. But we can see an additional side of La Sociale by looking at Edgar Rodrigues’ Os Anarquistas: Trabalhadores italianos no Brazil,[4] a first hand account of the life of anarchists and syndicalists in the Brazil of that era, which features a long list of plays and “musicals”, staged for anarchist audiences in short-term-rented theaters in Rio and São Paulo. There were also weddings, bars, parks, and so forth. It is just here that one sees the link to the peaceable, isolated colonias mentioned above.

The “African” cases are especially interesting, because the anarchists’ aims were much more difficult to achieve in this regard. Anarchism was brought to Egypt by Italian workers recruited for the gigantic construction project that was the Suez Canal. Direct access to the Arabicspeaking population was a huge problem, quite aside from the culture of Mediterranean Islam. Demotic Greek was a sort of lingua franca in the big cities, especially Alexandria, but Greek wasn’t a Romance language and had its own orthography. Greeks were also not Catholics.

Gorman’s chapter shows beautifully how hardly solidarity was won: by endless translations, written and oral, and constant oral practice. And won it was, with difficulty and perseverance, via “international” unions organizing Arabs and Europeans, multi-lingual meetings and speeches, and even a degree of cooperation with nationalisticallyminded Egyptian intellectuals. The movement was anchored in radical and anarchist networks spanning the three sides of the Mediterranean, linking Europe and the Middle East, led strikes and helped launch communism in Egypt. As an example of its practical internationalism, there is Malatesta’s remarkable involvement in Ahmad ‘Urabi’s 1882 revolt.

Van der Walt’s fine chapter on South Africa shows another set of intractable non-European difficulties: those connected to race. How could young Scottish anarchists and syndicalists reach out to black workers when fearful white workers typically tried to secure their fragile place by forming white-only unions? Borne into South Africa by European immigrants, the anarchist and syndicalist movement never appealed to more than a small section of the whites. Indeed, its main success was when it developed into as a popular, radical, union tradition among the Africans, Colored, and Indians. Sometimes cooperating with nationalists (as did the Egyptians and the Asians), it had no love for the nation-state; it sought the grail of an anti-nationalist mode of anti-imperialism, via the One Big Union.

Northeast Asia is a different story in many respects. Neither Japan nor China was ever colonized (although a substantial part of China was conquered or concessioned), but Korea, from 1910 to 1945 was forcibly included in the realm of the Japanese “Emperor”. There were plenty of Europeans around, but they were soldiers, diplomats, missionaries, teachers, journalists, and capitalists: no workers or peasants. All three countries were “Confucian” to varied extents, but their spoken languages were mutually unintelligible. The editors of this book posit Meiji-Taisho Tokyo as East Asia’s counterpart to Kropotkin’s London. The British capital was safer for anarchists than Paris, Madrid or Rome, and, as we shall see, radical Koreans and Chinese were safer in Tokyo than in Shanghai or Seoul.

Meiji Japan, eager to get fuller access to European philosophy, natural and social science, literature, etc., plunged into a massive endeavor of translation, not only from French and English, but also German and Russian. (Tolstoy, an anarchist favorite, arrived straight from St. Petersburg). Anarchist texts interested both the Japanese police and home-sprung radicals opposed to the authoritarian political regime: the timing is probably significant, since 1870–1939 was the noonday of anarchism and syndicalism in the West.

Japan naturally produced its own influential anarchists and syndicalists, some of high intellectual and moral caliber, and syndicalist unions, though they often came to bloody ends, but immigrants also proved key people, as Hwang nicely shows. Thousands of young Chinese, either sent by the Manchus or shipped by other means, came to study in Japan at a time when the writing of Japanese was still heavily done in kanji. Koreans were also brought to Japan, with the idea that this was a good way to domesticate them and ward off nationalist resistance. A small Japan-educated intelligentsia became visible as early as the late 1910s.

Books prohibited back home were usually available in the metropolis. It should also be said that newspapers played a parallel role. Already in the 1870s a global circuit of telegraphic under-ocean cables was in place, so that literate East Asians had almost immediate access to the Boer War in Africa, the Cuban rebellion in the Caribbean, and near to home the revolution in the Philippines.

What is both touching and instructive in Hwang’s study, and also indicated in Dirlik’s chapter on China, is actually the practical internationalism of the first generation of Korean anarchists, some of whom fled to China and linked up with Chinese comrades in an astonishingly energetic campaign to create La Sociale—schools, workers’ colleges, libraries, cooperatives, militias, refuges and so forth. These days, when Koreans have a reputation for diehard, inward-turning nationalism, Hwang’s account is really poignant. The transnational dimension of “Asian” anarchism is also stressed by Dirlik, who focuses on the role of networks and translocal connections in the making of the movement.

The next part of this book, probably more familiar to readers than the Asian and African sections, consists of four powerful studies of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas, though the important North American IWW Wobblies make brief but significant appearances. What is most valuable here is the sharp contrast in experience and praxis that the authors bring out. Biondo and Toledo’s description of radical politics in São Paulo from 1895 until 1935 etches especially clearly the familial tension that could arise between extremist anarchism and its pragmatic relative, syndicalism.

In Europe, the upsurge of syndicalism was mainly a response to the deepening of industrialism and the rapid growth of the urban working-class, as well as the violent state reaction to anarchism’s spectacular “propaganda by the deed”, in the last quarter of the 19^th century. The emergence of syndicalist unions in China and Japan (in Korea, these were ruthlessly crushed) was conditioned by similar factors. Syndicalists believed that revolutionary change could only come from the massive organization of trade unions, and their federation in different forms, including the dream of a single “big union” of them all. Their method of action was centrally defined by the strike, local, trade or general.

Anarchists did not ignore the significance of unions, and many played active roles within them. Moreover, the roots of syndicalism lay in the anarchist wing of the First International, and a great many anarchists embraced syndicalism. Nonetheless, a vocal section of anarchists always suspected that these unions were bases for undesirable internal hierarchies, and that, too often, they focused on short-term “economic gains”—higher wages, shorter working hours, and so on—at the expense of general social liberation.

Syndicalism flourished in São Paulo, the sole large industrial center of a Brazil that was still overwhelmingly rural and pre-industrial, and its main concerns were often with the “working man.” In some anarchist eyes, it therefore marginalized women and rural labor, and was not much interested in the general social and cultural transformation of the population. In a country dominated by a tight-knit oligarchy, and foreign capital, and with a very limited suffrage, anarchists and syndicalists were nonetheless united in their hostility to the coalition of oligarchs, capitalists, and the armed power of the state.

Laforcade’s wonderful micro-study of anarchist and syndicalist radicalism in riverine Argentina in the same era forms a nice parallel to the case of São Paulo. It is instructive that he focuses not on industrial workers in the restricted sense, but rather on the longshoremen and sailors employed in coastal and riverine shipping, who held a key strategic position in a country whose internal and external commerce was heavily determined by its unusual geography. Buenos Aires stood near the meeting-point between the Atlantic Ocean and the gigantic Rio de la Plata, navigable for hundreds of miles into the interior, shared with Uruguay and Paraguay, and dotted with the riverine ports through which agricultural exports from the interior overwhelmingly passed in a largely pre-railway era. Waterfront and on-ship strikes had a capacity for inflicting “damage” on the class enemy that was unmatched by any radical group in São Paulo. One consequence was that anarchists and syndicalists found in unionism a powerful weapon, and cooperated and competed on the waterfront for many years.

In both studies, we see the crucial role that immigration played in developing communication with European comrades, especially in Italy, Portugal and Spain. But we are also shown how the experience of being “foreign” created a strong stimulus for assimilation to local conditions and for developing solidarity across ethno-linguistic lines, particularly in the face of official efforts to create a deep divide between “foreign” trouble-makers and loyal, nationalist-minded “citizens,” paralleling, for example, the efforts in Egypt to unite “foreign” and “local” labor.

To the cases of São Paulo and Buenos Aires, Shaffer’s original chapter provides an impressive contrast. He describes and compares two very different types of transnational radical networks that grew up on the fringes of the rapidly expanding US empire in the Americas. The first linked Cuba with Puerto Rico, southern Florida (Tampa mainly), and Panama, that Yankee imperialism snatched out of Colombia’s hands to enable the creation of the inter-oceanic Panama Canal. Small places, without big industrial cities, all controlled by the US after 1903; huge immigration from rural Spain to Cuba in the 1880s and 1890s, and large Cuban emigration to southern Florida and Panama later on. Hence a network in which “language” was no obstacle, but rather a source of solidarity across state lines. In this context, syndicalism was a powerful force, straddling borders, and conflict between anarchist “purism” and syndicalist unionism was rare.

Anarchism and syndicalism had come to Cuba early, with the wave of immigration from anarchist Catalonia, above all. But almost at once it faced the problem of nationalism in a way that is invisible in Brazil and Argentina. Anarchists had defended immigration against creole nationalism, and if they initially hesitated to support Martí’s national revolution against Spanish colonialism, they eventually came round on anti-imperialist grounds, playing a central role. Curiously enough, the American occupation in 1898 allowed the anarchists to develop some favorite traditional themes, the condition of women, especially those working in the tobacco factories of Cuba and Tampa, the pitiable condition of children’s health and education, and so forth. At the same time, bound by the Spanish language it also moved easily across state boundaries, and created a dense network of communication, financial support, and educational activities that crossed over into the southeast tip of the USA and across the Caribbean to the Canal Zone.

Shaffer’s contrasting case developed around and across the border between the US and Mexico, especially once the Mexican Revolution got under way. Here we find syndicalism showing up, especially in the oil-fields along the Caribbean coast and in the largest urban conglomerations. Doubtless, this was partially the result of generally close ties with the syndicalist Wobblies themselves, who included a significant number of native Spanish speakers and well as bilingual Anglos in the American border states between California and Texas, who also were committed to internationalism.

Hirsch’s moving chapter on Peru makes “anarcho-syndicalism” its basic subject. Facing the remote southern Pacific rather than the heavily criss-crossed Atlantic, Peru experienced very little like the vast European migrations into Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba. On the other hand, it had a huge native population, which had long been extirpated in Cuba and Argentina, and been completely marginalized in coastal Brazil. Hence it faced a very different kind of nationalist question— one far closer to that confronting the movement in Egypt and South Africa, where Europeans were a small minority.

The origins of Peruvian anarchism and syndicalism therefore have some features comparable to the three previous Latin American and Caribbean cases, but others startlingly different. On the one hand, it was brought to Peru not by poor émigrés but by an upper-class Peruvian intellectual, Manuel González Prada, who spent 7 years of self-exile (1891–1898) in Spain and France. There he developed close contacts with radical leftists just at the time when syndicalism was in the ascendant at the base and when anarchism still had a strong influence in intellectual circles. On the other hand, at the end of the 19^th century, Lima and the nearby port-city of Callao were starting to follow the earlier path of São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Johannesburg—industrializing big city agglomerations increasingly connected to foreign capitalist investments in mines and other export industries.

In Hirsch’s narrative there are three themes of unusual interest. The first is that, well before any other political group, the anarcho-syndicalists made determined efforts to reach out to, and create solidarity, with the indigenous populations, both in the former Inca capital of Cuzco in the remote highlands and in urban coastal towns where migrations from the interior were beginning. This cannot have been easy, since few people of Spanish descent mastered either Quechua or Aymara, and the cultural gap between the highlands and the coast was truly vast.

Here a comparison is warranted with Brazil and Cuba, as well as South Africa. In the 1880s, Brazil and Cuba were the last in the world legally to end slavery. Shaffer shows how the Cuban anarchists sought to deal with the race question, although Toledo and Biondi do not mention the large population of urban blacks along the country’s northeast coast. Yet the blacks in both countries were far closer in religion and language to the dominant whites than anything comparable in Peru. In South Africa, the indigenous African majority (and African workers in particular) were culturally distinct, yet, as van der Walt shows, the latter were nonetheless championed by and increasingly central in the local anarchist and syndicalist movement.

Second, Hirsch underlines the Peruvian radicals’ close ties with their counterparts in neighboring Chili—at a time when the governments of the two countries were ferociously hostile to one another. Finally, the author underscores the serious efforts to empower and succor women, especially women workers, as well as to carry out the traditional anarchist endeavors to create a new culture by building schools, pamphleteering, literacy campaigns, and all the sociability characteristic of La Sociale.

Why is there a chapter on Ireland in this book? Morphologically, it can hardly be called a colony in the standard sense, parallel to, say South Africa, Indonesia, Syria, or Mozambique. It had its own parliament in the 18^th century, and after the Reform Act and the end of legal discrimination against Catholics, both happening in the 1830s, it had a powerful electorally-based presence in Westminster. From the 18^th century on some of the most outstanding writers in the UK were Irishmen too, including Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Wilde, and Joyce. Immigration into Ireland from Britain was negligible, while Irish emigration into Britain (and the USA) from the 19^th century on has been massive. By 1900, only a very small minority, in the far west of the island, spoke Gaelic rather than English. What marked most of the island off from Britain was the attachment to an often cruelly persecuted Catholicism and its poverty-stricken agricultural economy. It was one of the earliest European places where a militant nationalist movement was born.

O’Connor’s sober text makes the link, not through anarchism (which is not much mentioned) bur rather through syndicalism, even though, by his own account, few Irish worker radicals called themselves syndicalists. It appears in the decade before World War I, at a time when syndicalism was a major social force in Catholic Western Europe— France, Italy, and Spain, and when the Wobblies were a household word in the USA to which so many Irish people had fled during and after the great famine of the 1840s. It was also inextricably linked to the rising mobilization of Irish nationalist identity, and hostility to British domination—even of the local branches of powerful trade unions controlled from across the Irish Sea.

O’Connor’s work shows us some parallels with South America, and to an extent South Africa—radical unions centered in the big commercial and industrial port-cities of Belfast and Dublin; and the strategy of seizing for workers’ control, not so much of factories, as of the arteries of transportation, shipping and railways above all, in an economy dependent on the export of agricultural products, as well as cattle and horses. In syndicalist fashion, it was thought possible to create a powerful central transport workers’ union which could then expand to include smaller unions and eventually agricultural labor. Hence, the birth of the Wobblyish goal of One Big Union.

The rapid rise of radical Irish syndicalism intersected with the onset of the hitherto largest and bloodiest war in human history, which provided an opportunity or two for armed rebellions against London. First came the hopeless Easter Uprising of 1916, which charismatic syndicalist labor leader James Connolly quixotically joined with a few hundred followers, leading to his execution. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the Armistice, came the reinvigorated IRA’s guerrilla war for independence, which ended with the independence of the Catholic two thirds of Ireland, and London’s continued control of Protestant Ulster. Syndicalist labor played only a minor role in the war, and then faced the determination of the dominant Catholic bourgeoisie to cement its power, and the massive hostility of the Catholic Church to any kind of radicalism, especially as Lenin was now in power in the Soviet Union. Yet it was a potent force.

Finally, and this is a lovely surprise, there is a brilliant chapter by Shubin on the anarchist movement led by the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno from Czardom’s collapse in 1917 to its crushing by Lenin and Trotsky in 1921 (almost the same period as that between the Easter Uprising and the War for Independence in Ireland). Shubin tells the reader that early Russian anarchism grew out of the narodnik movement of the 1860s and 1870s, but was completely destroyed by the Czarist police, and was only revived a generation later, with strongholds, especially in the Ukraine. Literate Russians (in the broad vague sense) were certainly aware of the Russian roots of contemporary anarchism—Bakunin and Kropotkin—but their traces are only dimly visible in this account.

The uniqueness of Makhno—for this book—is that he came to power in large parts of the Ukraine thanks to an organized armed force which he led with brio. The core of this armed base may explain why he was usually hostile to Ukrainian nationalists, who were notoriously anti-Semitic as well as navel-gazing. The men and women who comprised the Makhnovist army were ethnic Ukrainian and other peasants, some urban workers, as well as local Jews and even a substantial number of Cossacks, whose own ethnic origins were a wild mélange of different linguistic and ethnic groups. (Yet the Czars had often used the Cossacks for pogroms against the Jews). Like the movements in China, Cuba, Egypt, Ireland, Peru, South Africa and elsewhere, it sought to organize beyond nationalist categories.

Makhno’s army was partially made possible by Berlin’s pulverization of the Czar’s armies, ending with Lenin’s and Trotsky’s signing the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk to prevent further German incursions, especially in the Ukraine. Germany’s own collapse towards the end of 1918, let loose a vast swarm of men with weapons and military experience in the old empire, for Makhno, as well as the Bolsheviks and Whites, to recruit.

The immediate onset of the Civil War gave Makhno further room to maneuver, between Reds and Whites—for a while. Shubin gives two striking examples of how Makhno used his military power beyond the battlefield. Anti-Semitic killers, rapists and looters, even when they appeared in his own army, were liable to execution out of hand. At the same time, Makhno ordered a massive distribution of land to the peasants and agricultural laborers well before the Bolsheviks passed similar decrees. Without military power, this distribution was scarcely possible. Only in Manchuria in the late 1920s among the Korean forces, and then in the 1930s, in Civil War Spain, did anarchism have comparable power and opportunities.

One crucial thematic throughout this book was the rise of nationalism—in Canton, Tokyo, Seoul, Odessa, Dublin, Havana, Cairo, Barcelona and Cape Town—in the springtime of anarchism. For all its genuine internationalism, anarchism had to deal with a force which it did not wholly comprehend, and had some good reasons to suspect. Alliances, as this book shows, were possible in many places, perhaps especially where anarchists were themselves “natives.” But it was a good deal harder where anarchists and syndicalists had left their native lands. Still, they adapted. In the chapters on Latin America we can observe them making international links, for example, between Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, Chili and Peru, and in Cuba and Spain. In China, Cuba, Korea, Ireland and Ukraine, they played an important role in “independence” wars.

And now? The editors of this book begin its time-frame in around 1870 and close it in 1940. Readers will recognize 1940 as the year after the bloody triumph of Franco’s armies in Spain (and the first year of fascism’s military domination of most of Europe). Was the Spanish Civil War perhaps the last international war? Volunteers from many places fought on both sides—South Africa’s poet Roy Campbell for Franco, France’s André Malraux for the dying Republic. This book shows, in a poignant sentence or two, something truly amazing— young Chinese, anarchists and not, joining the Republic of Spain’s struggle on the other side of the world.

But in fact, as these chapters also show, classical anarchism was entering a relative decline from the late 1920s, perhaps because it usually eschewed the ruthless discipline and centralization promoted by the Comintern. In an age of mass militarization, vastly enhanced police power aided by technological innovation, and militarized nationalisms, anarchism appeared to have less and less relevance. In the subsequent era of the Cold War, neither of the opposing blocs, which also included satellites in the ex-colonial world and satellite parties, paid much attention to anarchism—consigned by historian Eric Hobsbawm, with some teardrops of nostalgia, to the category of “primitive rebels”. Not a single post-World War II nationalist revolution was led by anarchism (although in some, like Korea, it still played an important role)—unsurprisingly since all these movements aspired to become “nation-states” within the United Nations, no matter what their ideological orientation.

It may be that this situation was a kind of blessing in disguise. This year, for the first time, South Africa, ruled by former eminences of the nationalist ANC (African National Congress), with the support of the Communist Party, has been designated the most unequal society in the world, narrowly outpacing the traditional “champion”, Lula’s Brazil. Ireland is virtually bankrupt, Egypt is in ruinous shape under the endless dictatorship of Mubarak. Neither La Kirchner’s Argentina, Garcia’s Peru, “Orange” Ukraine, gerontocratic Cuba, nor deeplydivided Korea offer much reason for optimism. But anarchism and syndicalism cannot in any way be blamed.

In Paris, in May 1968, one of the student activists’ most famous slogans was: “May the last capitalist be strangled with the guts of the last bureaucrat”. Behind the Roger Corman imagery we can see something inherited from the time of Proudhon and Bakunin: hostility to the state, any state, as a hierarchical institution of enormous power with an unappeasable hunger for more of it. Another slogan was: “Liberty for the Imagination”, with its retro-echo of Lennon.

Anarchism in its heyday would have been delighted with this kind of rhetorical effervescence. The US of the short 1960s created, probably without much memory of American anarchism, Make Love Not War, with the scent of La Sociale around it. Old anarchists were often strong about Free Love, at least in principle, even if in practice it was much messier than they had expected. Nonetheless, “liberation” for women, then a bit later for gays and lesbians, as well as oppressed ethno-linguistic minorities, drew on anarchism’s utopian élan and adhesion to the idea of self-rule by smaller, head-to-head communities and friendly “horizontal” relations with others of the same type.

Meanwhile, the world was changing rapidly in ways that partly reverberated with the world of 1870–1940. First and foremost was the tsunami of cross-national migrations after World War II, no longer mainly from the North to the South but vise versa, driven from behind by fear and misery and drawn ahead by hope and capitalism’s hunger for cheap labor. We can see here certain reflections of themes dominating this book. Poor Chinese learned Spanish, Indonesians Japanese, Filipinos Arabic, Mozambicans Xhosa or English, Turks German, Ivoiriens French, and so on.

But the processes did not work only in one direction. Apichai Shipper’s fine recent Fighting for Foreigners: Immigration and its Impact on Japanese Democracy book shows these processes perfectly.[5] While the scornful Thai, Persian, Indian, Filipino and Indonesian national embassies did less than nothing for their despised fellow-citizens, especially if they were illegal immigrants, and the Japanese national state, the mega-corporations and the yakuza exploited and abused them, it was precisely a fascinating mélange of ordinary Japanese who came to their aid, perhaps as in an anarchist’s dream-world: unions, angry lawyers and doctors, local governments, church-people from the Christian minority, NGOS and so on. The immigrants’ national solipsism was also diluted in many ways, not least because the Filipinos came to understand their Bengali opposite numbers as in the same boat and helped by the same dedicated Japanese, not abstractly in the manner of “human rights rhetoric”, but with human solidarity and a good nationalist shame at how “Japan” was exploiting these wretched of the earth.

Second was the communications revolution of the 1990s, paralleling the telegraphic revolution of the 1880s, which colossally advanced the speed and depth of global communications, not only for national-state surveillance agencies, but for anyone who was literate and had cheap access to internet cafés. Once again, there was a vast need for translation, since the cross-national networks worked mainly with the “grand languages” of our time, Anglo-American English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, and so on. What is interesting here is recognition. Leftists, gays and lesbians, workers, feminists, and ecologists knew they belonged to globality, but this was something new for minorities threatened with extinction, for which the story of Chiapas became a template for armed, militant autonomy within a bleached out nation state.

Third was the challenge of electoral, mediatic democracy and the “regime” of human rights. Even in the time of classical anarchism electoral democracy, rare as it then appeared, was a theoretical and practical problem. British experience, also German and French, had shown that left-wing pressure, expressed through electoral channels, could create, through national laws, changes that a hundred strikes could not easily emulate. Protection of women and children from appalling abuse in mines and factories, safety measures, later insurance, recognition of unions, wage arbitration, and so on. But these changes were embedded in “law”, and enforced (or not) by the national state in the form of proliferating bureaucracies: end product, the post-World War II welfare state. “Relax, we’ll take care of you”, so to speak, emphasizing the obverse pronouns.

The story of “human rights” offers certain parallels. As originally proposed by Amnesty International, classical anarchism would have loved the idea and its original agent: non-state and genuinely international, even if its’ HQ was in post-imperial London and its guiding spirit an Irish politician. (Indeed, Kropotkin saw the Red Cross and lifeboat associations as examples of an emergent anarchist-communist tendency). The still small secretariat had exemplary rules, of which the most important were that no HQ researcher could study or care for his or her own country of origin, nor could AI support-groups around the world. The disaster for AI was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Human rights” soon after became the masking slogan for all kinds of Machiavellian military interventions (as well as cynical noninterventions) by the dominant Western powers, led by the United States. Once again, “leave it to us”.

Last was the transformation of finance capital itself, under the motto of neo-liberalism. In former days, people in the Caribbean, and Central and South America could be sure that United Fruit’s violent successes were American. Whatever its cross-national reach, giant capitalism was still national at its roots: thus it was something which local nationalisms could combat, if they wished, under the flag of anticolonial nationalism’s traditional opposition to imperialism.

Meanwhile finance capital, at least in part, moved on. One has to consider an imaginary (but exemplary) United Fruit, whose headquarters are still in Boston, but whose major shareholders are Saudi Arabian princes, Swiss bankers, United Emirates sheikhs, American insurance companies, Japanese conglomerates, and so on, with, say, Indian CEOs. Meantime, the family that built United Fruit vegetates on hedge funds. In fact, Marxist theorists and anarchist activists had long emphasized the transnationality of capital. Nonetheless, perhaps in the grip of old-style anti-(national) imperialist nationalism, they did not imagine the situation we are faced with today.

The beauty of this book is that it shows what classical anarchism, and its progeny, syndicalism, bequeathed to our dyspeptic times. Exemplary courage, theoretical contestation (which lasts longer than theoretical certitude), concerns about how to live freedom, internationalism from experience, not from libraries, a skeptical view of the limits of nationalism, no matter how anti-imperialist, the building of transnational and transregional networks, a commitment to socio-cultural emancipation and grass-roots level organization, enmity toward “don’t worry we will take care of you” welfare bureaucracies, and of course utopias, over the rainbow.

Classical anarchism arose in an era when ultimate progress seemed assured; one could say it was “simply” a matter of the hopeful struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors. Dystopia was off the screen. Today’s anarchism lives under the sign of disaster—global warming, extinction of species and languages, and sauve-qui-peut-ism of every kind on. Let’s hope the tortoise can keep on truckin.’

References cited in text

• Introduction

Rethinking Anarchism and Syndicalism:
The Colonial and Postcolonial Experience, 1870–1940

Lucien van der Walt
University of the Witwatersrand

Steven J. Hirsch
University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg

This volume examines the history, influence, aspirations, and actions of anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and postcolonial world from the 1870s until the 1940s. By ‘colonial and postcolonial world’ we mean those regions of the world under the formal control of external powers, as well as the ex-colonies, that were ostensibly independent social formations, but remained subject to a significant degree to informal imperial power influenced by colonial legacies. The case studies presented in this volume are drawn from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe (with the exception of Ireland).

Each of these case studies analyzes anarchism and syndicalism within a colonial or a postcolonial context. In other words, they situate their analyzes within the larger context of late 19^th and early 20^th century imperialism and globalization, from the 1870s into the 1930s. During this epoch, the first modern globalization, imperialist power increased substantially and coincided with a heretofore unprecedented revolution in communication and transportation technologies, international mass migration, and the emergence of a truly global economy, which in turn spread industrialization across the colonial and postcolonial world.

The regions and countries examined in this volume all had a history of colonialism, including China, dismembered from the late 19^th. century. By the early 20^th-century, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States ruled 90 percent of Africa, 57 percent of Asia, a quarter of the Americas, around half of East and Central Europe, and all of Polynesia[6] The great powers also exercised immense indirect control over independent states and other polities in these regions, through the international state system, industrial investments, trade controls, and gunboat diplomacy.[7] Very often imperial capital either displaced or worked closely with the local bourgeoisie to maintain a highly unequal internal system of domination. Imperial capital also directed belated industrial change in subject territories in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

In recognition of the globalized character of the world during this period, this volume seeks to understand how anarchism and syndicalism developed as transnational movements. To this end it focuses not only national and local contexts but on supranational connections and multidirectional flows of the ideas, people, finances, and organizational structures that gave rise to these movements. In this way, it transcends Eurocentric narratives and obviates the frequent tendency to view movements in the colonial and postcolonial world as mere imitations or extensions of European movements. Instead it carefully examines both the universal and particular history of anarchism and syndicalism as reflected in the ideas and culture, social composition, and character of each social movement.

At another level, this collection pays close attention to how anarchists and syndicalists engaged with imperialism, anti-colonial movements and the national question. By the national question, we have in mind both the challenge posed by the role of national and racial identities to working class movements, and the place of demands for national self-determination (and racial equality) in class struggles. The volume seeks, then, to recover the history of anarchist and syndicalist anti-imperialism—as it was manifest in both theory and practice. This is a vital history that has often been ignored, or dismissed, in many texts. The papers in this volume, however, demonstrate unequivocally that anarchism and syndicalism were important currents in anti-imperial, including anti-colonial, struggles in the late 19^th and early-to-mid 20^th centuries—and were, for most of this period, more important than their Marxist rivals.

The framing of this volume

In order to highlight this experience of imperialism and inequality, we have organized this volume around the framework of a “colonial and postcolonial world”, rather than the Cold War concept of a “Third World” (or its successor, the “Global South”). The “Third World” idea routinely excludes the colonial regions within Europe itself, despite obviously instructive parallels with African, Asian and other experiences.

The concept has also always been defined in negative, incoherent, and state-centric terms.[8] It originally signified countries outside the (“socialist”) East and the (“capitalist”) West—yet it was itself never defined by reference to its own economic system; it included “socialist” China and Cuba alongside overtly “capitalist” countries. It also signified newly independent, and supposedly nonaligned, “nations.” Typically, these states defined themselves as “anti-imperialist”—even when their ruling elites continued to collude with the great powers. Finally, it referred to those countries defined as undeveloped or underdeveloped, which implied the need for economic assistance from advanced nations. This last claim always elided the great deal of socio-economic variation within and between these countries, and the reality of substantial, even dramatic, growth and industrialization, signified by the meteoric rise of Newly-Industrializing Countries (NICs). The notion of a “colonial and postcolonial world” avoids these difficulties, while retaining the stress on the importance of imperialism invoked by the “Third World” idea.

The volume’s focus on the period 1870 to 1940 has been chosen both to capture an era of unmatched mass anarchist and syndicalist influence, and the distinctive economic, social and political processes that took place in that period. (The closure of this era, and its implications for the anarchists and syndicalists, will be considered in more depth in our closing chapter, “Final Reflections”).

The period was one of unprecedented increases in transoceanic and intra-continental migration, global economic integration, and imperial expansion, with the first genuinely global economy emerging by the 1870s.[9] From 1870 to 1914 world trade and output grew steadily, with major powers developing trade to gross domestic product ratios exceeding 35 percent.[10] By all measures, levels of integration matched and typically exceeded those of the late 20^th century, and capital moved “quickly and pretty freely across existing national and imperial boundaries”.[11]

Jack London, a perceptive witness to these globalizing processes, expressed astonishment at the extraordinary “shrinkage of the planet”, which made the “East ... next-door neighbor to the West.”[12] Critical to this integration was European technical prowess, which led to the effective partition of the globe between a few great states by 1914.[13] British preeminence resulted in an empire incorporating a quarter of the world’s land and 800 million people in 1900.[14] The next imperial tier comprised modern powers like Austro-Hungary, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Declining premodern empires, oscillating between modernization and dismemberment filled out the bottom imperial tier: China, Iran, Ottoman Turkey, Portugal, Russia, and Spain.

Such a world posed great opportunities as well as immense challenges for the class-centered anarchists and syndicalists. At one level, the very circuits and centers of imperialism, industrial capitalism, and state formation provided the nexus in which their nemesis, the anarchists and syndicalists, emerged. The first globalization’s unprecedented mobilizations of labor for industry and war spread radicalism and connected the radicals, its cheap communications via steamships, telegraphs and the penny press provided a means of continual contact, and its new industrial centers provided the mass recruits to the syndicalist unions.

The very experience of migration eroded insularity, and demonstrated the common experience of the popular classes the world over, giving the anarchist and syndicalist case for internationalist classstruggle the ring of truth. The routine brutality of states, both colonial and postcolonial, and the grim conditions in fields as well as factories, strengthened the case for radical anti-statism and anti-capitalism. The emerging power of unions and other mass movements, partly a reflection of the era’s mass concentrations of urban workers, convinced many that a revolutionary transformation of society was within reach.

Before V. I. Lenin, classical Marxists also lacked an effective approach to struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world (with the key exception of Eastern Europe).[15] Marxists in these regions were (where they existed), typically marginal, burdened with the doctrine that the material prerequisites for socialism were lacking, and a fixed commitment to legalistic reformism in contexts where few could vote. The rise of Bolshevism, with its distinctively anti-imperialist and militant posture, radically changed matters. Meanwhile, anarchists and syndicalists had inscribed a record of mass mobilization across the colonial and postcolonial world, and (see below) of anti-colonial struggle. With Bakunin, these revolutionaries envisaged the “completed and real emancipation of all workers, not only in some but in all nations, ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ ”,[16] without supposedly necessary intermediate stages.

However, while industrialization, class formation and class conflict provided the social forces that the anarchists and syndicalists mobilized, and in which their programmatic flexibility and militancy could be activated, the contours of capitalism, the state and the popular classes were also profoundly shaped by imperialism. Thus, at another level, the colonial and postcolonial setting posed peculiar challenges to the revolutionary libertarian socialists: racial, regional, and national divisions among the working class and peasantry, as well as the rise of nationalism in the context of anti-imperialist movements.

National and racial identities, as movements like Zionism and Garveyism showed, could flow as easily via migrant and other networks as internationalist ones. Such sectional tendencies undercut internationalism, tended to become sharper as labor market competition intensified, and foreshadowed the world that followed the first modern globalization and the age of empire: the world of nation-states and economic nationalism, rooted in the 1920s and running into the 1990s (discussed further in the concluding chapter).

Anarchism and syndicalism

Although the term “anarchism” is often applied very loosely, this volume uses a narrow definition. The modern anarchist movement arose from the late 1860s in the context of an internationally expanding workers’ movement, linked together in the International Workingmen’s Association (or First International, 1864–1877).[17] Debates over the question of the state between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) were critical in establishing the anarchist current as a distinctive form of socialism. According to Piotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), the most important anarchist theorist after Bakunin, “modern anarchism” emerged “little by little in the Congresses of the great Association and later on among its successors,” giving birth to a mass working class and peasant movement.[18]

The core ideas of anarchism, as expressed by Bakunin and Kropotkin, are clear. Fiercely opposed to all forms of social and economic inequality and oppression, anarchism rejected capitalism, the state and hierarchy in general. A revolutionary and libertarian doctrine, anarchism sought the establishment of individual freedom through the creation of a cooperative, democratic, egalitarian and stateless socialist order. This would be established through the direct action of the working class and peasantry, waging an international and internationalist social revolution against capitalism, landlordism and the state.[19]

Syndicalism, on the other hand, refers to a form of revolutionary trade unionism, centered on the view that revolutionary union action can establish a collectivized, worker-managed social order resting on union structures.[20] Syndicalists argued that “the trade union, the syndicate, is the unified organization of labor and has for its purpose the defense of the interests of the producers within existing society and the preparing for and the practical carrying out of the reconstruction of society after the pattern of Socialism.”[21]

Syndicalist ideas emerged from “the nonpolitical tradition of socialism deriving from the libertarian wing of the First International”.[22] The “main ideas” of syndicalism can “all be found” in the First International, “and especially in the writings of the Bakuninist or federalist wing”.[23] This, as both Marx and Friedrich Engels noted, maintained that workers “must ... organize themselves by trades-unions” to “supplant the existing states”, with the “general strike” the lever “by which the social revolution is started”.[24] Thus, syndicalism was always an integral part of the broad anarchist tradition, although the relationship between anarchism and syndicalism was a complicated one: some anarchists rejected syndicalism, while a substantial section of syndicalists denied (or did not know) that syndicalism was embedded in anarchism.[25]

Taking anarchism and syndicalism seriously

Anarchism and syndicalism, as Benedict Anderson recently reminded readers, constituted an immense “gravitational force” across the planet in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. They were, he notes, the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical Left” from the 1870s onwards and “the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism” by the turn of the century.[26] Before 1917, Eric Hobsbawm conceded, “the marxist left had in most countries” been “on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy”, and “the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism”.[27]

Yet, in spite of its historical significance, anarchism and syndicalism as an international movement, has “not been well-served by the academy.”[28] Too often its history has been “buried under subsequent defeats and political orthodoxies,” when not effaced altogether by its rivals on the Left.[29] But the history of the movement is of paramount importance, precisely because it is essential to understand the trajectory of labor, of the left, and of anti-imperialist movements. Furthermore, as Arif Dirlik points out, it is crucial to “recall anarchism, which Leninist Marxism suppressed”, for it raises questions about the very meaning of socialism, and the place “democratic ideals for which anarchism ... served as a repository”.[30]

Taking a global view of anarchist and syndicalist history

The general underestimation of the historical importance of anarchism and syndicalism is rooted in the literature’s tendency to focus on the North Atlantic. The standard surveys of the movement’s history scarcely take into account the three quarters of humanity that comprised the colonial and postcolonial world. George Woodcock’s classic study ignored Asia and Africa, and only looked at one case of a colonial society within Europe itself: the Ukraine. Latin America garnered only three pages, despite the author noting that “until the early 1920s most of the trade unions in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chili, and Argentina were anarcho-syndicalist”, and that anarchism had there a “place that cannot be ignored”.[31] The work of James Joll reflects the same imbalance.[32] Studies by Daniel Guérin and Roderick Kedward fare no better, offering a brief treatment of the Ukraine.[33] Peter Marshall’s more recent study by comparison is balanced. And yet, it allocates only 2 out of 41 chapters, totaling 33 pages out of 706, to the colonial and postcolonial world.[34]

To describe this literature as strictly “Eurocentric” would be misleading. Other than the coverage of the Ukraine, it ignores the colonial regions of Eastern Europe, and its coverage of Western Europe and its offshoots is oddly incomplete, with cases like Ireland omitted.[35] Such a narrow and unrepresentative selection of cases has resulted in a flawed assessment of the history of anarchism and syndicalism. It posits, for instance, the thesis of Spanish exceptionalism, that is the notion that anarchism in Spain “became a mass movement ... to an extent that it never did elsewhere”.[36] Supposedly, Spain was “the only country in the 20^th Century where Anarcho-communism and Anarcho-syndicalism were adopted extensively as revolutionary theories and practices”.[37] Another problematic conclusion either explicit or implicit in this literature is that “anarchism has rarely taken root in ‘Third World’, colonial territories”, with the possible exception of Korea.[38]

Such claims only make sense if the history of anarchism and syndicalism in most of the world is elided. “[T]he truth is”, as Jason Adams astutely notes, “that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most exploited regions and peoples of the world”.[39] In other words, the history of anarchism and syndicalism mainly took place in the “East” and the “South”, not in the “North” and the “West”.[40] Latin America and Asia, for example, provide many examples of powerful and influential anarchist and syndicalist movements, some of which rivaled that of Spain in importance. Similarly, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe (and Ireland) provide ample evidence of movements operating in colonial situations, as well as in postcolonial contexts.

Argentina, Geoffroy de Laforcade’s contribution to this collection, is an instructive case. As de Laforcade demonstrates, Argentina possessed a vibrant and deeply embedded movement by the turn of the century. It is worth noting that Argentine anarchism stretches back to the days of the First International, and that the great Bakunin-Marx debate resonated locally at that time. The precocious development of anarchism in Argentina stemmed from massive proletarian immigration, the formation of transnational activist networks, and the diffusion of a radical press. As in other parts of Latin America these processes combined to produce a movement that would span continents.

Anarchism and syndicalism in Argentina spread rapidly in the burgeoning working-class neighborhoods and workplaces in Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital and chief port. By the turn of the century, Buenos Aires was (with Paterson in the United States) one of the world’s two great anarchist publishing centers, and Argentina became the only country to sustain to two anarchist dailies.[41] The Argentine labor movement reflected the influence of syndicalism. Shortly after it was founded in 1901, the Regional Workers’ Federation of Argentina (Federación obrera regional argentina, FORA) adopted the ideal of “anarchist-communism” at its fifth congress. The FORA would remain Argentina’s dominant labor federation for the next decade.

Anarchist influence in Argentina, as de Laforcade shows, extended beyond FORA to include Catholic unions and the rival General Union of Labor (Unión general de trabajadores, or UGT). The UGT evolved into a syndicalist Regional Workers’ Confederation of Argentina (CORA), which merged with FORA at its ninth congress in 1915. This precipitated a split between a self-described “anarchist” wing (identifying with the positions of fifth congress of 1905, the FORA-V) and a “syndicalist” wing aligned to the 1915 merger congress (the ninth, which adopted more pragmatic positions, thus FORA-IX). The two FORAs grew into the 1920s, with around 250,000 members at their height, and no significant rival centers.[42] Analyzes that downplay the anarchist influence in Argentina overlook the striking fact that the main split in the union movement was between rivals located within a shared, broad, anarchist tradition.[43] In the Argentine context, Marxism—represented by the tiny, moderate local Socialist Party—paled in comparison to the influence of the libertarian movement.[44]

Argentina was by no means an exceptional case of an anarchist “mass movement” in Latin America. In Cuba, anarchism emerged in the 1870s, and “dominated leadership positions in the incipient labor movement” from the 1880s, as Kirk Shaffer notes in his study for this collection. In fact anarchist hegemony persisted for nearly five decades, spanning the Workers’ Circle (1885), the Workers’ Alliance (formed 1887), the syndicalist Cuban Labor Federation (CTC, 1895), the Labor Federation of Havana (1921), and the National Confederation of Cuban Workers (Confederación Nacional de Obreros Cubanos, CNOC, 1925), the latter claiming 200,000 workers.[45] Yet this history has long been obscured, according to Shaffer, by accounts that excised anarchists or misrepresented them as Marxists.[46] Both the Argentine and Cuban cases reflect the larger Latin American pattern: substantial Marxist movements simply did not exist before the mid-1920s,[47] and labor movements were commonly identified with anarchism and syndicalism throughout the rise and fall of the First International and the Labor and Socialist (so-called “Second”) International (1889).

Ediline Toledo and Luigi Biondi’s chapter on Brazil, likewise demonstrates the “diffuse sympathy” anarchism registered among workers in expanding centers like São Paulo. The syndicalist Confederation of Brazilian Workers (COB, 1906) also dominated the union movement. The COB had between 100,000 and 125,000 members in Rio de Janeiro alone by mid-1919, while the moderate socialists were marginalized and isolated. Anarchists in Mexico, also examined by Shaffer, played a leading role in the unions from the days of the General Congress of Mexican Workers, formed in 1876. The syndicalist federation, the House of the World Worker (Casa del Obrero Mundial, COM or Casa) formed in 1912, was the main labor center in the 1910s, with 150,000 members.[48] In 1921, COM was reorganized as the General Confederation of Labor (Confederación General de Trabajadores, or CGT), which brought in the Mexican section of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies), peaking at 80,000 in 1928–1929.[49]

Anarchism and syndicalism similarly exercised a preponderant influence over labor movements in Latin America’s less developed countries. Steven Hirsch’s chapter on Peru demonstrates that anarchists and syndicalists were the dominant force in the labor movement for the first three decades of the 20^th century. They organized the principal labor unions in Lima-Callao such as the Workers’ Regional Federation of Peru (FORP, 1913, 1919) and the Workers’ Federation of Lima (FOL, 1921) and in the provinces. Peru’s organized labor movement had contact with FORA and the anarcho-syndicalist dominated union movement in Chili.[50] Syndicalism was also a significant force in Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and visible in Costa Rica, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Panama. In Puerto Rico, for example, as Shaffer shows, anarchists were a vocal dissident minority in the Free Federation of Workers (Federación Libre de Trabajadores, or FLT).

African, Asian and European cases

The movement in Africa never attained the influence it had in Latin America, not least because of the late onset of industrialization and proletarianization. Yet, as in the Latin American case, the movement emerged in the areas most closely linked to global processes of capital accumulation and imperial penetration: southern Africa, and the Mediterranean perimeter of North Africa. Anthony Gorman’s chapter on Egypt and Lucien van der Walt’s contribution on South Africa highlight two relatively unknown but highly significant movements, operating at different ends of the diverse continent.

The movement in Egypt emerged along with that elsewhere, and represented in the First International in 1876. It drew much of its early support from the skilled Europeans hired to work on the state’s great modernization projects—most notably the Suez Canal—although it aimed to organize across the barriers of culture and class. Gorman shows that the movement eventually expanded beyond its original immigrant, mainly Italian, nucleus to include Arabic-speaking Egyptians, as well as local Greeks and Jews. This shift was linked to the rise of syndicalist unions and “resistance leagues” in the expanding industrial sector around the turn of the century.

Anarchist activities in South Africa date from the 1880s when the opening of great mines helped launch an industrial revolution. However, the greatest influence of anarchism and syndicalism came after the turn of the century, when Britain had conquered the region and created thereafter the Union of South Africa in 1910. By the end of that decade, a substantial bloc of syndicalist unions had emerged in manufacturing and services—most of these unions were initiated by white radicals, but their base was mainly among people of color. The most notable was the Industrial Workers of Africa. It was through such structures that pioneering white militants like Scots immigrant Andrew Dunbar (1879–1964) recruited Africans like T.W. Thibedi (1888–1960), and Indians like Bernard L.E. Sigamoney (1888–1963).

The overall membership of the South African syndicalist unions probably did not exceed 4,000 workers countrywide in the late 1910s, as compared to roughly 47,000 in the South African Industrial Federation (SAIF, 1914), and 6,000 in the Cape Federation of Labor (1913). It must, however, be noted that these syndicalist unions were some of the very first unions among people of color, who were largely excluded from the two big federations.

In both African cases, the anarchists and syndicalists did not actually establish union federations linking the unions they led or initiated. They played a role—a minority one—in the leadership of more orthodox union centers that emerged from the 1910s: the General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT, or Ittihad al-niqabat al-‘am) formed in Egypt in 1921, and the Cape Federation of Labor and the SAIF, respectively.

In Central Asia, anarchists could be found across the (ex-)Russian and Ottoman territories, with adherents among Arabs, Turks and national minorities.[51] In South Asia, anarchism influenced Bengali extremists of the early 1900s, the Ghadar Party in the 1910s and the Hindustan Republican Socialist Association in the 1920s.[52] It was, however, in East Asia that anarchism and syndicalism were most prominent.

In East Asia, Dirlik notes, anarchism became the “the dominant ideology” during the first two decades of the 20^th century. Pioneering union efforts in the Philippines were followed by more durable and sophisticated movements not just in imperial Japan, but in China, Korea and Vietnam,[53] as well as Taiwan and British Malaya (now Malaysia). Dirlik’s chapter provides a partial overview of the East Asian movement, where immersion “in the burgeoning labor movement” was often an important focus. In China the anarchists played a leading role in unions in the major urban centers.[54] Anarchists founded the first modern unions, with around forty anarchist-led unions in the Canton area alone by 1921, and “anarchist domination” of the unions in Canton and Hunan into the mid-1920s.[55]

While the East Asian movement tended to develop late by European standards, its peak—the late 1910s into the early 1930s—overlapped quite closely with other movements in the colonial and postcolonial world. Dongyoun Hwang’s chapter on Korea shows the movement belatedly emerged in the 1920s, and its key period spanned the 1920s and 1930s. Despite concerted efforts to establish anarchist organizations in Korea, Japanese colonial police thwarted these efforts by repeated “prompt and brutal suppression”. Korean anarchists had more success in the border areas and in China and Japan. Syndicalism was influential—although repression in Korea meant that the most successful Korean syndicalist initiatives occurred among Korean workers in Japan.

As the preceding discussion of the colonial and postcolonial world suggests, the “great age of the anarchists” certainly did not come to a close in 1914.[56] The studies in this volume point to a different chronology.

Like the famed National Confederation of Labor in Spain (Confederación nacional del trabajo, or CNT, 1910), the FORAs, FORP, CNOC, and COM (and its successor the Mexican CGT), along with Chinese, Korean, Egyptian, and South African syndicalist organizations, grew rapidly throughout the 1910s, into the 1920s, and often, beyond.[57] This trajectory is also evident in the story of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), linked to the Irish Trade Union Congress, which is discussed in Emmet O’Connor’s contribution on Ireland. Anarchism emerged in Ireland as early as 1885.[58] Three decades later, deeply influenced by syndicalism, the ITGWU exploded from 20,000 in 1913 to 120,000 by 1920.

Provincializing Spanish anarchism

By adopting a broader, global scope of comparison and eschewing a traditional focus on the West, then, this volume challenges the validity of the Spanish exceptionalism thesis. Anarchist and syndicalist influence among the working-classes and union movements in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba, was arguably as significant, if not more so, than in Spain. The CNT at its zenith represented approximately half of Spain’s union movement, whereas the FORAs, CTC, CNOC, COB and FORP comprised a decisive and overwhelming majority of the organized labor force in their respective countries.[59]

From a colonial and postcolonial world perspective, then, Spain’s movement is only one important link in a chain of mass anarchist and syndicalist movements. Barcelona, the “fiery rose” of Spanish anarchism, likewise, must be seen as only one among many “important red-and-black cities”.[60] Anarchism and syndicalism found fertile soil for its “fiery roses” to blossom as powerful movements in urban centers across the globe, including Buenos Aires, Canton, GulyaiPolye, Havana, Hunan, Lima, Lisbon, Montevideo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Santiago; there were also budding movements in centers like Alexandria, Cape Town, Dublin, Johannesburg, and Beirut.

The class character of anarchism and syndicalism

Anarchism has long been stereotyped as a movement based on petty bourgeois artisans and peasants, who, threatened by the modernizing forces of industry and mechanization hanker for a pre-modern past.[61] This interpretation has been propounded by Marxist activists and scholars. Not surprisingly, they routinely portray anarchists as “reactionary” petty bourgeois types or occasionally as pre-political “lumpenproletarian” socialists.[62] Even syndicalists are often are characterized as “workers in small industry and artisan crafts”, isolated from “medium and large-scale industry”.[63] Such claims naturally conduce to the simple conclusion that anarchism and syndicalism are anti-modern movements. For some, this reinforces the teleological proposition that the Marxists alone “always and everywhere represent the interest” of “the proletariat” which “alone is a really revolutionary class”.[64]

Under close empirical analysis, the thesis of the petit bourgeois class composition of anarchism and syndicalism assertion is difficult to sustain. The largest organizations in the broad anarchist tradition were the syndicalist unions. Studies drawn largely from the Western experience have demonstrated that the majority of workers in the syndicalist unions were unmistakably proletarian. These proletarians were not limited to casual and seasonal laborers, like construction workers, dockers, gas workers, and farm laborers; factory workers in light and heavy industries, miners, and railway workers also constituted core elements of the syndicalist unions.[65]

The studies in this collection generally bear out the proletarian social base of anarchism and syndicalism. O’Connor’s chapter shows that that syndicalism had a particular resonance among construction, metallurgical, mine, and transport workers, while at its height in 1920, half its membership were farm workers.[66] In Peru, Hirsch points out that anarchism and syndicalism drew support largely from semi-skilled factory, port, and railway workers.[67] Mexican syndicalism, likewise, had strong support from skilled workers in small plants, as well as a mass base among factory workers, notably in textiles, and miners.[68] In the case of Brazil, Toledo and Biondi’s study demonstrates that anarchism and syndicalism garnered support from factory as well as artisanal labor in São Paulo.[69] In Argentina, de Laforcade shows that anarchist and syndicalist unions set down deep roots in the urban working class, and in the expanding “ports to an extent never equaled in any other sector of the economy”.

The African contributions to this volume also corroborate this claim. In Egypt, Gorman shows, the majority of anarchists were initially skilled manual workers, but by the end of the 19^th century the movement shifted towards the “new working class, particularly cigarette workers, printers and the employes of the new public utilities, such as the tramways”. In South Africa, van der Walt notes, leading activists included blacksmiths, carpenters and teachers, but the popular membership of syndicalist unions was primarily drawn from semi-skilled and unskilled workers in manufacturing and services, like dockers, tramway workers, clothing workers, and employes in food and tobacco processing.

In short, this volume documents the industrial and service sector composition of anarchism and syndicalism. In the colonial and postcolonial world, it was precisely the sectors most closely associated with capitalist globalization and state modernization that furnished the bulk of anarchist and syndicalist activists. Most of the cases also indicate a concerted attempt to develop support among rural wage workers: this was particularly true in Argentina, Cuba, Ireland, Peru, and Puerto Rico.

It is also important to note that peasant farmers were sometimes targeted for recruitment and mobilization. In China, anarchists were the first Leftist radicals to seriously consider the peasantry as a revolutionary force and to spearhead “the transmission of the revolutionary movement to rural areas”.48 Dirlik points out Chinese anarchists shared with Kropotkin a vision of the world, in which industry and agriculture, town and country, would be harmoniously integrated.

Efforts to organize the Mexican peasantry along anarchist and syndicalist lines date back to the late 1860s.[70] Subsequently, as Shaffer shows, the anarchist Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) of Flores Magón organized armed revolts in Baja California (Mexico, 1911), and in Texas (United States, 1915), which drew heavily on peasant support. Building alliances between urban workers and rural peasants was never easy. Deep divisions existed between Zapatista peasants and COM’s urban-industrial worker base during the course of the Mexican Revolution. In Peru, ethnic and regional tensions between indigenous peasants in the countryside and mestizo workers in urban areas complicated anarchist attempts to forge durable solidarity networks.

Successful peasant organization and mobilization by anarchists, clearly demonstrated the peasants’ revolutionary potential. The most dramatic example comes from colonial Europe in the form of the Makhnovischna (or Makhno movement) anarchist movement which developed in the Ukraine from 1917—the subject of Aleksandr Shubin’s contribution. Anarchist currents were influential in the Ukraine from the 1880s, with Bakunin’s views of particular importance.[71]

The movement revived in the early 20^th century. The eponymous Nestor Ivanovich Makhno (1889–1934) came from a poor peasant family, and was jailed in 1908 for anarchist activities. Working in wage labor from his adolescence, he played an important role in the unions of Gulyai-Polye, a small manufacturing town, after his release in 1917.[72]

However, it was from the peasantry of the Ukraine—the richest farming region in the Russian Empire, producing around 20 percent of the world’s wheat by 1914—that the movement drew its big battalions.[73] From 1917 the anarchists in the Ukraine organized the peasants to expropriate land, and then form a largely peasant militia, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine, the following year. As the Makhnovischna seized control of large sections of West Bank Ukraine, they redistributed land and promoted cooperatives and a system of councils.

The emphasis on peasant organization and self-defense likewise can be seen in the Korean case. Although Korean anarchists were active in Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo, Hwang points out, they joined Chinese and Japanese anarchists in the Movement for Rural Self-Defense Communities in Fujian Province in the 1920s. As a result, peasant militias were formed to fight off bandit and Communist attacks. In Kirin province in Manchuria, anarchist veteran Ha Ki Rak (1912– 1997) recorded, the anarchist general Kim Jao-jin (of the Korean Independence Army, which controlled the area) sponsored the “Korean People’s Association in Manchuria”. An anarchist aligned body it ran education, services, military defense and cooperatives from 1929 to 1932 in an area with an estimated population of two million.[74] Ha characterized Kim as the “Korean Makhno”, and suggested this “Kirin Revolution” compared favorably to the Makhnovischna revolution in the Ukraine from 1918 to 1921.

Anarchism, syndicalism, and transnational networks

A salient feature of anarchism and syndicalism was the pivotal importance of transnational networks in constituting the movement. Comprised of formal and informal structures, these networks facilitated doctrinal diffusion, financial flows, transmission of information and symbolic practices, and acts of solidarity. Anarchist networks, as a key recent study has shown, were often built upon migratory diasporas and were reinforced by the movement’s press and the travels of major activists.[75] It might be added that were also connected by linked shared campaigns (such as the international protests against the execution of anarchist educator Francesco Ferrer i Guàrdia, 1859–1909), and common rituals like May Day (originating as a commemoration of American anarchists executed in 1887 after the struggle for the eighthour day).

The papers in this collection, therefore, seek to balance a national case study approach with careful attention to the role transnational processes played in the development of anarchism and syndicalism. Shaffer’s study illustrates the merits of paying close attention to the transnational dimension. He delineates two different anarchist and syndicalist networks encompassing the Caribbean, Mexico and southern US. One network linked Cuba, Panama, Puerto Rico, and the US. Its hub was in Havana from whence came ¡Tierra! (‘Land!’), the anarchist weekly. ¡Tierra! would be instrumental in the coordination of a cirum-Caribbean anarchist movement. The other, overlapping network discussed by Shaffer connected Mexico and the US Southwest. Here, the PLM paper Regeneración and the cross-border organizing of the IWW played central roles. Political exile and economic migration also contributed to reinforcing the networks as radicals and workers circulated widely between jobs and temporary sanctuaries throughout the Caribbean, the US and Mexico.

The diffusion of anarchism in East Asia likewise was fueled by transnational and translocal connections. Dirlik stresses the importance of translocal ties in linking revolutionaries across Asia (and also beyond Asia), with the networks not only diffusing ideas but also reshaping them locally. Imperial Paris was important to East Asian anarchism, but imperial Tokyo was undoubtedly the central “location for radical education and activity that is quite reminiscent of the role played by London for radicals in Europe”, drawing in students and radicals from across Asia, spreading nationalism, anarchism and later Marxism. Dirlik stresses in his chapter that the anarchism encountered by Chinese radicals “in the early part of the 20^th century was already a product of global circulation, having spilled out of Europe into locations across Asia, Africa and Latin America”. It was adapted to local circumstances and demands (as Toledo and Biondi also note of Brazil, and as Shaffer notes of Cuba) but if “native experiences shaped the translation of anarchism into local idiom, the very act of translation transformed the local idiom as well”.

As indicated earlier, anarchism and syndicalism emerged within the circuits and centers of imperialism, industrial capitalism, and state formation, including its labor mobilizations and communications revolution. As concrete examples, the opening of the Suez (1869) and Panama (1914) canals is very much part of the story of anarchism: the workforce recruited to the former helped launch Egyptian anarchism, as Gorman suggests, and the workforce recruited to the latter spread the movement to the isthmus of the Americas, as Shaffer notes. In Egypt, this contributed to the development of a network linking Egypt, Greece, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunis and Turkey, as well as the major centers in Europe and the Americas, “based on personal recommendation and shared ideological vision”.

Likewise, as van der Walt argues, anarchism and syndicalism came to South Africa in the wake of an industrial revolution financed by European capitalists and hastened by British imperial expansion. British-born immigrants—workers and soldiers—played a key role in fostering the movement. The first organized activity dated to 1881, in Port Elizabeth. Links between South Africa and Britain, especially Scotland—via the radical press, migration, and visits—networked militants in imperial Europe and colonial Africa, with Scotch radicals from the Clydeside factories decisive in introducing the IWW, including the variant associated with Daniel De Leon (1852–1914). Thus, the IWW, formed in Chicago with influences from Paris, spread via Detroit into Glasgow, and from there into Cape Town, Durban, Kimberley, Pretoria and Johannesburg.

Language and ethnic diasporas clearly played an important role in such transnational networks. This can also be seen among the Chinese anarchists who were active in Cuba, France, the United States, Japan, and British Malaya.[76] Language and a shared press—notably papers like Pingdeng (“Equality”)—helped establish the transnational Chinese anarchist network and foster a shared class struggle.[77] It was the Chinese anarchists who launched the Malaysian trade unions.[78] The Italians played a similar role. Indeed, a great deal of the history of Italian anarchism took place outside of Italy. Biondi and Toledo point out there were more Italian-language anarchist periodicals in Brazil than Portuguese ones.

While this might seem a recipe for ethnic insularity, the medium should not be confused with the message. The Italian anarchists were certainly connected by common origins, language and culture but were defined by their anti-nationalist and “cosmopolitan global movement opposed to all borders”.[79] In the Western Hemisphere anarchist networks, as Shaffer suggests, arose from “language facilitated network connections” among a range of Spanish-speaking nationalities across a range of countries and communities.

Hwang’s work makes a similar point, showing that Korean anarchism cannot be reduced to anarchism within Korea proper. It was a regional movement active across East Asia, linked by a common press and it operated in a cosmopolitan context.[80] Thus, Korean anarchism first emerged in China and Japan, and was always located in a cosmopolitan milieu characterized by transnational linkages and activities. There were many examples of joint Chinese, Japanese and Korean anarchist cooperation in the 1920s. Notable initiatives included cooperation in the radical Lida College in China, peasant organizing in Fujian Province, and the founding in 1927, in Nanjing, of the Eastern Anarchist League (Mujeongbu juui dongbang yeonmaeng) by Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese delegates.

The concept of “informal internationalism” helps explain the simultaneous emergence of anarchism in Europe, Latin America and North Africa from the late 1860s and 1870s previously alluded to in this introduction.[81] The First International provided the womb in which the anarchist movement emerged, but the formal meetings of the International, its press, and its debates were located within the body of a dynamic global working class and peasant network. Anarchism had an organized presence in Argentina, Cuba, Egypt and Mexico from the 1870s, followed by Ireland, South Africa and Ukraine in the 1880s. The first anarchist-led, syndicalist, unions outside of Spain (the Spanish Regional Workers’ Federation, 1870) and the USA (the Central Labor Union, 1884) were Mexico’s General Congress of Mexican Workers (1876) and Cuba’s Workers’ Circle (1887). These were the immediate ancestors of the better known syndicalist unions that emerged globally from the 1890s onwards.[82]

To put it another way, anarchism was not a West European doctrine that diffused outwards, perfectly formed, to a passive “periphery”.[83] Rather, the movement emerged simultaneously and transnationally, created by interlinked activists on three continents—a pattern of interconnection, exchange and sharing, rooted in “informal internationalism,” which would persist into the 1940s and beyond.

Nor were these linkages only informal. Besides the First International, and the Eastern Anarchist League, we can adduce transnational bodies like the Anti-Authoritarian International (or “Black International”, 1881), of which the American Central Labor Union, and the Mexican General Congress of Mexican Workers, were the largest affiliates, and the syndicalist International Workers Association (1922), with its powerful Latin American wing, the American Continental Workers’ Association (Asociación Continental Americana de Trabajadores, ACAT, 1929).

To speak of discrete “Northern” and “Southern” anarchist and syndicalist movements, then, would be misleading and inaccurate. The networks discussed in this section straddled the colonial, postcolonial, and imperial countries, linking for example, radicals in Mexico and the US, in Cuba and Spain, South Africa and Britain, and Korea and Japan. The movement, in short, was not just internationalist in principle and imagination, but global in its creation, organization, reach and aspirations. At the same time, it did not deny the existence of nationality but rather it sought to reconcile nationality with internationalism.

Race, nation and imperialism

The question of how anarchism and syndicalism approached issues of nationality, race, and imperial power is one that has received surprisingly little attention in the literature. Yet the anarchist and syndicalist movements were ascendant in a period marked by the first modern globalization and empire-building. The way in which the anarchist and syndicalist movement engaged with divisions within the international working class and peasantry, and the impact of imperial power on different parts of the globe, in this particular context, remains strikingly under-examined in the existing literature.

The standard texts on anarchism and syndicalism pay scant attention to how these confronted imperialism and the national question, or how their history was shaped by the inescapable presence of empires. The works of Joll, Woodcock, and Marshall, for example, studiously avoid an analysis of how anarchists and syndicalists grappled with racial and national divisions in the popular classes.

The issue of how anarchism and syndicalism engaged with antiimperialist struggles is also given short shrift in these texts. Conventional treatments, focused on Spanish anarchism, tend to gloss over not only regional and ethnic divisions within the CNT, but the Spanish empire itself. Their examinations of the Makhnovischna scarcely note that the movement was operating in a territory long subject to Poland and Russia (and briefly, Germany), emerged in the context of the massive wave of independence struggles then sweeping Central and Eastern Europe, and competed (and sometimes cooperated) with Ukrainian nationalists.[84] Daniel Guérin’s work at least takes up the issue of when and why anarchist luminary Bakunin supported independence struggles, but neglects to carry this through into his discussion of the Makhnovischna.[85] Marshall’s analysis of Asian and Latin American movements correctly notes their anti-imperialism, but elides what this entailed.[86]

It is understandable, then, that there is a fairly widespread notion that historical anarchism and syndicalism were conspicuously absent from anti-imperialist struggles—a view found even among some contemporary self-described anarchists. For some, this supposed absence is evidence of anarchism’s commendable ethical universalism, and its rejection of arbitrary social divisions.[87] For others, by contrast, it purportedly demonstrates a deplorable Eurocentrism that apparently ensured anarchism had “almost nothing to do with the anti-colonial struggles that defined revolutionary politics in this century”.[88]

However, both of these academic and polemical literatures are deeply flawed: they ignore the depth and breadth of anarchist and syndicalist anti-imperialism. There is a small but valuable scholarly corpus that rather more effectively addresses the relationship between anarchism and syndicalism, on the one hand, and the national question, on the other although it is schematic and often Eurocentric.[89]

In general, it emphasizes that Bakunin and Kropotkin subscribed to the principle of “respect for humanity” based on “the recognition of human right and human dignity in every man, of whatever race” or “color”.[90] For Bakunin anarchism implied a “multi-national, multiracial” and “world-wide” working people’s organization dedicated to a class-based libertarian revolution.[91] A recent study on anarchism in Western Europe also found that from “its very inception” it rejected xenophobia in favor of international unity, anti-militarism and anticolonialism.[92] With respect to “Syndicalist movements”, Marcel van der Linden observed that they “probably belonged to those parts of the international labor movement which were the least sensitive to racism”.[93]

The few extant analyzes of anarchist and syndicalist engagements with racial and national divisions in the colonial and postcolonial world also offer important insights.[94] In general, they underscore an active opposition to prejudice and oppression. In late 19^th century Cuba, for example, the anarchist Workers’ Circle was the “first working-class association ... that was explicitly antiracist and antinationalist”, and organized across racial lines, “fostering class consciousness and helping to eradicate the cleavages of race and ethnicity”.[95] Its successor, the Workers’ Alliance, “eroded racial barriers as no union had done before in Cuba”, and sought to combat racial discrimination by employers and the state.[96] In Brazil, labor activists “inspired by the egalitarian doctrines of socialism, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism” struggled to forge an interracial labor movement, uniting native-born and immigrant workers, and black and white, with explicit appeals to Afro-Brazilians.[97]

Similarly, anarchists and syndicalists in Peru explicitly rejected doctrines of inherent racial inequality, championed the cause of indigenous emancipation, and developed a significant presence among Indian peasants and mine workers.[98] Nevertheless, positivist philosophical influences also shaped the movement’s attitudes toward native Peruvians inasmuch as it tended to see their Westernization as progressive.[99] In Mexico the movement struggled against the “wage disparity between Mexicans and North Americans”, and “discriminatory practices by foreign managers”.[100] The PLM also adopted an anti-racist posture. It claimed that racial and national prejudices were “managed by the capitalists and tyrants” to make “impossible the union of all nations who are separately fighting to free themselves from Capital”.[101]

Supplementing the abovementioned literature, the papers in this volume shed additional light on the movement’s relationship to the national question, demonstrating that a radical and subversive antiracialism and internationalism were hallmarks of the movement. De Laforcade demonstrates that in Argentina there was a “fierce anarchistinspired opposition to nativist and ethnically divisive projections of working-class identity”. Shaffer’s contribution underscores anarchist efforts to surmount racial and national divisions in the working class in Cuba, Mexico and Panama had varying degrees of success. Toledo and Biondi’s work on Brazil shows that exclusive cross-class ethnic associations co-existed alongside integrated anarchist and syndicalist class-based organizations. The immigrant workers—mostly Italian and Spanish—were divided by country, even province, of origin, as well as by language, and language also posed problems for their relations with the (Portuguese-speaking) Brazilian workers. Hirsch’s study documents the Peruvian movement’s efforts to organize and empower indigenous peasants and to forge a working-class alliance that transcended ethnic and regional divisions.

In the Ukraine, the largely ethnic Ukrainian Makhnovischna distinguished themselves from the nationalists in their violent opposition to the murderous anti-Semitism sweeping the collapsing Russian empire. Besides arming Jewish communities, and forming a Jewish battalion in the Revolutionary Insurgent Army, Shubin notes, the movement executed members found to have been involved in pogroms; it also acted against those who attacked German settlers. In Ireland, the syndicalists faced the challenge of organizing in industrialized Ulster, where as O’Connor notes, the Catholic minority formed a subaltern caste. The ITGWU sought to overcome the sectarian divide with class solidarity, and had some success in opposing Protestant Unionism, while supporting Irish republicanism. It was, however, eventually forced to accept the division of the country set out by the 1921 Anglo-Irish peace treaty.

In Egypt, Gorman shows, the anarchists’ syndicalist unions united workers into inclusive “international” unions, despite divisions fanned both by employers and by sections of the Egyptian nationalist movement which drew on nativist and ethnocentric appeals. The movement was committed to “an internationalist mission and membership”, and took great efforts to deal with “ethnic, religious and linguistic pluralism”, “engaging with the diversity of Egyptian society at large”.

The South African context presented a host of acute problems that militated against uniting the popular classes across race and ethnic lines. The majority of the working class were African workers, drawn from conquered peoples, mostly unfree laborers subject to internal passports, segregation and indenture. Free Colored and Indian workers likewise were subject to discriminatory practices in accordance with the racist ideal of white supremacy elaborated under the post1910 state. The white working class, restive and distrustful of big companies who might replace them with unfree black labor, organized along segregationist lines in bodies like SAIF.

Anarchists and syndicalists in South Africa, however, as van der Walt demonstrates, were distinguished by a commitment to interracial labor unity, and “the abolition of all forms of native indenture, compound and passport systems; and the lifting of the native worker to the political and industrial status of the white”. Most favored an IWWstyle One Big Union as the means to sweep away such “tyrant laws”, uniting the working class in the struggle for the social revolution. The syndicalist unions it formed among Africans, Coloreds and Indians were seen as stepping stones to this great goal.

Internationalism, anti-colonialism, and national liberation

It is ironic that the English language literature on anarchism and syndicalism provides nothing comparable to the rich scholarship on Marxist approaches to anti-imperialist struggles. Even nationalist narratives concede anarchists and syndicalists played a key role in 19^th and 20^th century struggles. Flores Magón lies buried alongside generals and presidents in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in the National Pantheon at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City, “part of the nationalistic myth of the ‘institutionalized Mexican revolution’”.[102] In the Republic of Korea, anarchists Yu Rim (1894–1961), Bak Yeol (1902–1972) and Yu ha-myŏng (1891–1985) are commemorated as “independence activists”, and Kim Jwa-Jin’s birthplace is a national monument.[103] Meanwhile, Shin Chaeho (1880–1936)—the most famous Korean anarchist—features in school textbooks. The 110^th anniversary of Makhno’s birth received official celebrations in Gulyai-Polye, stressing his role as an independence activist.[104] In Dublin, Ireland, the name of the De Leonist syndicalist James Connolly (1868–1916, executed after the failed Easter Rising), adorns train stations and a hospital; like Kim, he has a statue, although this one was sponsored by the unions.[105] The National Union of Mineworkers in South Africa (allied to the ruling nationalist African National Congress, or ANC), is investigating establishing a “workers’ monument” to the “worker hero” Thibedi.[106]

The papers in this collection are, then, of the utmost importance in opening up a serious examination of anarchist and syndicalist responses to imperialism. By the late 19^th century, imperialist economic and political penetration had evoked various political and cultural responses across the colonial and postcolonial world. Collaboration and accommodation with empire were always important currents. However, there were major independence struggles across the Spanish empire in the 1890s, followed by colonial Europe in the 1910s. The late 1910s saw protests sweep the African and Asian colonies, and the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, along with rising demands for more economic independence in Latin America and Southern Africa. By the late 1920s, mass independence movements were becoming important in Africa and Asia. From the 1940s, the remnants of formal imperial rule were collapsing across the world (at least outside of the rapidly expanding Soviet realm).

It is important to stress that nationalism was one—but only one— current in these national liberation struggles; the two are all too often conflated. Nationalism is a definite doctrine, which views the world as comprised of discrete nations, each requiring its own nation-state to express its general will. Nationalist movements therefore center on uniting all sections of the nation, regardless of class, towards that end. This outlook differs radically from the anarchists and syndicalists’ insistence on class-based internationalism and anti-statism, and generally also (as we will show below) to their own visions of decolonization and self-determination.

Indebted to European revolutionary thinking, colonial nationalist movements were a reaction against European (and other) imperialism,[107] usually launched by frustrated native elites. In practice, colonial nationalists vacillated between accommodation with empire, and demands for more radical autonomy, even statehood. Only from around 1919 did the latter demands begin, fitfully, to dominate colonial nationalism.[108] Even then, however, nationalism often struggled to assume leadership of national liberation movements, because religious- and class-based currents were also important forces.

Three major anarchist and syndicalist approaches to independence struggles

The notion that anarchism and syndicalism ignored anti-imperialist struggles is indefensible. Anarchism and syndicalism were doctrinally opposed to imperialism, and thus, in principle, always supported some notion of national freedom. Support for national freedom followed from the anarchist opposition to hierarchy, and stress on voluntary cooperation and self-management. “The right of freely uniting and separating”, Bakunin wrote, “is the first and most important of all political rights”.[109] In place of state centralism and nationalism, he advocated a “future social organization” that was “carried out from the bottom up, by free association, with unions and localities federated by communes, regions, nations, and, finally, a great universal and international federation”.[110] National self-determination itself would, in short, be premised on individual freedom through cooperation, and classlessness as well as statelessness.

The difficulty was, however, that many of the national liberation struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world were influenced by nationalism, or at least, the nationalist dream of independent statehood. The question was therefore posed: how should anarchists and syndicalists relate to nationalism, and to struggles for independence that stopped short of the social revolution for “a great universal and international federation” and a new “social organization”?

Anarchists and syndicalists seemed to have adopted three main approaches.[111] The first of the anarchist and syndicalist responses was that current independence struggles were futile, inasmuch as they were viewed as simply replacing foreign with local oppressors. There were, for instance, substantial tensions between Cuba’s early anarchist-led unions, stressing class struggle, and the separatist movement, stressing the national unity across class, which is touched upon in Shaffer’s chapter.[112] Key anarchists like Enrique Roig de San Martín (1843– 1889) suggested that any change short of full-blown social revolution (delivering national freedom) was futile, and sought to distance the unions from the separatists.[113] This position effectively maintained that national liberation struggles were basically nationalist, and would thus inevitably generate narrowly nationalist outcomes: a new state, and the persistence of a class system. This left these anarchists and syndicalists outside of national liberation movements; notwithstanding their principled opposition to imperialism and colonialism, it often meant they sidestepped these issues for an ostensible focus on class struggle.

The second modal approach was quite the opposite: it actively and uncritically embraced nationalism. Like Roig de San Martín, it tended to conflate nationalism and national liberation, except that it saw this relationship as positive and necessary. In his pioneering work on Korean anarchism, John Crump drew attention to a tendency that was so deeply imbued with nationalism that it “flouted the basic principles of anarchism”.[114] Yu ha-myŏng and Yu Rim served in the Korean Provisional Government in exile, and with Ha formed an Independent Workers and Peasants Party (IWFP) to run in the first post-independence elections. Yu Rim stated that “We Korean Anarchists are not literal non-governmentists” but “want to establish an independent and democratic unified government”.[115] In China, likewise, the anarchists Li Shizeng (1881–1973) and Wu Zhihui (1865–1953) were closely associated with what Dirlik labels the anti-Communist “nationalistically obsessed Guomindang Right”. In practice, they saw the nationalist program as a necessary step towards a future transition toward anarcho-communism.[116] In other words, this approach saw the formation of independent nation-states as a partial break with imperialism, and, indeed, a precondition for a future anarchist society. From this stages approach followed a willingness to set aside differences with the nationalists, downplaying anti-statism and class struggle—at least until independent statehood was achieved.

The third anarchist and syndicalist position on independence struggles was the most sophisticated, and arguably the most important historically: a project of critical engagement and radicalization. National liberation struggles were seen as a crucial part of the libertarian program, and of the class struggle. While current independence struggles could be captured by bourgeois and other elite forces, this was not inevitable. Nationalist and elitist forces could be displaced, with the intervention of anarchists and syndicalists pushing national liberation struggles directly towards internationalist and anti-statist social revolution. Success would merge class and national struggles, rather than somewhat artificially separate the two.

From 1892, as Shaffer indicates, Cuban anarchism largely committed itself to the separatist struggle. It declared unequivocal support for “the collective liberty of a people, even though the collective liberty desired is that of emancipation from the tutelage of another people”, but added the struggle must lead to the predominance of the interests of the popular classes.[117] Many joined José Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Cubano, or PRC). When the War of Independence started in 1895, anarchists made a “huge” contribution, providing soldiers, resources, propaganda and subversion—and martyrs.[118] The anarchists retained their own agenda throughout, and, after formal independence, were relentless critics of the postcolonial elite and its United States backers.

This position, in short, centered on contesting the national liberation struggle within a larger movement that included nationalists. At its heart was a conceptual distinction between nationalism (merely aiming at a new state) and national liberation in general (potentially able to move to social revolution); and, from this, a determination to achieve leadership of the national liberation struggle. From this perspective, anarchists and syndicalists must participate in national liberation struggles, while remaining skeptical of the nationalists and their plans for statehood. Genuine national liberation did not mean independent statehood, but the satisfaction of the demands of the masses for social and economic equality via a libertarian socialist society.

For example, Connolly—as O’Connor notes—was well known for the dictum that since “the Irish national struggle was also a social struggle, only the working class could complete the struggle, and only socialism could guarantee real economic independence”. The other key figure in Irish syndicalism, Jim Larkin (1874–1947) held a similar position. Both men gave to socialist republicanism a distinctly syndicalist edge. The syndicalists in South Africa in the late 1910s—admirers of Connolly—similarly rejected African (and Afrikaner) nationalism in favor of national liberation through an interracial One Big Union. In South Africa, according to van der Walt, syndicalist formations like the International Socialist League viewed the revolutionary One Big Union as proletarian forge in which a common society embracing all, regardless of color, would be created. Rather than create a nationstate, they sought to establish a self-managed libertarian socialist “Industrial Republic”, as “an integral part of the International Industrial Republic”.

In Puerto Rico, Shaffer notes, anarchists challenged the mainstream independence groups, insisting that real independence had to involve an anarchist and communist restructuring of society. In Mexico, the PLM’s work provides a clear example of an anarchist current aiming to push struggles against Western domination and local elites in a revolutionary direction. At the same time, PLM experience shows the difficult questions that participation in such struggles can pose. Most notable is the PLM’s attempt to radicalize the Plan of San Diego (PSD), a 1915 separatist revolt in southern Texas by Mexicans and MexicanAmericans that had overtones of racial warfare.

In China, too, collaboration with the nationalist party, the Goumdindang, was a controversial issue, with some anarchists seeking to tactically use Guomindang resources for their own, distinct, purposes: Dirlik’s and Hwang’s chapters deal with some of the complexities this entailed. The revolutionary outlook on national liberation was also very influential among Korean anarchists. Militants like Yi Jeonggyu and Bak aimed at social revolution, rather than simply a political revolution that aimed merely at independence. Hwang challenges Crump’s emphasis on the nationalist inclination of the Korean movement, arguing that while anarchism was “re-read” to stress independence, independence was often rethought as part of a larger set of transnational and universal problems and concerns. Shin’s 1923 “Declaration of the Korean Revolution” fits well: besides independence from Japan, it stressed the abolition of class rule and exploitation in “an ideal Korea”.[119]

In Egypt, Gorman shows, the anarchists disagreed with the nationalists, but engaged in several de facto alliances. One was the participation of the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta in the 1882 revolt led by Ahmad ‘Urabi, and this convergence was also in evidence in the 1919 Revolution, marked by countrywide agitation against British rule, and syndicalist activity between foreign and Egyptian labor. For its part, the Military Revolutionary Soviet of the Makhnovischna declared,

When speaking of Ukrainian independence, we do not mean national independence in Petliura’s [Symon Petliura, head of the nationalist Directory] sense, but the social independence of workers and peasants. We declare that Ukrainian, and all other, working people have the right to self-determination not as an ‘independent nation’, but as ‘independent workers’.

To the extent that the activities of Makhnovischna and Korean People’s Association in Manchuria constituted social revolutions, they would exemplify a successful drive to push national liberation well beyond the bounds of narrow nationalism.

The third anarchist and syndicalist position on independence struggles was very much in line with Bakunin’s support for independence movements on the basis that national liberation had to be fought “as much in the economic as in the political interests of the masses”. A movement dominated by “ambitious intent to set up a powerful State”, and the agenda of “a privileged class” would end up a “retrogressive, disastrous, counter-revolutionary movement”.[120] He believed that:[121]

Every exclusively political revolution—be it in defense of national independence or for internal change...—that does not aim at the immediate and real political and economic emancipation of people will be a false revolution. Its objectives will be unattainable and its consequences reactionary.

The “statist path involving the establishment of separate ... States” was “entirely ruinous for the great masses of the people”, because it did not abolish class power but simply changed the nationality of the ruling class.[122]

A Note on the Volume’s Organization and Scope

This volume is divided into two parts. The first part consists of studies that examine anarchism and syndicalism in the context of European and Japanese colonialism. We define colonialism in a straight-forward manner to refer to peoples and regions of the world subject to direct foreign political and economic control. Some may find controversial the designation of China as part of the colonial world. Although it was never completely colonized, it was systematically subjected to an expanding range of formal concessions of territory and rights from the 19^th century, and then to a protracted colonial conquest from the 1930s. The case can thus be made for its inclusion in the colonial section given its colonial and “semi-colonial” status by the early 20^th century.

The second part groups studies that probe the experience of anarchism and syndicalism in the context of postcolonial situations, which, given the period covered by this volume, necessarily means primarily Latin American cases. For the purposes of this book, “postcolonial” denotes ex-colonies that, despite independent polities, remain profoundly influenced by the legacies of colonialism. In particular, it refers to countries subject to a clear (but widely varying and contested) degree of indirect external control and of relative economic dependence within the world capitalist economy’s division of labor. These external constraints condition, but do not determine, internal systems of domination by class, race, culture, and gender.

No single volume can possibly address the entirety of the historical experience of anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. This book focuses fundamentally on several key analytical questions: Which social groups formed the base of support for anarchist and syndicalist movements in the colonial and postcolonial world between 1870 and 1940? What were the doctrinal tenets, programmatic goals, and organizational structures of these movements? What methods of struggle did they employ? How did they address racial and ethnic cleavages? How did these movements grapple with colonialism, national liberation, imperialism, state formation, and social revolution?

Other questions and lines of inquiry also need to be investigated. We suggest that gender ideologies and practice, race relations, and generational dynamics in anarchist and syndicalist movements in the colonial and postcolonial world require further scholarly research. Likewise, more studies on the countercultural and internationalist dimensions and influences of these movements are needed. We are also cognizant of the limited coverage of our volume. Certainly, anarchist and syndicalist (and anarchist and syndicalist-influenced) movements in other African, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Central American, and Pacific island contexts deserve scholarly examination. The post-1940 period also needs attention. We hope this volume opens up new vistas on the history of labor and the left, and the materials collected here will help to shape future research agendas.

References cited in text

• Part 1

Part One: Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial World

“Diverse in race, religion and nationality ... but united in aspirations of civil progress”:
The Anarchist Movement in Egypt 1860–1940

Anthony Gorman
University of Edinburgh

Anarchism first appeared in Egypt among Italian political refugees and workers during the 1860s. Nurtured by a developing international network of labor, transport and communications across the Mediterranean, it expanded beyond Italian circles to attract members from across Egypt’s diverse ethnic and religious communities over the following decades. Though heterogeneous in character, different anarchist trends shared a discourse of radical social emancipation that in its propaganda and public actions proclaimed the universality of humankind and decried the evils of capitalism, state power and religious dogma.

In the years after 1900, anarcho-syndicalism played an energetic and central role in the development of the labor movement in Egypt, articulating the rights of workers in the struggle against capital and promoting an internationalist activism that resisted nationality, religion and race as the basis of organization as it countered imperialist, nationalist and state-based perspectives. Yet, while it rejected nationalism as an organizing principle, anarchism did at times make common cause with the nationalists against imperialism and arguably influenced the strategy and tactics of the nationalist movement.

Origins

The presence of a foreign working community in Egypt at the end of the 19^th century has its roots in the policies pursued by Muhammad Ali, ruler of Egypt from 1805 until 1849. Embarking on a program to modernize the military, state administration and the economy, he had encouraged those with the necessary skills to migrate to Egypt to assist in the task. Under his successors, Sa‘id (1854–1863) and Isma‘il (1863–1879), an impressive series of infrastructure projects, all requiring skilled labor went ahead—the establishment of a railway network, the expansion of the canal system and an extensive urban building program. The flagship project, the construction of the Suez Canal, required large numbers Italian, Greek, Syrian and Dalmatian workers, in addition to Egyptian laborers before being completed in 1869.[123] However, the availability and employment of such labor, both longterm migrants and seasonal workers, was not a phenomenon confined to Egypt but part of a broader trend throughout the Mediterranean and beyond to the New World that laid the foundations of an international network not only in labor but capital, goods and ideas.[124]

That anarchism should first find a following among Italians in Egypt is not surprising given the presence of a significant Italian working community, the established tradition of Egypt as a place of refuge for political exiles and the historical role played by Italians in the development of the anarchist movement.[125] In time this combination of labor and political radicalism proved potent. The Italian Workers Society (Società Operaio Italiana), formed in Alexandria in the early 1860s to protect the interest of its members, was the first in a series of Italian organizations that took on an increasingly political character.

By the middle of the next decade veterans from Garibaldi’s campaigns and other radicals established Thought and Action (Pensiero ed Azione), a political association based on Mazzinian principles.[126] Soon after in 1876, a more radical splinter group was recognized as an official section of the First International in Alexandria.[127] Additional sections were formed in Cairo, Port Said and Ismailia the following year and presented their first report at the Anti-Authoritarian International held at Verviers, Belgium that September.[128]

Although strongly Italian in character, even at this early stage the movement was seeking to expand its activities beyond the boundaries of this ethnic community. The report presented at Verviers does not survive but the published proceedings show that the Alexandria section, with the support of the section in Cairo, and the Greek Federation, successfully sponsored a proposal, calling on the federal bureau to disseminate socialist propaganda in the East “in Italian, Illyrian, Greek, Turkish and Arabic”.[129] The dissolution of the International soon after meant the motion came to nothing yet it was a clear statement of the intention to disseminate the ideas of the First International beyond European communities to the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The international network

The anarchist movement was not only global in ambition but international in connections, scope and operation. The Egyptian participation at Verviers was the beginning of a continuing pattern of involvement with international congresses. At the London conference in July 1881 that unsuccessfully sought to reconstitute the International, the Egyptian sections, now in federation with Istanbul, were represented by Errico Malatesta, one of the preeminent anarchists of his time.[130] Francesco Cini, who lived for many years in Egypt from the 1870s, attended the revolutionary socialist congress at Capolago in Italy in 1891 that strongly endorsed an anarchist program. Later, Cini would be chosen as the delegate for Egyptian anarchists at the London conference of August 1914 subsequently canceled due to the outbreak of the war.[131] The pattern continued beyond the war with the participation of Alexandria anarchists at the Second Congress of the Italian Anarchist Union (Unione Anarchica Italiana), held in Italy in July 1920.[132]

More informally, the international anarchist network was lubricated by the frequent movement of individual militants between different countries and across continents, from Asia to Europe, North Africa and the Americas. Egypt itself had the advantages of serving as a relatively safe political haven while not being far from Europe. In time, it developed into a significant anarchist center at the eastern end of the Mediterranean with close connections to Greece and Turkey, attested by the confederation between anarchists in Egypt and Istanbul during the 1880s. Regular connections were also maintained with groups in Tunis, Palestine and Lebanon, as individual activists crisscrossed the Mediterranean or followed the line of the North African coast, utilizing a network based on personal recommendation and shared ideological vision. These links operated far beyond the Mediterranean, extending not only with the main European centers but also across the Atlantic to the United States, particularly in the greater New York area, and to South America, in Brazil and Argentina.

While most of this movement was perforce of the rank-and-file fleeing repression, carrying confidential information, or seeking economic opportunity, leading anarchists also traveled for personal and political purposes. Egypt was a regular destination. Amilcare Cipriani, a key if mercurial figure of revolutionary politics during the 19^th century, was perhaps one of the first, visiting twice in the 1860s.[133] Other notable visitors included the celebrated geographer, Élisée Reclus (1884),[134] Malatesta (1878, 1882–83), Luigi Galleani (1900–1901)[135] and Pietro Gori, who passed through Egypt and Palestine on a lecture tour in early 1904.[136] The presence of such charismatic activists and thinkers no doubt inspired the local anarchist community to greater efforts even as they spurred on security authorities to greater surveillance.

Important as these visits were, the written word arguably sustained a more regular sense of international community and global political mission among anarchists. An ‘imagined community’ created and consolidated not by ‘print capitalism’ but print internationalism, the scattered arms of the movement were kept connected and informed by an expanding anarchist press from the second half of the 19^th century.[137] Information flowed in both directions. Activists in Egypt regularly subscribed to anarchist newspapers published in Europe, North Africa, and the Americas, most often in Italian but also in French and Greek.[138] Militants in Egypt contributed items on Egyptian affairs to anarchist newspapers abroad, particularly before the development of a local anarchist press. When newspapers such as La Tribuna Libera (“The Free Tribune”) and L’Operaio (“The Worker”) were established, they were available to an international readership that could follow labor and social affairs in Egypt.

In this way anarchists in Egypt (and elsewhere) were able to keep informed of the fortunes of the movement at home and abroad being provided with theoretical discussions, commentary, and serialized literature that promoted a shared sense of the international nature of the anarchist project. Many publications were dedicated to workers’ issues, offering insights, debates and discussion of common difficulties on matters of labor organization and strategy. Facilitated by an increasingly developed international transport system, particularly steamship services, the international anarchist press served as a vital channel for dissemination and diffusion of ideas a movement that saw itself as international in practice and conception.

The local scene

Despite the reverses suffered in Europe at the end of the 1870s and early 1880s, the anarchist movement continued to grow internationally. In 1881 in Alexandria, anarchists had established a European Social Studies Circle (Circolo europeo di studii sociali) where they discussed social questions and were operating a clandestine press for the printing of posters. In the same year a conference was convened at Sidi Gabr and attended by about a hundred activists from different anarchist groups across Egypt.[139]

At this very time Egypt was in the middle of a deep political crisis. Unable to service the debt incurred to fund expensive infrastructure projects and Ismail’s expensive lifestyle, Egypt had been forced to accept European control over its treasury in 1876. Three years later under European pressure, Ismaʿil had been deposed and succeeded by his son Tawfiq who endeavored to satisfy Egypt’s creditors. A contest for power developed between elements of the Turko-Circassian elite and Egyptian Nationalist officers led by Ahmad ‘Urabi who sought a constitutional government. By the beginning of 1882, ‘Urabi as War Minister was confronted by hostile British and French governments determined to defend European investments and their own resident nationals.

Characterized as anti-foreign, ‘Urabi did in fact receive support from some elements of the foreign community, including Italian workers in Alexandria and a number of anarchists.[140] In June, following their bombardment of Alexandria British forces landed in the city and marched against Urabi, defeating him at a last stand at Tel al-Kabir in September. British occupation of the rest of the country quickly followed.

In the early years of the British occupation, the anarchist movement in Egypt was plagued by the fragmentation, disputation and factionalism that characterized it elsewhere.[141] During the 1870s anarchists and socialists had been uneasy comrades under the umbrella of the International. The defection of Andrea Costa (an influential figure in Egypt) to legalitarian socialism in 1879 had caused a significant local schism. The movement suffered other internal divisions, particularly the enduring conflict between anti-organisationalists and anarchosyndicalists on the role of collective association in achieving anarchist aims. Until the end of the 19^th century, the former trend appears to have been in the ascendancy but with the growth of the labor movement anarcho-syndicalists expanded their influence. Other disputes reflected the power of personalities. Ugo Parrini, a key figure and staunch anti-organisationalist, was notorious for his uncompromising style and was a persistent obstacle to greater cooperation among anarchists. Not until after his death in 1906 was a national program of action agreed which provided a solid basis for collaboration within the Egyptian movement.

Although Italians remained the dominant ethnic group among anarchists in Egypt right up until World War I, over time the movement would expand beyond its original Italian nucleus and take on a more multiethnic character. Greek anarchists, particularly, produced a distinguished record of syndicalist activity, leading militants, and an impressive press and pamphlet literature, but the participation of Jews, Germans, and a variety of Eastern European nationalities was also notable.[142]

The extent of the participation of Arabophone Egyptians, while undoubted, is still difficult to quantify. While apparently absent from anarchist circles before 1900, the appearance of native Egyptians in important industrial actions, educational activities and anarchist meetings during the first decade of the new century suggests a growing involvement.[143] That impression is confirmed by the concerns expressed by Egyptians and the British authorities about the potential threat of anarchism and the new radical ideas posed towards Egyptian society.[144] The ethnic diversity of the anarchists in Egypt was matched by the wide range of occupational backgrounds. The majority of anarchists were skilled artisans such as carpenters, masons, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, stonecutters, tailors and painters, a phenomenon usually explained by the strong tradition of the guild, the better education and the relatively greater economic security of skilled tradesmen over factory workers.[145] Some came from the petite bourgeoisie, particularly grocers, jewelers, tavern and bar owners, whose businesses offered a useful place for meetings. Yet other anarchists had a commercial background being involved in trade, owning or working for merchant houses—particularly true of Jews in Alexandria—or came from the professional class, chiefly doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, journalists and writers. By the end of the 19^th century there was a shift away from the artisan core to the new working class, particularly cigarette workers, printers and the employes of the new large utilities, such as the tramway companies, providing new members. The great majority of anarchists attested in the record are men but the establishment of a separate women’s section in Cairo in the 1870s and the attention given to women’s issues suggests significant initial and ongoing female participation.[146]

Addressing the East

A diverse, multi-dimensional and sometimes contradictory assemblage of ideas, anarchism called for the moral, political, economic and social emancipation of all men and women through international solidarity and brotherhood. In promoting ‘the Idea’, it called for a struggle against the main causes of human exploitation, ignorance and injustice: capital (and its agent, the bourgeoisie), the state and dogmatic religious authority.

Anarchists never came to an absolute agreement on how this struggle might be conducted in Egypt but there was recognition of the particular difficulties the anarchist message faced there. Dr Enrico Insabato, an anarchist in Cairo, believed that European anarchists had first to disassociate themselves from those things that had overshadowed relations between East and West in order to effectively promote their message.[147] He singled out three particular aspects: the tradition of religious division (which he accused priests of creating); Western attempts at political domination of the East, notably the Crusades and the more recent ‘clerical and diplomatic dynamite’ conducted by certain Western powers; and finally, the forces of international capital.

We must show [them, i.e. the Arabs] that not all Europeans are exploiters and besides that the enemies of the Orient are also ours ... For them irresponsible anonymous capital is European [but] the day they become aware that the capitalist does not constitute the lowest part of the European population, they will give just form to their hatred.

Once anarchists found a “common language” and established intellectual communication with an audience in the East, Insabato believed that “the Idea is not only possible here but that it is destined to be the most illuminating fulcrum for the future development of European-Oriental relations”.[148]

Anarchist language in Egypt was strongest when it was attacking the evils of capitalism. While it also believed that dogmatic religious authority was one of the chief forces responsible for ignorance and injustice and called for emancipation not only from churches but “from synagogues, from temples and from mosques”,[149] Islam as a faith does not seem to have been specifically targeted in anarchist literature. This may have been because its nonhierarchical structure put it in a favorable light compared to other religions. Insabato himself had singled out Catholicism and Brahmanism as anarchism’s religious adversaries since they taught “blind and passive obedience” and were thus a type of “intellectual alcoholism”. Islam, by contrast, was praised for its tolerance by Raoul Canivet at the opening of the Free Popular University.[150]

The anarchist attitude to the Egyptian state was much more hostile even if it appears not to be detailed or systematic. There was general condemnation of the coercive aspects of the state, particularly the actions of the police, state security services and the culture of surveillance. The injustice of laws and the abuse of power were regularly criticized. Anarchists eschewed involvement in institutional politics in principle but they believed that the particular character of the Egyptian government, which impeded the formation of political parties and electoral contests, meant that the anarchist approach was better suited to Egyptian conditions than the pursuit of power through parliamentary contests advocated by legalitarian socialists.[151]

Further research is required to present a more complete picture of how anarchists viewed Islam and the Egyptian state. Pragmatic considerations, such as the viability of anti-religious rhetoric or concerns of deportation may have played some role in determining the limits of activism. Whether for ideological or practical reasons, anarchists did not target religion or the state head on. The program of action agreed at the anarchist conference held in 1909, one of the most widely agreed manifestos of the Egyptian movement, observed the standard demands for the abolition of private property and the state, but it gave more attention to the goal of social transformation through the use of propaganda, education and workers’ associations, urging members

... to take part collectively and individually in all agitation of a moral, economic and social nature, actively participating in all struggles between capital and labor, and [...] to maintain in their public and private life that consistency between ideal and action that attracts popular sympathy towards anarchists.[152]

The commitment to its internationalist mission and membership remained a central theme of anarchist discourse in Egypt. Public statements consistently emphasized the universal solidarity of all peoples. As one May Day poster announced,

On this day, across the sea and borders, conscious minorities of people, diverse in race, religion, nationality and customs but united in aspirations of civil progress, love, peace, well-being, liberty and hope greet the fateful date of 1 May.[153]

Such sentiments were commonly expressed by anarchists internationally. In Egypt, the reality of a multi-ethnic working class gave this ideal of people of different races, religions and nationalities united in solidarity more than rhetorical force. Particularly after 1900, this was a distinctive feature of Egyptian anarchism: that it sought to engage with the ethnic, religious and linguistic pluralism experienced by many in their everyday and working life to promote an internationalist message. At public conferences and labor meetings audiences of different faiths and nationalities gathered to listen to the same message delivered in a number of languages. This is not to say that this internationalist call did not meet obstacles, sometimes within the movement itself though more often without. Nevertheless, the record suggests that anarchism was in principle committed to adapting to and engaging with the diversity of Egyptian society at large.

Propagating the Idea

Anarchists in Egypt overwhelmingly favored propaganda of the word over “propaganda of the deed”. Although there were some cases of workplace-related violence, they eschewed political assassination and violence against members of the government or ruling class even if they applauded such acts carried out by their comrades in Europe and the United States.[154] Nevertheless, local consular authorities were eager to promote a sense of the threat that anarchism posed to society at large.

The sensational announcement in October 1898 of the arrest of eighteen anarchists in Alexandria on charges of conspiracy to assassinate the German Emperor Wilhelm II during his visit to the Middle East was perhaps the most obvious example.[155] Splashed across the local and international press to maximize its impact, the affair seems to have been cooked up by an agent provocateur, perhaps with some assistance from the Italian consulate, and thus reflects more the concerns of the authorities than any real threat of revolutionary violence by local activists. In the trial the following year, the accused were all acquitted of the main charge although they were found guilty of lesser charges of possession of prohibited literature. A series of rumors of conspiracies ascribed to anarchists in subsequent years should probably be put in the same category.[156]

Rather than favor political violence, anarchists in Egypt preferred the spoken or printed word to disseminate their ideas, principally through communal study, public meetings, demonstrations and the press. Small groups had been organized at least since the early 1880s as a forum for holding discussions and attracting new members.[157] This pattern continued into the new century but it took on a broader compass. The “European Circle” of 1881 gave way to the International Reading Room (Sala di lettura internazionale), a small library of anarchist books and newspapers in Cairo, which opened its doors to the public in June 1902, distributing a manifesto in Italian and Hebrew (or Yiddish?) on the occasion.

A series of similar ventures followed: a Social Studies Club was launched in Alexandria by young Jewish anarchists in 1903 and a Libertarian Studies Room (Sala di studi libertari) the following year in Cairo.[158] Three years later a committee of Europeans, local Jews and Egyptians invited “all workers and friends of justice” to help establish an International Reading Room which would hold “scientific, philosophical, political and social works in every language.”[159] Other associations moved beyond the reading room and stressed specific aspects of libertarian thought. Atheist Clubs (Cercles Athées) were set up both in Cairo and Alexandria while a section of Free Thinkers (Libres penseurs), with a membership of more than two hundred, was organized in Alexandria.[160]

The local anarchist press aimed for a larger audience. After the false start of 1877, the appearance in Alexandria of the bilingual La Tribuna Libera/ Le Tribune Libre heralded a renewed period of activity in October 1901.[161] Announcing itself as an “International organ for the emancipation of the Proletariat”, La Tribuna sought nothing less than the “complete emancipation of moral-political-economic and social slavery” of the workers of the world.[162] In the course of the seven issues that appeared before the end of the year, it set an example for the radical press that followed, featuring articles on anarchist thought, local and international news of the movement, extracts from noted writers such as Leo Tolstoy, and a series on education by Dutch anarchist, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis.

Over the next decade, a series of newspapers and periodicals took up different aspects of the anarchist program. In Alexandria the weekly L’Operaio (1902–03) promoted anarcho-syndicalism, focusing on issues of workers’ associations, education and public health. In response, il Domani (“Tomorrow”) (1903) in Cairo adopted a stridently libertarian tone. Lux! (“Light!”) (1903) a fortnightly literary journal presented extended discussions of anarchist theory and practice, while the Alexandrian weekly, Risorgete! (“Rise Again!”) (1908– 1910), promoted a strong anti-clerical line.[163] In 1908 the appearance of O Ergatis (“The Worker”), “an organ for the emancipation of women and the worker”, provided for a Greek language readership. Although contrasting in styles and specific orientation, particularly true of il Domani and L’Operaio, these publications were expressive of the ideological and linguistic diversity of the Egyptian movement. From 1909, a more coordinated anarchist press was forged from the consensus of the conference in Alexandria that year.[164] In the succeeding years two newspapers, L’Idea (1909–1911) and L’Unione (1913–14), both co-edited by committees in Cairo and Alexandria, spoke to a broad audience with articles in Italian, French and Greek.

Despite its polyglot character, the anarchist press in Egypt does not appear to have included an Arabic language newspaper.[165] Nevertheless, anarchism (usually referred to as fawdawiyya in Arabic) had regularly featured in the mainstream Arabic newspapers since the 1890s, usually in reporting the activities of the movement abroad. At the same time modernist journals such as al-Muqtataf and al-Hilal carried articles discussing the origins and development of anarchist thought and practice, sometimes in the context of the broader socialist movement.[166] From 1897 al-Jami‘a al-Uthmaniyya engaged with socialist ideas while a review, al-Mustaqbal (“The Future”), which appeared in 1914 but was soon closed down by the authorities, featured the work of Salama Musa and Shibli Shumayyil, two Egyptian writers influenced by anarchist ideas.[167]

As the international anarchist press served to promote the ideas and sustain the identity of the movement globally, so did its local counterpart on a smaller scale. The effectiveness of this press in promoting the ideas of the movement has to be qualified by two important considerations. The first is the literacy of the target audience. This was much higher among the foreign working class with, for example, sixtyseven percent of Italians and almost sixty percent of Greeks being able to read and write, than for native Egyptians, where only thirteen per cent of men and about one per cent for women, were literate.[168] However, access to newspapers was not strictly limited to the literate since the common practice of reading newspapers out aloud in cafés allowed for the transmission of ideas to the unlettered.

Affordability was also a limiting factor. Although anarchist newspapers suffered from regular financial difficulties in production, they were competitively priced. La Tribuna Libera, L’Indipendente (“The Independent”) and L’Unione (The Union”) all sold for five millièmes

(half a piaster) a copy. This was the same price as the mainstream Arabic language papers at a time when the daily wage for highly skilled (usually European) labor was between twenty and forty piasters and for unskilled (most often Egyptian) workmen, about eight piasters.[169] L’Operaio, unusually for an anarchist newspaper, carried advertising and sold for only one millième. Other anarchist publications, particularly numeri unici (one-off issues), were often free or by voluntary donation. At the other end of the scale Lux! which in any case was a more literary production was expensive at two piasters a copy. Circulation figures are difficult to establish but we know that the first issue of La Tribuna Libera was one thousand copies (six hundred of which were sent abroad).[170]

While the press served to connect its readership through dissemination of news and analysis, the anniversaries of important political events offered an opportunity for a public commemoration of the radical past and celebration of its principles. On these occasions, posters, leaflets and fliers were printed, posted in the streets and distributed to the public by different anarchist groups, promoting the values of their cause and their aspirations for the future. Initially the most fêted of these days was 18 March, the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871, publicly celebrated in Egypt by 1889.[171] In time it would be challenged by May Day in marking the international solidarity of workers.[172] For Italian anarchists the occasion of 20 September, the anniversary of the capture of Rome and the completion of Italian unification in 1870 provided a specific occasion to contemplate a sense of lost opportunity.[173]

Other expressions of anarchist sentiment were more spontaneous. In January 1907 a series of public protests gathered in Alexandria and Cairo to oppose the rumored deportation of three Russian revolutionaries.[174] Two years later anarchist hostility towards religious authority and political tyranny came together dramatically when the Spanish government arrested Francesco Ferrer i Guàrdia, a noted anarchist thinker, educator and founder of the Modern School movement in Spain, on charges of taking part in the anti-conscription uprising. News of the action spread quickly and prompted widespread protest internationally. In Alexandria a Pro-Ferrer committee was formed and hundreds of copies of a numero unico published on 30 September 1909 to publicize the case. On 4 October a series of speakers denounced the actions of the Spanish government at a meeting at the Free Popular University. Despite these and other protests Ferrer was executed in Barcelona some days later but he soon acquired martyr status. In Cairo later that month a number of anarchist organizations held a pro-Ferrer protest march.[175] By the end of the year a plaque in Ferrer’s memory was set up in Alexandria and on 1 May the following year, the cry was heard: “Vive 1 May, Vive liberty, Vive Francesco Ferrer”.[176]

Popular education

The outrage expressed at the execution of Ferrer was not simply a protest against state tyranny but recognition of his status as an advocate for secular education, an important vehicle for social emancipation in anarchist thought. Indeed, it was in the cause of public education that anarchists in Egypt mounted their most ambitious project, the Free Popular University (Università Popolare Libera, henceforth UPL) in Alexandria in 1901.[177] Planned in the early months of that year and galvanized by the leadership of Galleani, the UPL was inaugurated in May with the aim of providing free evening education to the popular classes. The event was covered at length in the local European and Arabic language press which endorsed enthusiastically its objectives and drew widespread support from across the full range of Alexandrian society.

Although inspired by a European model (the first UPLs had opened in Italy over the previous twelve months), the UPL in Egypt developed its own specific program and character. Ideologically it applied a more radical vision than the Italian UPLs, which had close ties to the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), in offering classes in the humanities and the latest advances in science to workers and providing individual lectures on progressive social issues, such as workers’ associations and the position of women in society. The UPL in Alexandria was also more internationalist by virtue of catering to a culturally and linguistically diverse community. Drawing on the services of voluntary teachers, classes were given in a number of languages, principally Italian and French, but also in Arabic and other languages. As one Alexandrian daily newspaper noted, “All the languages that sound in the mouths of the happy fellow drinkers of the waters of the Nile serve as a vehicle in lectures of different university teachers”.[178]

Despite this propitious beginning, the radical nature of the UPL soon attracted hostility. Concerned at its political character the Italian consular authorities moved quickly to institute legal proceedings against a UPL lecturer, Dr Curti-Garzoni, after he had made certain remarks in class regarding the recent assassination of the Italian king, Umberto I. The action, while attracting some public criticism, effectively undermined the momentum behind the UPL and witnessed a quick shift in attitude in some quarters. Formerly supportive, al-Ahram now accused the university of being based on “depraved principles” and standing “revealed for its disgrace and emptiness”.[179] Within a year reliably bourgeois elements had wrested control of the UPL from its anarchist founders and proceeded to transform it into a vocational college that, among other things, taught shorthand, accountancy and languages. Its brief life as a revolutionary project notwithstanding, the UPL marks an important moment for anarchism in Egypt and almost certainly served as an inspiration to Egyptian nationalists who would establish the Higher Schools Club (Nadi al-madaris al-‘ulya) in 1905 which similarly put educational means to political purpose.[180] Anarcho-syndicalism and labor

Anarchism in Egypt would have its most significant impact on the development of the labor movement. With the emergence of a new working class of critical mass at the end of the 19^th century, anarchosyndicalism, in contrast to the anti-organisationalists, held that formal collective organization was the necessary instrument of social revolution and began to assert itself as a force. Employing a discourse that stressed the virtues of solidarity, workers’ rights, and justice, it played a central role in organization and formulation of the strategy and tactics of working class militancy in resisting the predations of capital.

Organized labor was far from new in Egypt. Guilds had been an integral part of the traditional Ottoman order, serving as guardians of the trade, regulating entry into the profession, maintaining standards of workmanship, controlling competition and providing a framework for mutual aid.[181] The modernization program of Muhammad Ali in the first half of the 19^th century and the progressive incorporation of Egypt into the international capitalist system in the second had begun to undermine established social and economic structures. Greater foreign trade, the demand and import of large amounts of goods and the inflow of capital invested in land companies, agriculture and local industry in Egypt significantly changed the economic and social role of guilds and the character of the working class.[182]

As has already been indicated, an important part of this process was the establishment of a local foreign workforce alongside native Egyptian labor. Historians of the Egyptian labor movement, primarily concerned with its contribution to the national movement, have tended to stress the differences between the European and foreign worker above any common basis for action.[183] While acknowledging in varying measure the positive role played by foreign workers in inspiring the organization of Egyptian workers, they have tended to emphasize the factors that militated against such cooperation: the ethnic character of some occupations, the differential rates of pay, and the legal advantages foreign workers enjoyed under the Capitulations.[184]

This characterization of the relationship between these two groups requires some revision. While the factors noted clearly played some part in determining the pattern and configuration of labor activism, the record shows a clear and sustained evidence of cooperation and collaboration between the elements within these two groups that took off at the very beginning of the new century. As Lockman has rightly pointed out, the native Egyptian working class was not homogeneous, did it function as a single actor nor did it possess a single subjectivity.[185] The same is true of the local foreign working class.[186] Our understanding of the relations between these two groups should therefore not be reduced to a European style of labor organization in competition with a new emerging Egyptian labor model. It is argued here that a model of collaboration between European and Egyptian workers grounded in an internationalist ethic and universal workers’ rights was locally constituted in Egypt during the critical years from the beginning of the 20^th century until 1914.

The international or mixed union (in Arabic, niqaba mukhtalifa) was the clearest formal expression of common cause between foreign and Egyptian workers and the most obvious vehicle for anarcho-syndicalist militancy. Accepting workers of all nationalities, these unions were established in important trades, such as cigarette workers, tailors, tobacco workers and shoemakers, but they were also set up on a less specific basis, such as the International Union of Workers and Employes (IUWE) formed in Cairo. Meetings and demonstrations reflected the international character of the membership. At a meeting during the tailors’ strike in 1901, workers’ demands were read out in a number of languages while at the inaugural meeting of the IUWE in 1909 speakers addressed an audience of more than two thousand people on the importance of the collective action and international solidarity in Arabic, French, Greek, Italian and German.[187] Union leadership was similarly international. A committee of fourteen made up of five Greeks, five Egyptians, two Syrians, one Italian and an Armenian, for example, ran the shoemakers union.[188]

In common with existing workers’ associations, these international unions provided various welfare services to members but they also represented a break from earlier patterns of labor organization. They more aggressively championed workers’ interests in the battle against employers and they also appealed to higher values of international solidarity and universal brotherhood adopting names redolent with ideological aspirations such as Concord (tailors), Progress (tobacco workers) and Reform (shoemakers). They were complemented in this by the resistance leagues (leghe di resistenza), first established in Alexandria among printers, tailors and cigarette rollers at the beginning of the decade by the tireless Pietro Vasai, which probably served as a smaller, disciplined core of anarcho-syndicalist practice.[189] In Cairo in 1910 the common purpose and ideological affiliation between these organizations was made particularly clear, when the IUWE, the Ligue Typographique, the Association of Cigarettiers and the International

Federation of Resistance, rented a common premises.[190]

The cigarette rollers union embodied the new militancy of the international unions. Originally set up as a Greek body in Cairo during the 1890s, it accepted membership from rollers of all nationalities just prior to launching the successful strike of 1899–1900 that is regarded as a milestone in industrial militancy in Egypt.[191] The successful out come of this action put the cigarette workers at the vanguard of the new labor movement. However, the peaceful gains of this strike contrasted with the bruising confrontations in December of the following year when police used canes and fire hoses to attack workers. More desperate still was the strike of 1903. At the height of the confrontation, anarchists Ugo Parrini and Nicolas Doumas led the call for a general strike, urging workers to fight violence with violence.

Ultimately the strike collapsed as employers brought in other Egyptian and Syrian workers as strike breakers and successfully split the united front by branding the industrial dispute an ethnic conflict. Cigarette workers would take some years to recover from the blow. When they did reorganize in 1908, the two cigarette unions, the Matossian Union and the Ligue Internationale des Ouvriers Cigarettiers et Papetiers du Caire, further expanded their membership by accepting all cigarette workers, not only rollers.

By the end of the first decade of the century, the anarcho-syndicalist international union had emerged as a significant industrial and indeed moral force. As one Cairene newspaper confidently announced,[192]

Happily in Cairo some years ago, a movement began to be observed of the fraternization of the working classes, and after not many years the city of the Caliphs will be one of the first socialist centers on account of its international character.

The optimism may have been overstated but the sentiment expressed captured the confidence of a broad movement within the working classes based on universalist principles in which anarchists and syndicalists had played a leading role.

Competing orientations

Despite the successes of the international unions, the call for workers of all nationalities to unite and defend their interests did not go unchallenged. The closest ideological rivals were the socialists with whom anarchists shared an anti-capitalist program but disagreed on the manner and the rationale it should be pursued.[193]

One source of competition for the loyalty of foreign workers was the local national associations found in the foreign communities that provided welfare services and a social life for members within a communitarian or homeland orientation. These were particularly significant in the Greek community where the power of the bourgeois oligarchy in funding and controlling community institutions maintained a patron-client relationship with workers.[194]

However, the most significant challenge to the internationalist aspirations of syndicalism in respect of Egyptian workers was the emerging nationalist movement. Initially, workers had not figured in the thinking of young nationalists like Muhammad Farid, who in the mid1890s had regarded signs of militant labor as part of a “European disease” and alien to the Egyptian context.[195] Over the next decade and a half as the phenomenon of strikes increased and the power of the labor movement became clear, the nationalist position shifted.[196] In 1909 the Watani Party openly backed the formation of the Manual Trades Workers Union (MTWU), a diverse body of Egyptian urban workers, recognizing both the need to constitute a broader national community and the political potential of the worker in the struggle against the British occupation.[197]

Well before this time, anarcho-syndicalists had been aware of the need to engage with the native Egyptian worker. This was most easily done in the framework of the international union; however the structure of the working class, where many occupations were for all practical purposes practiced only by Egyptians, meant that their formation was often not feasible. Nevertheless, some anarchists and particularly the editors of L’Operaio even as they recognized certain difficulties highlighted the importance of promoting the necessity of labor organization and militancy to the native proletariat. When the cab drivers in Alexandria went on strike in April 1903, the paper heralded this as the beginning of a genuine Egyptian militancy.[198] The editors of L’Unione similarly stressed the shared interests of European and Egyptian workers, emphasizing they had to unite to successfully defend their interests because “capital is our common enemy”. More than that they pointed to the universal condition of workers:[199]

Labor has no frontiers or language. Therefore we make no issue of nationality, of religion, of race. All feel the same needs, all suffer the same grief; all have one single aspiration: their own well-being, which cannot be other than the result of the common well-being.

Egyptian nationalists, however, articulated quite a different political vision and in the years after the formation of the MTWU contended with anarcho-syndicalists for the support of the working class in Egypt, employing both discursive and organizational tactics, and drawing on nativist and ethnocentric appeals to splinter the internationalist labor movement. In this, they followed the employers during the cigarette strike of 1903.

One arena in which these conflicts were played out was the International Printers League of Cairo. Established at the beginning of the century by Italian anarcho-syndicalists, the membership of the union was predominantly Italian but included Greek and Egyptian members. In 1909 a splinter group of Italian workers sought to break away from the union to form an Italian Mutual Assistance Society. The anarchist l’Idea came out strongly against the move branding it a “regression” that rejected “brotherhood and international solidarity”.[200] For a time, a split appears to have been averted but in February 1911 some parting of the ways between Egyptian and European printers seems to have occurred.[201] In the years that followed, anarcho-syndicalist forces were weakened by the government campaign of deportation waged against activists, Pietro Vasai being among them.[202] Yet, by 1915 now under the leadership of Italian anarchist Giuseppe Pizzuto, Europeans and Egyptians were again accepted as members of the union on equal terms.[203]

The postwar order

Britain declared Egypt a protectorate following the outbreak of the World War I and for the next four years oversaw a policy of clamping down on all political activities, interning nationalists, surveilling or deporting foreign anarchists and closing down newspapers. With the end of hostilities in 1918 Egyptian nationalists renewed their calls for the immediate evacuation of British forces and Egyptian independence. The British government sought to resist these demands, a policy that detonated a series of protests across the country, known as the 1919 Revolution, which saw nationalists fronting a broad-based coalition of forces.

The same year witnessed an explosion in industrial unrest unleashed after the enforced moderation of the war years. A strike in the Suez Canal in May was the prelude to an outbreak of strikes in August by Egyptian and foreign workers in Cairo and Alexandria and the establishment of a large number of new labor syndicates. Anarchosyndicalists again played a leading part in this movement. Pizzuto at the head of the printers’ union led the move to set up a Bourse de Travail in Cairo in the summer of 1919 before being deported in September. In February 1921, after considerable planning the General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT, or Ittihad al-niqabat al-‘am) was established in Alexandria with anarchist

Joseph Rosenthal as one of its chief organizers.[204] The CGT brought together almost three thousand mostly foreign workers from twentyone unions, but it was a measure of Rosenthal’s standing at the time that he was visited privately later in the year by Mustafa al-Nahas, a leading member of the Wafd and future Egyptian Prime Minister.[205]

These years also saw a reconfiguration of radical political forces. In August 1921 the Egyptian Socialist Party (ESP), the precursor of Egyptian Communist Party, was established. Based in Cairo with branches in Alexandria and the Delta, it claimed a party membership of fifteen hundred by late 1922 drawn from both Egyptian nationals and resident foreigners. Its program was anti-imperialist, calling for the liberation of the Nile Valley (Egypt and the Sudan), and anti-capitalist. Its economic and social principles owed a significant debt to anarchism even if it did embrace parliamentary politics.[206] According to one of its leaders, the party aimed

to defend their [i.e. workers’] interests in parliament and elsewhere, and to work to force the government to issue social laws to protect the workers, who were left to the mercy of capitalism and its tyranny.[207]

These words of Rosenthal, a key figure in radical politics of more than twenty years, suggest that many of those who had been anarchist militants before the war were now drawn to the party as the main vehicle for the radical challenge to the traditional political order.[208] In this they finally agreed with their close rivals, the socialists with whom they had been doing battle and making common cause since the 1880s.

The early life of the ESP was marked by internal conflicts over policy and strategy prompting the departure of more moderate members. One contentious issue was the question of affiliation with the Communist International (Comintern). Following contacts with Moscow, a general meeting of the ESP in January 1923 accepted the necessary twenty one conditions for Comintern membership and the Communist Party of Egypt (ECP) was formally established, adopting a program that called for the end of the Capitulations and equal pay for Egyptian and foreign workers.[209] Additional conditions were required, among them the expulsion of Rosenthal as an “undesirable” element, very probably because of his anarchist past, and possibly others with a similar record.

In 1922, the bitter dispute between Egyptian nationalists and Britain was temporarily settled by the British decision to unilaterally grant Egypt self-rule even if it reserved certain important powers to itself. At the beginning of 1924, Sa‘d Zaghlul at the head of the Wafd, became the head of Egypt’s first popularly elected government under the new constitution. He soon launched a sustained attack against the ECP and other radical opposition. For the rest of the 1920s and into the early 1930s communists, anarchists, socialist and radical nationalists were subject to a campaign of government repression. During this time anarchists themselves maintained a separate presence in Egypt but more research is required to establish how significant the movement was during this period.[210] While its role was clearly diminished compared to its pre-war position, anarchist thought and international syndicalism continued to exercise some influence. In the 1930s the Atheists Circle and Les Libres Penseurs continued to operate in Cairo, attracting a new generation of socialists and free thinkers, some of whom would play a part in the revived left of the 1940s.[211] By this time the labor movement drew ideological support from the communist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood but it nevertheless still owed something to its anarcho-syndicalist roots.

Anarchists and Egyptian nationalism

It was not only in the competition for the loyalties of workers that anarchists clashed with nationalists. There was a much more fundamental ideological gulf between the two movements. As Insabato had made clear,[212]

... we do not love religious fanaticism but we find that those who wish to substitute religious fanaticism with that of fatherland, nationality, caste or class make progress go backwards.

Yet despite their profound differences nationalism and anarchism did share a common enemy, imperialism, and on more than one occasion became de facto allies in opposing it. Perhaps the earliest example of this was in 1882 when Malatesta and his companions joined Urabi’s forces to resist the British, less to assist the nationalist cause per se than to take advantage of the opportunity the situation offered for social revolution.[213] For its part when the Watani Party embraced the labor movement, it nevertheless recognized the importance of allying with foreign workers and urged Egyptian workers during the tram strike of 1911 to, “Unite and strengthen yourselves and increase your numbers through combination and through unity with the European workers, your comrades”.[214]

This confluence of political interest was repeated more forcefully during the 1919 Revolution when nationwide agitation against continued British rule and syndicalist activity between foreign and Egyptian labor worked together to improve working conditions.[215] Nationalists were also influenced by the strategies and tactics of anarchism at home and abroad. The likelihood of the UPL influencing nationalist education policy has been mentioned. It seems clear the anarchist organization had influence on nationalist political activity more generally as well.[216]

Conclusion

In the fifty years before World War I an anarchist community emerged in Egypt sustained by an expanding Mediterranean network of migration, labor mobility, communications and transport. Initially taken up by elements in the resident Italian community, it was gradually embraced by members of other communities who shared a radical view of social emancipation of social, economic and intellectual life. In the decade and a half before World War I anarcho-syndicalism, typified by the ‘international’ union, was a leading force in the organization and development of a militant labor movement. Calling for international solidarity among all workers, it adapted with little effort to a society characterized by ethnic and religious pluralism and articulated an anticapitalist, anti-nationalist discourse as it did battle with nationalist and other forces in seeking the support of the popular classes in Egypt. As a libertarian movement, anarchists may have had a less definable but still significant impact, along with socialists and liberals, on the advancement of secular thought in Egyptian intellectual life.

Despite these successes, the anarchist movement faced considerable difficulties in Egypt. The coercion of the state through a sustained campaign of surveillance, prosecution and occasionally deportation no doubt hampered the movement as did its characterization by the authorities as a group of dissolute, political adventurers promoting an alien ideology. More than this, however, the achievement that anarchists had made in formulating an anti-capitalist discourse, in calling for social emancipation and articulating the consciousness of workers would from the beginning of the 1920s, be appropriated by other forces, chiefly the Egyptian Communist Party and the Egyptian national movement.

References cited in text

• Part 2

Part Two: Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Postcolonial World

Peruvian Anarcho-Syndicalism:
adapting transnational influences and forging counterhegemonic practices, 1905–1930

Steven J. Hirsch
University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg

At first glance early 20^th century Peru would seem an unlikely setting for anarcho-syndicalism to flourish. A predominantly agrarian society with a large and economically marginal indigenous population, Peru scarcely resembled a nation in the second stage of industrial manufacturing. Despite significant capitalist growth in Peru’s export sectors (chiefly mining, sugar, cotton, wool), vast areas of the nation were largely unaffected by capitalist change. With the exception of Lima-Callao, Peru’s capital and adjacent port city, which served as the nation’s administrative, commercial, and financial center, sizable urban economies were conspicuously absent. Not surprisingly, given this context, the massive influx of European immigrants that catalyzed the anarcho-syndicalist labor movements in Argentina and Brazil bypassed Peru.

Yet Peru was not entirely isolated from anarchist currents. Anarchist ideas and publications circulated widely in Peru by the first decade of the 20^th century. Manuel González Prada, a Peruvian aristocrat and social gadfly, and a handful of radical immigrant intellectuals based in Lima facilitated the dissemination of anarchist thought. Simultaneously, a nucleus of self-taught craftsmen and machine-tenders inspired by the writings of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta, spearheaded a movement to organize workers in Lima-Callao based on anarchosyndicalist doctrine. By dint of their efforts anarcho-syndicalism would become the dominant radical ideology of Peru’s fledgling labor movement. Although the influence of anarcho-syndicalism was strongest in Lima-Callao, it also spread to working-class elements along Peru’s northern coast, and central and southern highland regions.[839] The ideals and practice of anarcho-syndicalism appealed to a diverse spectrum of urban craftsmen, factory and transport workers, stevedores, and rural proletarians.[840] Adherents of anarcho-syndicalism however would constitute a minority of Peru’s urban and rural working-classes. Nevertheless, because of their tremendous determination and activism, anarcho-syndicalism would profoundly influence working-class struggles, organization, and culture in Peru during the first three decades of the 20^th century.

This chapter examines how anarcho-syndicalist ideas were adapted to Peruvian contexts, primarily in Lima-Callao and the southern region of Arequipa, Cuzco, and Puno during the 1910s and 1920s, the heyday of Peruvian anarcho-syndicalism. It analyzes the ways anarchosyndicalism challenged the combination of oligarchic rule by Peru’s creole planter class (sugar and cotton) and British and US imperialism in the form of economic control over the lucrative export sectors (copper, silver, oil) and domestic manufacturing (e.g. textiles).[841] This challenge mainly consisted of organizing labor unions and cultural associations, fostering a radical proletarian counterculture, and promoting class struggles.

The Origins of Anarcho-Syndicalism in Lima-Callao

The formation of a working-class in Lima-Callao can be traced to the 1890s and the early 1900s when an export boom stimulated unprecedented growth in the urban economy. Native and foreign capitalists involved in the export sectors channeled a portion of their profits into new financial institutions, infrastructure projects, utility companies, and consumer goods industries.

Accompanying this economic expansion was a dramatic increase in the urban laboring population. In Lima the number of manual workers had risen from roughly 9,000 in 1876 to nearly 24,000 in 1908. By the latter date, artisan and factory workers accounted for 17 percent of Lima’s estimated 140,000 inhabitants.[842] In Callao the labor force expanded less rapidly. Yet between 1905 and 1920 it would double in size to approximately 8,000 out of a total population of 52,000.[843] The composition of this incipient working class was extraordinarily heterogeneous; workers were divided by origins, sex, race, ethnicity, age, and skill.[844] Irrespective of these differences however, they tended to work long hours (12–16 hour days) under harsh conditions, and earn miserable wages that scarcely covered their subsistence needs.

To ameliorate their dismal working and living conditions workers began to embrace anarchism. The turn toward anarchism was in part a response to the failure of mutualism and workers’ inability to obtain satisfaction from Peru’s elite-controlled political party system. It was also strongly encouraged by dissident elites.

Foremost among them was Manuel González Prada, an upper-class intellectual, who became an anarchist as a result of his contacts with French and Spanish anarchists during a self-imposed European exile (1891–1898). González Prada lent his considerable talents to persuading workers to reject mutualism in favor of anarchist practices. He also founded Los Parias (“The Pariahs”), the first anarchist publication in 1904. Other anarchist papers soon appeared: La Simiente Roja (“The Red Seed”, 1905–1907), El Hambriento (“The Hungry”, 1905– 1910), Humanidad (“Humanity”, 1906–1907), and El Oprimido (“The Oppressed”, 1907–1909).

Staffed mainly by radical intellectuals like Gliserio Tassara, Angel Origgi Galli, Carlos del Barzo, and Inocencio Lombarozzi (Chilean), these papers exposed workers to the writings by European anarchists and anarchist perspectives on the state, the bourgeoisie, the Church, property, and class relations. Anarchists slogans like Kropotkin’s “Liberties are not bestowed, they’re seized” were also prominently displayed on the papers’ mastheads.[845]

The indoctrination of workers in anarchist thought was further assisted by anarchist study circles. Jointly operated by workers and radical intellectuals, The Center of Socialist Studies First of May (1906– 1908) in Lima and the group Love and Light (1911–1919) in Callao provided a forum for workers to discuss anarchist precepts. Like the anarchist press, the study circles emphasized the ideal of workers’ selfemancipation and workers’ cultural advancement. In addition, they inculcated workers in an internationalist outlook. On October 17, 1909, the Center of Socialist Studies First of May organized a public protest in response to the Spanish government’s execution of the anarchist and educational innovator, Francesco Ferrer i Guàrdia.[846]

The year before an anarchist musical group associated with the center held a performance to commemorate a massacre of Chilean mine workers in 1907.[847] Annual May Day commemorations in honor of the Chicago martyrs were also supported by the study circles and the anarchist press. The first May Day celebration, organized mainly by the Federation of Bakery Workers—Star of Peru (Federación de Obreros Panaderos “Estrella del Perú”) in Lima took place in 1905. The celebration not only underscored international working-class solidarity in the struggle for the 8 hour day but it honored Peru’s first worker martyr in the cause.[848]

Anarcho-syndicalism firmly began to take hold in Lima-Callao in 1911. In the course of that year the urban working class mounted its first general strike and succeeded in organizing the first class-based resistance societies. The general strike originated with a strike led by anarcho-syndicalists and backed by five hundred workers at the U.S.owed Vitarte Cotton Mill in March 1911. The strikers demanded a wage increase, a reduction of the work day from 13 to 10 hours, and the abolition of the night shift. The strike would endure for 29 days and eventually erupted into a general strike on April 10, bringing Lima’s business and transport to a standstill. The following day President Leguía intervened in the conflict and forced management to accept the workers’ demands.[849] The general strike underscored the effectiveness of direct action tactics and working-class solidarity. It also revealed the limits of workers’ power inasmuch as the outcome was ultimately decided by state intervention. In order to preserve their hard won gains and to offset the growing power of capital, textile workers in Vitarte founded the Textile Workers’ Unification of Vitarte, a resistance society in May 1911. The Unification dedicated itself “to serve and defend the rights of the proletariat in general and the textile workers in particular”.[850] Following Vitarte’s example, textile workers at Lima’s major mills organized resistance societies.

Anarcho-syndicalist organization and practice in Lima-Callao gained momentum in 1912 and 1913. In October 1912 workers affiliated with the anarcho-syndicalist oriented La Protesta group (1911–1926) succeeded in organizing the first Workers’ Regional Federation of Peru (FORP). It colligated the textile, bakery, and electrical workers’ resistance societies, among others, in Lima-Callao. FORP modeled itself after Argentina’s Workers’ Regional Federation (Federación obrera regional argentina, FORA). And like FORA, it espoused the principles and goals of anarchism and syndicalism and was committed to both short term improvements and social revolution. In 1913 FORA sent two delegates to Lima-Callao to promote solidarity between the two organizations and to encourage Peruvian workers to begin laying the foundations for a national labor confederation. Conditions however were not conducive to achieving this lofty goal. In fact, FORP disbanded in 1916 owing to the fragility of Lima-Callao’s working-class organizations in the context of economic instability related to World War I and state anti-labor hostility.[851]

FORP’s dissolution proved to be a temporary setback. Between 1916 and 1919 anarcho-syndicalist workers redoubled their efforts to organize Lima’s workers including rural wage earners on nearby sugar and cotton estates.[852] To aid in their organizing activities, they encouraged existing labor organizations to establish their own presses and to disseminate anarcho-syndicalist ideas. By 1919, shortly after the death of Manuel González Prada, worker-run union presses had replaced the anarchist papers once directed by non-worker intellectuals like González Prada.[853] Among the new union presses were El Sindicalista (“The Syndicalist”, shoemakers’ union), El Obrero Textil (“The Textile Worker”, textile workers’ federation), La voz del panadero (“The Voice of the Baker”, bakers’ union), and El Electricista (“The Electrician”, electrical workers’ union). As a result of the stepped up labor organizing and propaganda activity, the anarcho-syndicalist labor movement in Lima-Callao significantly improved its organizational strength and disruptive capabilities. Between 1918 and 1919 several new labor federations were established (e.g. Textile Workers’ Federation of Peru, or FTTP; the Print Workers Federation; the Federation of Masons) and FORP was resuscitated.

In the immediate postwar period a fertile climate existed for the resurgence of Lima-Callao’s anarcho-syndicalist labor movement. Workers’ living and working conditions had deteriorated during the war years. Real wages had steadily eroded as the cost of living had risen by 100 percent since 1913. This intolerable situation prompted a spate of strikes in 1918 by organized textile, railway, bakery, dock, and leather workers. Although in some cases these strikes were settled with wage concessions, labor militancy continued unabated.

The most significant strike occurred in December 1918 when approximately 2900 textile workers employed in Lima’s 9 largest textile factories walked off the job demanding the 8 hour workday. One month earlier President Pardo had issued a decree granting women and minors an 8 hour workday in an attempt to placate workers. This proved to be a miscalculation. Unwilling to accept the state’s restricted application of the 8 hour workday, anarcho-syndicalist workers prepared to organize a general strike. In January 1919 the anarcho-syndicalist labor movement backed by broad sectors of Lima-Callao’s working class, and university students engaged in a mass general strike. Although key anarchosyndicalist strike leaders were arrested and tortured, the general strike persisted.[854] After three days of street clashes and business inactivity, President Pardo, on January 15 acceded to what Delfín Lévano, the anarcho-syndicalist union leader, called “the inalienable right” of workers to the 8 hour workday.”[855] The conquest of the eight hour day constituted a milestone in the development of the anarcho-syndicalist labor movement and it validated the prodigious efforts to promote workingclass consciousness, solidarity, and union organization.[856]

A few months after the January general strike, anarcho-syndicalist workers organized another mass protest to address the cost of living crisis. In April, Adalberto Fonkén, a descendant of Asian coolie laborers and a former leader of the Vitarte textile union, Carlos Barba, a founder and general secretary of the Union of Shoemakers and Associates (1914), and Nicolás Gutarra, a cabinetmaker and former secretary general of FORP (1915), among other prominent anarcho-syndicalist leaders established a Committee for the Cheapening of Prime Necessities (Comité Pro-Abaratamiento de las Subsistencias). The committee soon established chapters throughout Lima-Callao with ties to 30,000 workers. To press its demands for price reductions of basic food-stuffs, the committee staged a series of street demonstrations and marches involving thousands of workers and their families.

President Pardo and the business community refused to bow to the committee’s demands. Troops and mounted police were deployed to break up the demonstrations. On May 27 the committee declared a general strike that paralyzed economic activity in Lima-Callao. The general strike lasted for five days. “The net result of the five days of disorder”, according to a U.S. observer, “was a death list that may be conservatively placed at one hundred, several hundred wounded, from 300 to 500 prisoners in the Lima jails, property loss and damage that will reach at least two million soles, all business demoralized for a week and a severe lesson imposed upon the anarchistic Maximalist elements of Lima and Callao and their misguided followers”.[857]

This assessment is accurate to a point. The general strike failed to win concessions but it did not weaken the organizers’ resolve. Indeed, on the day Gutarra and Barba were released from jail where they were held until July 7, they confronted President Leguía who appeared on the balcony of the national palace. Before a multitude of supporters, Gutarra defiantly informed Leguía that “the populace of today was not the tame one of yesterday which had silently borne all tyrannies”. After condemning the police actions and reciting a list of demands, he declared, “the social problem is not solved by a full stomach—the mind also needs feeding so that education may reach all—we want justice, liberty, and equality”. He concluded his peroration with the threat that the proletariat was tired of promises and would take to the barricades to defend their liberties and rights.[858] Two days later anarcho-syndicalist workers re-activated FORP and proclaimed its mission was to “do away with capitalism” and to create a new society in which “everyone works and produces according to their abilities and receives according to their needs”.[859]

Gutarra was right. The anarcho-syndicalist labor movement through its propaganda and praxis had dissolved any lingering passivity, deference, and fatalism on the part of organized workers in Lima-Callao.[860] Indeed, this would be further reflected in its aggressive response to new threats from the state and employers. Leguía’s promulgation of a new constitution in 1920 with strict provisions to regulate strikes and to subject labor conflicts to compulsory arbitration elicited condemnation and street protests from workers. The Local Workers’ Federation (FOL) which replaced FORP in 1921 lashed out at the government’s “legal ruse” and vowed to ignore it.[861]

A few months later, in September 1921 textile workers seized El Inca mill in response to management’s plans to close the factory due to the adverse business environment. Ultimately, workers were dislodged from the factory by troops acting on orders of the local prefect. The following day Lima’s business paper, El Comercio ran an editorial admonishing workers against imitating factory takeovers in Italy and pointing out workers inability to effectively manage complex enterprises.[862]

The war of position

Did the emphasis on union organization, working-class solidarity, and the pursuit of short-term material interests cause FOL and its affiliates to neglect workers’ cultural emancipation? To what extent did their anarcho-syndicalist project entail the development of an autonomous and oppositional working-class culture? What follows is an examination of the discourse and practice of Lima-Callao’s anarcho-syndicalist labor movement in the 1920s as it relates to these questions. The evidence strongly indicates that anarcho-syndicalists prioritized forging a counter-hegemonic working-class culture capable of contesting and supplanting the dominant culture of Peru’s ruling elites. In short, they opted for a “war of position” attacking the legitimacy and moral authority of bourgeois rule. This strategy involved undermining dominant social conventions and ‘naturalized’ values by inculcating workers in an oppositional ethos through an alternative network of autonomous social and cultural structures.[863]

Fig. 6. Nicolás Gutarra, Peruvian anarcho-syndicalist leader, is hoisted on the shoulders of the crowd on May Day 1919, Lima.

At FOL’s first congress in 1921 worker representatives from 23 labor organizations reaffirmed the necessity of elevating working-class morality and culture. In recognition of the inseparability of cultural emancipation and social revolution, they approved FOL’s “exclusive dedication to the economic, moral and intellectual improvement of the working-class”.[864] By simultaneously asserting its commitment to both an economic and a cultural agenda, FOL unambiguously signaled the importance it assigned to workers’ socio-cultural development. To underscore this point, it authorized the establishment of an official “workers’ daily” and a “popular worker library”.[865] Two months later, under the direction of Adalberto Fonkén, the popular worker library opened on Trujillo Street in central Lima to male and female workers of all races. Here workers were informed they would have access to rational books capable of “breaking the darkness of popular consciousness”, which in turn would empower them to act against “despotic bourgeois social edifice” {sic}.[866]

Even if FOL had not endorsed the need to promote workers’ moral and cultural edification doubtless its affiliates would have done so anyway. An influential minority of highly motivated anarcho-syndicalist worker-intellectuals within FOL’s labor organizations were determined to free workers from the social constraints and cultural marginalization imposed by Peru’s aristocratic order. For example, as early as 1919, union workers at Santa Catalina woolen mill established their own press, El Nudito (“The Little Link”), which published local labor news and social commentary. The paper proudly boasted “it is not edited by intellectuals but is written by workers and for workers”.[867] Ultimately, El Nudito would be superseded in 1920 by the FTTP’s official organ, El Obrero Textil. Arguably the most important union paper in Lima during the 1920s, El Obrero Textil, readily embraced FOL’s cultural mission insisting that “the more culturized [sic.] the people are, the sooner they conquer their liberty”.[868] This view resonated with print, carpenter, and construction workers’ federations, who in turn published presses and extolled the virtue of workers’ self-expression. Under the editorial direction of anarcho-syndicalist worker-intellectuals, these and other union presses provided a forum for workers to publish poetry, discuss moral issues, address female workers’ emancipation and the ‘Indian question”, debate ideological points, and analyze capital-labor relations.[869] To further advance the socio-cultural and political education of workers the union presses also utilized drawings and graphic images. El Constructor (The Builder), the official organ of the Construction Workers’ Union, for example, published an instructive cartoon depicting a workman breaking the chains of militarism, politics, the clergy, and the State, with the caption that “an offense against one worker, is an offense against all”.[870]

In addition to the proliferation of union presses, concern for workers’ ‘moral and intellectual improvement’ prompted FOL and its affiliates to sponsor a panoply of cultural and recreational associations. This included workers’ libraries, theater and art associations, musical groups, and sports clubs. Taken together these autonomous worker associations constituted a concerted effort to remake working class social practices and culture in Lima-Callao. The involvement of workers, their families and communities, in these associations allowed for the assimilation of an anarcho-syndicalist discourse about self-improvement, moral codes of behavior (e.g. abstention from gambling and alcohol), working-class dignity and solidarity, and social justice.

Fig. 7. Peruvian anarcho-syndicalism: breaking the bonds of oppression, exploitation, and ignorance.

Illustrative of this point is the Workers’ Musical Center (Centro Musical Obrero de Lima, or CMO). Founded in 1922 under the direction of Delfín Lévano and with the strong backing of FOL, the CMO provided a musical and a political education for its working class audience. Performing in Lima’s working class zones of El Cercado, La Victoria, Barrios Altos, and Rimac, the CMO exposed workers to a variety of musical forms and to songs centered on workers’ emancipation, rights, liberty, triumphs, and passions.[871] Among the repertoire of songs performed by the CMO were “La Internacional” (The International), “Anarco”, “El Paria” (“The Pariah”), “Canto del Pueblo” (“Song of the People”), “Lira rebelde proletaria” (“Rebellious Proletariat Lyre”), and “Canto del Trabajo” (“Song of Work”).[872] This last song typifies the social criticism and spirit of rebellion propagated by the CMO:[873]