Anarchism in Latin America

379 Pages·2017·3.47 MB·English

anarchism in latin america
Á . C
NGEL J APPELLETTI
G P -F
TRANSLATED BY ABRIEL ALMER ERNÁNDEZ
R A & J S -C
INTRODUCTION BY OMINA KEMI AVIER ETHNESS ASTRO
Translator’s Acknowledgments
The publication of this translation would not have been possible without the
good and dedicated work of Zach Blue and AK Press. Zach showed a keen
interest in this project from its beginning. When we encountered what
seemed to be an insurmountable hurdle thrown in our path by the
bureaucracy of a State, he found a way for us to overcome it. I am indebted
to Romina Akemi and Javier Sethness-Castro for accepting Zach’s invitation
to write the Introduction to this volume. I am very grateful for the talented
editorial hands first of Molly Toth, of Youngstown, Ohio, and then of Emma
Young, of Bloomington, Indiana. My home institution, Youngstown State
University, provided me with a Research Professorship to complete this
project. I am most grateful—and grateful everyday—for the kindness,
friendship, and love of my wife, Sarah V. Lown. These simple words of
thanks to them leave much unsaid.
Ángel Cappelletti, Biographical Note
Ángel Cappelletti was born in 1927 and died in 1995 in Rosario, Argentina.
This industrial port city was a major center of anarchist activities beginning
in the late 19th century, when Italian immigrants formed a group called El
Miserable. A little later, the anarcho-communist group Ciencia y Progreso
was formed in Rosario, and the Italian anarchist paper Demoliamo, as well
as the anarcho-feminist La Voz de la Mujer, edited by Virginia Bolten, were
published there. In 1890 Bolten headed the first march ever held in Rosario
to mark the 1st of May. She carried a red flag with this inscription in black:
“First of May. Universal Brotherhood. We, the workers of Rosario, abide by
the dispositions of the International Labour Committee in Paris.” Other
anarchist papers published in Rosario at this time were La Verdad (1896), La
Libre Iniciativa (1895–1896), La Federación Obrera (1896), and La Libera
Parola. There were also general strikes in 1901 and 1907, as well as
repression, persecution, and execution of militants. Ernesto “Che” Guevara
would be born in Rosario in 1928.
Cappelletti received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of
Buenos Aires in 1954 and for the next twenty-seven years taught the history
of philosophy, logic, sociology, Latin, Greek, and the history of political
ideas at the Universidades de Cuyo y Litoral, Argentina, Universidad de
Montevideo, Uruguay, and the Universidad Central y Simón Bolivar de
Caracas, Venezuela. He is the author or editor of 40 books, including
Utopías antiguas y modernas (Puebla, 1967), Abelardo (Buenos Aires,
1967), El Socialismo utópico (Rosario, 1968), Marco Aurelio (Buenos Aires
1968), La filosofía de Heráclito de Efeso (Caracas, 1969), Introdución a
Séneca (Caracas, 1973), Introdución a Condillac (Maracaibo, 1974), Cuatro
filósofos de la Alta Edad Media (Mérida, 1975), Etapas del pensamiento
socialista (Madrid, 1978), El pensamiento de Kropotkin (Madrid, 1978),
Ensayos sobre los atomistas griegos (Caracas, 1979), La teoría de la
propieded en Proudhon (Madrid, 1980), Ciencia jónica y pitagórica
(Caracas, 1980), Prehistoria del Anarquismo (Madrid, 1983), La filosofía de
Anaxágoras (Caracas, 1984).
The present translation originally appeared as a Preface by Cappelletti to a
volume of previously published anarchist writings by Latin American
authors. The volume was conceived and begun by Carlos Manuel Rama. At
the time of his death in 1982, Rama had completed an initial selection of the
material. Cappelletti would conclude the project several years later.1 The
volume was scheduled to appear in 1990 through the Venezuelan publisher
Biblioteca Ayacucho. But due to several complications it did not appear in
print until 1993. Rama was a Uruguayan historian and sociologist. Among
his publications are: Historia del movimiento obrero y social
latinoamericano contemporáneo (1967), Sociología de América Latina
(1970), Las ideas socialistas en el siglo XIX (1976), Sociología de América
Latina (1977), and La ideología fascista (1979), among others.
—Gabriel Palmer-Fernández
1 See Appendix B for the entire selection.
Abbreviations
ACAT Asociación Continental Americana de Trabajadores
AFL American Federation of Labor
AIT Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores (International Workers’
Association, IWA)
ALU Acción Libertaria Uruguaya
APRA Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (Peru)
CGS Centro Gremial Sindicalista (Ecuador)
CGT Confederación General del Trabajo (Argentina)
CGT Confederación General de Trabajadores (Chile, also Mexico)
COA Confederación Obrera Argentina (Workers Confederation of
Argentina)
COB Confederación Obrera Brasileña
CORA Confederación Obrera Regional Argentina
CNT Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of
Labor)
CROM Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana
CRRA Comité Regional de Relaciones Anarquistas (Regional Committee
of Anarchist Relations)
CTCH Confederación de Trabajadores de Chile
FACA Federación Anarco-Comunista Argentina (Argentinean Anarcho-
Communist Federation)
FAI Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist Federation)
FAU Federación Anarquista Uruguaya
FCPM Federación Comunista del Proletariado Mexicano
FLA Federación Libertaria Argentina
FOA Federación Obrera Argentina
FOCH Federación Obrera Chilena
FOH Federación Obrera de la Habana
FOI Federación Obrera Internacional (Bolivia)
FOL Federación Obrera Local de la Paz (Bolivia)
FORA Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (Argentine Regional
Workers Federation)
FORP Federación Obrera Regional Paraguaya
FORP Federación Obrera Regional Peruana
FORU Federación Obrera Regional Uruguaya (Uruguayan Regional
Workers’ Federation)
FOT Federación Obrera del Trabajo (Bolivia)
IWA International Workers’ Association
IWW Industrial Workers of the World
PRC Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuba).
PIT-CNT Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores and Convención Nacional
Trabajadores
UGT Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers)
USA Unión Sindical Argentina (Syndicalist Union of Argentina)
USU Unión Sindical Uruguaya (Syndicalist Union of Uruguay)
Preface
Anarchism emerged in Europe as an ideology and social philosophy during
the first half of the nineteenth century. One of several kinds of pre-Marxist
socialist thought, it was essentially a French product and owed its name and
first systematic formulation to Proudhon, although it had two powerful
predecessors in England and Germany, Godwin and Stirner, respectively.
Prior to 1850 in France, as a social movement of the productive classes
(workers, artisans, peasants), it assumed a mutualist form. Under Bakunin
after the 1860s it appeared in a collectivist form and joined its activities to
the First International, gradually becoming the dominant position within the
movement. During these decades the majority of organized workers in Italy,
France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and elsewhere
either were anarchist or professed a closely related revolutionary socialism.
Even trade unionism in Great Britain, though of moderate tendencies, was
closer to Proudhon than to Marx.
By the 1860s anarchism reached Latin America and took root in a number
of activist groups. Sections of the First International formed in the French
Antilles; the ideas of Proudhon and Bakunin were disseminated throughout
Mexico; and the first organizations of workers, peasants, and students with a
libertarian bent were established there. In the 1870s there was a clear
presence of anarchist groups on both sides of the Río de la Plata. For the
next half century, anarchism enjoyed a steady even if often irregular history
in many Latin American countries. It absorbed the major part of the working
classes through unions and resistance societies for several decades in
Argentina and Uruguay. In other countries, like Mexico, it played an
important role in their political history and armed struggles. In Chile and
Peru it sparked the revolutionary dimension of the working class struggle.
There is no doubt that even in some countries whose later history failed to
produce an organized and significant labor movement—such as Ecuador,
Panama, and Guatemala—there were early workers’ organizations that went
beyond simple mutual aid societies and carried forward the class struggle,
and they were anarchist.
Thus anarchism in Latin America has an ample history rich in struggles
peaceful and violent; in demonstrations of individual and collective
heroism; in organizational efforts; in oral, written, and practical propaganda;
in literary works; and in theatrical, pedagogical, cooperative, and
communitarian experiments. That history has not been totally documented,
although a few fine partial studies are available. Moreover, many writers of
the social, political, cultural, literary, and philosophical history of the
continent either ignore or downplay the important role of anarchism—the
result of ignorance or bad faith. Some historians do not know the
achievements of anarchism or consider anarchism a marginal philosophy or
totally undesirable. Others are aware of the significant role anarchism has
played in the history of socialist ideas and understand its position towards
Marxism well, but precisely because of that forget or belittle its role: a sign
of their revolutionary immaturity, abstract utopianism, pragmatic or petty
bourgeois rebelliousness.
This work does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of Latin
American anarchism but simply a sketch of it. But the range of the material
and the dearth of impartial studies available do prompt a sustained treatment
of that history. Hence this work examines the social achievements, the
popular writings, and the anarchist literature of each Latin American
country from Argentina to Mexico.
As with other ideas of European origin, anarchist ideology was a product
imported to Latin America. But ideas are not simply products. They are also
living organisms and, as such, ought to adapt themselves to new
environments; in so doing, they evolve in lesser or greater ways. To say that
European immigrants brought anarchism to these shores states only the
obvious. And to take that as a kind of weakness is plain stupidity. Like the
very ideas of nation and of a nationalistic ideology, anarchism comes to us
from Europe.
Anarchism is not merely the ideology of the working and peasant masses
who, arriving in the new continent, are robbed of their hopes for a better life
and witness the exchange of oppression by the ancient monarchies for the
no less brutal oppression of the new republican oligarchies. Soon some of
the native and also indigenous masses adopt the anarchist view of the world
and society, from Mexico to Argentina, and from Francisco Zalacosta in the
Chalco to Facón Grande in Patagonia. It is seldom noted that the anarchist
doctrine of self-managed collectivism has a close resemblance to the ancient
ways of life and organizations of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and
Peru, ways of life that were practiced prior to the imperialism of not only
the Spanish, but also the Aztecs and Inca before them. To the extent that
anarchists reached the indigenous, they did not have to inculcate exotic
ideologies but only to make conscious the ancient peasant ideologies of the
Matagalpan calpulli and the Andean ayllu.1
At the same time, a tendency towards liberty and indifference towards all
forms of statist structure was already present in the Creole population.
When that tendency was not usurped by the ways of the feudal caudillos, it
proved fertile soil for a libertarian ideology. Few mention the existence of
an anarchist gauchaje in Argentina and Uruguay, or its literary expression in
libertarian payadores.2 But those matters aside—undoubtedly they will be
looked upon as having little consequence by academic and Marxist
historians—without hesitation we can say that anarchism took root much
more deeply and extensively among indigenous workers than did Marxism,
perhaps with the exception of Chile.
It is important to note that from a theoretical perspective, even if the Latin
American movement did not make fundamental contributions to anarchist
thought, it did produce forms of organization and praxis that were unknown
in Europe. For example, the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina
(FORA), a labor union that was majoritarian (becoming almost the only
union), never conceded to syndical bureaucracy, and developed an
organizational form as different from the Confederación National del
Trabajo (CNT) and other European anarcho-syndicalist unions as it was
from the North American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). A second
example, typically Latin American, is the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM).
Primarily through the efforts of Ricardo Flores Magón, within a few years
of its founding it adopted an ideology that was unquestionably anarchist,
nonetheless keeping its name while continuing as a political party, and
thereby earning sharp criticism from some European orthodox thinkers like
Jean Grave.
With the exception of that singular case, anarchism in Latin America is
nearly always anarcho-syndicalism and is essentially linked to workers’ and
peasants’ organizations. To be sure, there were some anarcho-individualists
in Argentina, Uruguay, Panama, and other places, as well as anarcho-