“A Marxist-Leninist Perspective” on Stalin: Totalitarian Propaganda that Fails in Rationalizing his World-Historical Crimes (Part I/III)

“Today [in 1958], everyone knows Russian Communism as the greatest barbarism on earth. Stalin is the name which symbolizes this.”

– Raya Dunayevskaya¹

Marc (Moishe) Zakharovich Chagall, “Festive Design” (1918-9)

Breht Ó Séaghdha’s much-anticipated, “big,” and supposedly “spicy” interview on “Revolutionary Left Radio” with Justin and Jeremy from the “Proles of the Round Table” about Josef Stalin and the historical record is a sustained, nearly three-hour long fraud that above all insults the memory of Stalin’s millions of victims. Unfortunately for the host Ó Séaghdha, who misleadingly presents his guests Justin and Jeremy as following an “empirical and statistical approach” to the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the reality is that he platformed neo-Stalinist propagandists on this episode, and either could not or would not challenge them on their myriad lies covering for what the Marxist-Humanist Raya Dunayevskaya rightly terms “the greatest counter-revolution in all history.”2 Given the friendly tone between Ó Séaghdha and his guests during this interview, as reflected in his admission at the outset of his “love and respect” for his “comrades and friends” Justin and Jeremy, his identification of the “Proles of the Round Table” as being “one of [his] go-to podcasts” represents a dangerous concession which reveals that he is following his guests’ lead when it comes to historical events.

Before analyzing and correcting the numerous distortions presented by Justin and Jeremy on this particular episode of “Revolutionary Left Radio,” I must express a very fundamental concern for Ó Séaghdha’s profession in the introduction of the need for leftists “always to show solidarity with our Jewish comrades,” given that not once in this three-hour interview does either the host or the guests discuss or even mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop, or Nazi-Soviet, Pact signed on August 23, 1939. Following in the wake of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss with Austria, the terms of this non-aggression treaty, agreed initially to ten years, represented a ‘honeymoon’ for the two totalitarian dictators Hitler and Stalin, setting forth the terms by which Poland, Finland, and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were to be divided after the Nazi invasion a week later.

In Tinísima, Elena Poniatowska depicts even so hardened a Stalinist as Tina Modotti, a nurse who worked in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) with Red Aid International, affiliated with the Third International (Stalin’s Communist International, or Comintern), as reacting to the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact by refusing food, desiring death, and considering this “the betrayal of everything for which we’ve fought.” Arguing with her partner Vittorio Vidali, himself a high-ranking Comintern agent responsible for numerous assassinations of non-Stalinist supporters of the Spanish Republic, Modotti asks:

“And the dead? And the relatives of the dead—who will calm them down? You know how much I love and admire the Soviet Union; you know how I revere Stalin. Everything you say is fine, Toio [Vittorio], but an alliance with Hitler—never!”³

Indeed, as historian Catherine Evtuhov relates,

“The agreement stunned leftist intellectuals and workers, who had believed that Moscow was the vital center of international revolution and anti-Nazism. As Arthur Koestler recalled, the sight of the swastika flying at the Moscow Airport [to mark Ribbentrop’s visit] destroyed his allegiance to communism.”⁴

The Hitler-Stalin Pact not only carved up Poland and much of the rest of Eastern Europe, but also involved the NKVD and Gestapo exchanging political prisoners, including Communists, and Polish prisoners of war; trade in oil, wheat, and weaponry between the two hegemons; and Stalin publicly praising Nazi victories.⁵ Furthermore, between 1939 and 1941, Stalin’s regime deported a million and a half Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians to the Far North, Siberia, and Central Asia; approximately one-fifth of those deported perished. Stalin’s forces were also responsible for executing at least 17,000 captive Polish officers in 1940.⁶

Cartoon in The Evening Standard (20 September 1939) depicting the partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin at the dawn of World War II. Notice the Orientalist depiction of Stalin’s face.

With Stalin thus neutralized, Hitler received the green light with which he infamously launched World War II and, shortly thereafter, the Holocaust, or HaShoah, which accelerated in June 1941 when Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally by invading the Soviet Union. Alongside the estimated 25 million Soviet people who died in the war, at least 1 million Jews in Ukraine and five million other Jews were murdered in Poland, the Soviet Union, and other territories of Eastern Europe which were conquered by the German Wehrmacht for Hitler’s pathological, ultra-nationalist concept of Lebensraum (“living-space”).⁷ In fact, in January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was executed on Stalin’s orders by the Soviet Belorussian State police before he could bring to light documentation of the Nazi genocide of over 1.5 million Soviet Jews in these same territories conquered by the Wehrmacht “from the retreating Soviets”—territories which previously had been occupied by the Red Army, following Hitler and Stalin’s mutual agreement.⁸

When it came to actual war with Hitler, Stalin’s myopic incredulousness about the reported 84 intelligence warnings he received about German preparations for invasion led to the immediate destruction of one-fourth of the Soviet air force, effectively granting the Nazi Luftwaffe aerial supremacy during the beginning of “Operation Barbarossa.”⁹ Whereas the Red Army had “approximately the same number of men on the Soviet western border as the Germans and significantly more tanks, guns, and aircraft,” the USSR’s security was endangered for two important reasons: the Red Army was comprised of peasants who were often demoralized by collectivization and famine, and it was led by inexperienced officers who had effectively been promoted through Stalin’s devastating Purge of an estimated 90 percent of “the highest army commanders, all the admirals, about 90 percent of corps commanders,” and several “divisional and brigadier generals” just a year to two years before the start of World War II.¹⁰ That the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had ordered his troops to occupy the new territory gained through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which lacked any defensive fortifications, was not helpful, either.¹¹

Moreover, Stalin’s disagreement with and overriding of the “leading Soviet military strategist,” General Georgii Zhukov, led to multiple disasters. To name just a couple: first, in August 1941, when Stalin refused to withdraw Red Army divisions from Kyiv (Kiev), the Wehrmacht proceeded to encircle and imprison more than 3 million Soviet officers and troops by the end of the year;¹² and second, when, following the successful December 1941 counter-attack to rescue Moscow, Stalin hubristically enjoined offensives across the entire western front that “exhausted his troops and exposed them to Germany’s new campaign, this time aimed at the Caucasus and its oil fields.” Once Kyiv fell, the Nazis systematically murdered its Jewish population—some thirty-thousand men, women, and children—in the massacre known as Babi Yar.¹³

Beyond this, Stalin’s refusal to sign the Geneva Conventions (1929) governing the treatment of prisoners of war (POW’s) arguably greatly harmed his officers and troops captured by the Nazis, who, in contrast to Western POW’s, were initially generally refused food and medical treatment, if they were not summarily executed. In point of fact, it was on Soviet POW’s that the Nazis first “tested” Zyklon-B gas in the Auschwitz death-camp (September 1941). An estimated three million Soviet POW’s died in Nazi captivity.¹⁴ Hitler’s regime did not think to exploit Soviet POW’s as forced labor until November 1941, alongside the millions of Ukrainian and Polish Ostarbeiter slave laborers, though it had no reservations leaving intact collectivized farms in occupied Ukraine, thus “taking advantage of the Soviet invention for extracting resources from the rural population.”¹⁵

In light of these incredible omissions about the nearly two-year period of collaboration between Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, and the General Secretary’s numerous strategic blunders during World War II itself—which Jeremy and Justin outright ignore, mischaracterizing Hitler’s military defeat in May 1945 as Stalin’s “accomplishment”—it becomes clear that no one on this show has any credibility discussing the historical record.

To put it lightly, it is extremely problematic for anyone appealing to history to uncritically champion the genocidal and imperialist state-capitalist monster known as Stalin in 2018. As Rohini Hensman rightly points out, and as we shall explore more in part II of this response, “Stalin […] in his time had rehabilitated tsarist imperialism.”¹⁶ In 1927, Alexander Berkman identified Stalin’s rule as being equivalent to “Tsarist Socialism,” perhaps following Nestor Makhno’s lead in denouncing the “Bolshevik tsars” the previous year.¹⁷ According to Hannah Arendt’s analysis, class struggle and internationalism were absent within the politics of Stalinist totalitarianism, beyond merely opportunistic use as legitimating ideologies.¹⁸ Dunayevskaya correctly identified the Stalinist bureaucracy as “the most deadly, the most insidious, [and] the most dangerous enemy because it springs from the proletariat and cloaks itself in Marxist terminology.” So why on Earth would revolutionary leftists want to promote the legacy and supposed continued relevance of such decidedly counter-revolutionary distortions of socialism?

There is clearly something rotten in the heart of the Western left, for both neo-fascism and the red-brown alliance are on the rise. Indeed, “[t]his alliance between neo-Stalinists […] and neo-fascists […] is a twenty-first century version of the Hitler-Stalin pact.”¹⁹ It should not be surprising, then, to contemplate that Ó Séaghdha uncritically interviewed the pro-Assad propagandist and Russia Today correspondent Rania Khalek six months ago. Amidst such stark realities, I concur with Hensman that we must pursue and tell the truth as well as seek to bring morality and humanity into politics, among other critical tasks,²⁰ and it is in the spirit of these maxims that I respond critically to Ó Séaghdha’s “Stalin podcast.”

Vladimir Tambi (1906-1955), Tanks

What Did Stalin Do Wrong?

“The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have already seized.”

– Hannah Arendt ²¹

As if the host and his guests could be forgiven for covering up the Hitler-Stalin Pact—which they cannot—Jeremy and Justin’s ‘homage to Stalin’ comes through very clearly in their responses to Ó Séaghdha’s opening question, regarding which criticisms (if any) the “Proles of the Round Table” have of Stalin’s rule over the former Soviet Union. Still, even before responding here, Jeremy and Justin already have denied that Stalin was a dictator, instead suggesting that certain “people” could criticize him without fear of retaliation. Which people do they mean? Surely, they are not referring to M. I. Ryutin, the first Communist to openly denounce Stalin’s personal dictatorship and war on the peasantry in his 1932 appeal to the Central Committee, requesting Stalin’s deposition and an end to forced collectivization. Stalin responded by demanding Ryutin’s execution, yet, due to the objection of members of the Politburo (the highest-ranking body within the Communist Party), this renegade Communist was banished and only murdered five years later in the Purges. In addition, Stalin executed Ryutin’s sons, banished his wife to a prison camp, and temporarily exiled the Jewish Politburo members Lev Kamenev and Gregory Zinoviev for their supposed complicity in the affair—thus foreshadowing their ultimate fate in the Purges.²²

Evidently, the “Proles of the Round Table” rely on a misunderstanding of what dictatorship is—that is, centralized and effectively absolute power over the State and military apparatus. They miss Voline’s point that “dictatorship […] being universal and universally embraced, the way is open for fascist psychology, ideology and action.” With their comment on Stalin’s openness to criticism, they would consciously eliminate from history all the artists, intellectuals, dissidents, workers, and peasants who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in the Stalinist Terror, including the writer Isaac Babel, the renowned poet Anna Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilyov (imprisoned in the GULAG slave-labor camps) and her husbands Nikolai Gumilyov, who was murdered by the CheKa (precursor to the NKVD, or Soviet Interior Ministry: Stalin’s secret police), and Nikolai Punin (who died in the GULAG), as well as the Russian Makhnovist Peter Arshinov, who was executed in the Terror in 1937 or 1938 on the charge of organizing to resurrect the anarchist movement in the Soviet Union—to say nothing of all the “Old Bolsheviks” killed in the Moscow Show Trials.

Jeremy and Justin therefore reject the historical reality that, following the expulsion in 1927 of his primary rival Lev Trotsky from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “there is little doubt that Stalin and a narrow circle of aides made all the historical decisions of the period.”²³ Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had joined with Trotsky (also Jewish) in 1926 to form a “United Opposition” to Stalin, quickly recanted following Trotsky’s forced exile in 1928. Lacking a base among either workers or peasants, these rivals of Stalin were outmaneuvered by the General Secretary’s construction of a vast bureaucracy.²⁴ The “Proles of the Round Table” thus omit Stalin’s internal liquidation of factions, his utter subordination of foreign Communist Parties to his arbitrary rule, and his war on the remnants of intellectual freedom in the USSR.²⁵ Like other authoritarian socialists, Justin and Jeremy misleadingly conflate the Communist Party bureaucracy with the proletariat and peasantry it exploited and dominated—a notion with which Ó Séaghdha concurs, insisting as he does that historical Stalinist bureaucracies have represented “mass-proletarian movements.” This is a classic exposition of “substitutionism,” whereby élites of intellectuals and/or bureaucrats rule over the working classes by proxy and in their supposed interests, though without any democratic participation on the part of workers and peasants. The ill-named concept of “democratic centralism” expresses the same dictatorial idea.

Therefore, rather than reflect thoughtfully on the history of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, Jeremy and Justin vigorously defend Stalin’s technocratic and genocidal legacy of authoritarian high modernism, whereby the centralized power of the totalitarian State is employed “scientifically” and expeditiously to transform society not in the interests of humanity or the working classes, but the Party bureaucracy and state-capitalism.²⁶

According to the “Proles of the Round Table,” these were the three greatest mistakes or crimes for which Stalin is responsible during his three decades as General Secretary of the Soviet Union, from 1922-1952:

1. Justin argues that Stalin should have supported the Spanish Revolution more, although Jeremy is quick to clarify that he did not “betray” it. The pair detail the extent to which Stalin supplied arms and ammunition to the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War—yet Jeremy suggests that, had Stalin provided greater assistance to the Republic, the Soviet Union might not have been able to resist Nazi and Japanese expansionism during World War II. Of course, he fails to mention the Hitler-Stalin Pact here; neither does he seem to consider that, had the Nationalist forces been defeated in Spain, Hitler may have been checked before even launching World War II. Jeremy and Justin contend that Stalin’s intervention in Spain was benign, and that it’s “patently false” that his Comintern agents “maliciously murdered anarchists […] in the streets.” Both claims are complete lies. Firstly, Stalin effectively looted the Republic’s gold reserves by vastly overcharging for the arms sold to it, as historian Gerald Howson has shown, and the Soviets would often send dysfunctional weapons that lacked ammunition. In addition, Stalin treated Spain as a colonial possession, dispatching NKVD and GRU (military-intelligence) agents there who reported to and acted under him, not the Republican government.²⁷ Even so pro-Soviet an historian as E. H. Carr recognized that the Republic ultimately had become “the puppet of Moscow.”²⁸ Secondly, the “Proles of the Round Table” appear willfully ignorant of the “Tragic Week” of May 1937, otherwise known as the “May Days,” when Stalinists from the Comintern-affiliated Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC) in Barcelona struck out against the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), and the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), in an effort to uphold “antifascist unity” while crushing the ongoing social revolution. In effect, the May Days “guaranteed the armed victory of the Stalinist-led counter-revolution,” which in turn allowed for the victory of Nationalist forces, following the rationale that “Stalin feared his leftist rivals in Spain more than he did Franco.”²⁹
2. The deportation to Irkutsk and Siberia of “10,000 Soviet citizens” from the Volga region who were ethnic Germans beginning in 1941, supposedly for fear of their being a “fifth column” vis-à-vis the invading Nazi military. For Jeremy, the error was that Stalin deported these Germans on an ethnic basis, though he definitely implies that the General Secretary would have been justified in deporting or exiling his opponents on a “class” or political basis—because, of course, for Jeremy and Justin, any political opposition to Stalin is “counter-revolutionary,” no matter its actual content, given their absurd view that the General Secretary represented the epitome of the Russian Revolution. In uttering such words, Jeremy unwittingly expresses his support for Stalin’s GULAG system of slave-labor camps on principle. He also underestimates the number of Volga Germans deported by Stalin’s regime by a factor of between 40 and 70.
3. Stalin’s imposition of Article 121, which criminalized male homosexuality with hard labor, following the Bolsheviks’ earlier suspension of Tsarist-era penal codes against homosexuality after October 1917. Though they criticize Stalin for this reactionary move, Justin and Jeremy try to contextualize the reversal by pointing out the supposedly perceived affinities between homosexuality and fascism at that time, and between homosexuality and pederasty, or pedophilia—thus unironically recalling today’s criminalization of homosexuality under Vladimir Putin. Ó Séaghdha assists by claiming such criminalization to have been standard practice “all over the world” at the time. Yet a fact check shows this not remotely to have been the case.

What’s the problem, then, with these supposed criticisms? For one, they reveal that Jeremy and Justin are not remotely arguing in good faith. To begin with, the guests chuckle when discussing the “shady” actions of NKVD agents “murdering anti-Soviet communists in the background” in Barcelona after Ó Séaghdha questions them about this. They are, moreover, quite dishonest about the overall meaning of Stalin’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

Furthermore, regarding deportations, Jeremy completely overlooks Stalin’s far more extensive and systematic ethnic cleansing of over a million ethnic minorities, mostly Muslim, during World War II: Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks (Buddhists), Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, and Meskhetians. As there is no mention or discussion of these on the podcast, neither is there any discussion of precisely why Stalin and the Communist Party might have feared these minorities’ siding with the advancing Germans: namely, due to their oppression under the Soviet Union. Forcibly transferred by the NKVD to Central Asia, the Far North, and Siberia like the Cherokee people coerced onto the “Trail of Tears,” many of these oppressed peoples died either during the journey or in exile—leading to the logical conclusion that Stalin is guilty of genocide here beyond any reasonable doubt. Of course, these atrocious mass-deportations go unmentioned by Jeremy, who rather banally asserts that the Volga Germans “had it better” in exile in Russia’s Far North and Eastern Siberia than those Germans and German-Americans detained by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration in internment camps during World War II. For context, he will later add that he considers Lavrentiy Beria, the successor to the “Purged” Nikolai Yezhov as NKVD chief in 1939—a man responsible for the liquidation of Social Democrats in Georgia and Armenia, Old Bolsheviks in the Terror, and Polish officers captured after the Nazi-Soviet Pact—to have been a “liberal.”³⁰

So beyond proclaiming elitism and substitutionism; arguing in bad faith; and denying atrocities such as the Stalinist dictatorship, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the May Days, Stalin’s mass-deportations of oppressed nationalities, and the GULAG slave-labor camp system (see part II of this response); Jeremy and Justin now present the classic argument of “whataboutism,” which seeks to distract from the issue at hand—Stalin’s totalitarian atrocities—by falsely claiming that that same issue is dwarfed by some similar issue that is ongoing elsewhere. A fact check shows just how dishonest this argument is: 11,000 Germans and German-Americans were interned in the U.S. during WWII, while Stalin’s regime deported at least 400,000 Volga Germans to Siberia and Irkutsk.³¹ (For reference, the U.S. interned about 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII.)

In sum, Jeremy is lying to his audience when he claims that Stalin wasn’t “just f*cking with people just to f*ck with them.”

Courtesy Asya Pereltsvaig

Notes

1Raya Dunayevskaya, Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution, eds. Eugene Gogol and Franklin Dmitryev (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 317 (emphasis in original).

2Ibid.

3Elena Poniatowska, Tinísima (México, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1992) 595-596 (my translation).

4Catherine Evtuhov et al., A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 700.

5Ibid 702.

6Ibid 710.

7Ibid 705; Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 269-274.

8Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2010), 340-345; Plokhy 269.

9Evtuhov 702-703.

10Ibid 673.

11Plokhy 264.

12Ibid 264-265.

13Evtuhov 703.

14Ibid 704-705.

15Plokhy 267-274.

16Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 47.

17Alexander Berkman, “A Decade of Bolshevism,” in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 122; Nestor Makhno, “The Idea of Equality and the Bolsheviks,” in Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution, eds. Friends of Aron Baron (Chicago, Calif.: AK Press, 2017), 58.

18Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1968), xv, 362.

19Hensman 52.

20Hensman adds the political goals of struggling for democracy, centering internationalism, and advocating for the promotion of human rights and democracy through global institutions (279-302). Beyond this, reorganizing society toward popular power through self-organization in the labor, educational, and territorial sectors (on the social level) is an equally pressing task.

21Arendt 392.

22Evtuhov 671.

23Plokhy 245.

24Evtuhov 641-644.

25Arendt 379; Evtuhov 663.

26James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

27Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, ed. Ronald Radosh (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), xvii-xviii.

28E. H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War (London: Pantheon, 1984), 31.

29Agustín Guillamón, Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933-38 (Oakland: AK Press, 2014), 189; Evtuhov 698.

30Evtuhov 692.

31Ulrich Merten, Voices from the Gulag (Lincoln, Nebraska: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2015), 168-170.

Laurence Davis: “Only a Bold and Popular Left Radicalism Can Stop the Rise of Fascism”

Written by Laurence Davis and published on Open Democracy, 12 February 2017

Walter Benjamin’s observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition.

Horkheimer is front left, Adorno front right, and Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair, Heidelberg, 1964. Wikicommons/Jeremy J. Shapiro at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Some right reserved.

Two new worlds are now struggling to be born amidst the crumbling ruins of neoliberalism and market globalisation. The first is the waking nightmare now unfolding in the United States in the glare of the international media. A reality show with a cast of horrors, its politically successful mix of faux right-wing populism and neo-fascism has inspired and emboldened autocrats everywhere and threatens in the absence of an effective counter-power to become our new global reality.

The second, a just, compassionate, ecologically sound and democratically self-managed post-capitalist world, may be detected in what Colin Ward once described as scattered ‘seeds beneath the snow’. Deeply rooted in a rich soil of ideas and grounded utopian imagination nourished by countless counter-cultural critics of capitalism, industrialism and grow-or-die economics from William Morris, Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus to Gandhi, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin and Ursula Le Guin – as well as a long history of popular movements from below working together to resist regimes of domination and develop progressive and sustainable alternatives to them – the tender shoots of another world are emerging all around us.

They are visible in a wide range of grassroots practices, movements, and practical utopias, from Buen Vivir in the Andes, Ubuntu in South Africa, Ecoswaraj in India, Zapatismo in Mexico, and the budding degrowth movement in Europe to solidarity economies, commoning activities, permaculture projects, re-localisation movements, community currencies, transition towns, co-operatives, eco-communities, worker occupied factories, indigenous people’s assemblies, alternative media and arts, human-scale technologies, basic and maximum income experiments, debt audit movements, radical democratic movements such as Occupy and democratic confederalism in Rojava, and emerging anti-fascist fronts and coalitions uniting immigrant solidarity groups, anti-racists, feminists, queers, anarchists, libertarian socialists and many others.

The great danger we now face is that newly empowered forces of reaction will use that power to repress progressive alternatives before they are able to coalesce as an effective counter-power, sowing seeds of hatred and intolerance instead.

Many commentators of a liberal democratic or centre-left political persuasion have dismissed such warnings as scare-mongering, and suggested that the most effective antidote to ‘populist politics’ is a renewed commitment to social democracy and market globalisation with a ‘human face’. Rather than seek to understand the complex mix of reasons why American citizens voted for a demagogue like Trump, they blame an undifferentiated ‘populism’ and advocate more elite democracy instead.

The breathtaking naivety of this commentary is perhaps matched in recent memory only by Francis Fukuyama’s equally naïve and now risible prediction in 1989 of an ‘end of history’, i.e. an end to mankind’s ideological evolution with the ‘universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.

Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1939

Now more than ever, it is vital that we recognise and articulate careful ideological distinctions between competing right and left wing varieties of populism, and that those of us committed to values like equality, democracy and solidarity take urgent action to oppose Trumpism and the rise of fascism not with more of the same failed elite-led liberal democracy, but with a bold left egalitarian and inclusive radicalism.

The Trump campaign gave voice to the ugly authoritarian and reactionary face of popular opposition to the political establishment. It castigated the elitism and corruption of the system, emphasised its ineffectuality in the face of sinister threats to national well-being posed by Muslims and illegal immigrants and other easily scapegoated ‘outsider’ groups, and maintained that Trump and Trump alone could ‘make America great again’. It succeeded by peddling false solutions and scapegoats for real social problems generated by the governance of interconnected political and economic elites.

By contrast, a bold and inclusive left populist radicalism would expose the real roots of festering social problems by speaking plainly and directly to ordinary people’s needs, without pandering to their worst prejudices and fears. It would offer a generous vision of a better world, and a sweeping programme for revolutionary social change that can be translated into everyday practice.

This will require a reconnection with revolutionary roots. Historically, revolutionary ideas and social movements have tended to emerge out of, and give ideological coherence to, popular democratic social forms. However, in our time once revolutionary ideologies and movements like socialism and anarchism have grown increasingly detached from their radical democratic roots, leaving a political vacuum that right-wing populists and demagogues have been quick to fill.

Walter Benjamin’s observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition. It may be interpreted not only as warning, but as a grimly realistic utopian hope that we still have a fleeting historical opportunity to act before it is too late.

“Contra el Capital, la Autoridad y la Iglesia”

Sobre la vida y la muerte del compañero Ricardo Flores Magón

Esta es la segunda parte de una entrevista a Claudio Lomnitz acerca de su libro, El Retorno del Compañero Ricardo Flores Magón (The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, Zone Books, 2014). Traducción elaborada por el entrevistador y revisada por María A. Castro.  Publicada en linea en Portal Libertario OACA y Bloque Libertario.

Para continuar con el tema de la última pregunta de la primera parte de nuestra conversación sobre las relaciones profundamente románticas, tanto platónicas como sexuales, que se desarrollaron entre las figuras centrales de la Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) y l@s más cercanos a ell@s, ¿qué papeles jugaron el arte y la belleza en este movimiento? En su capítulo sobre la época bohemia de Magón, “La Bohème,” Ud. observa que la sensibilidad estética estaba íntimamente asociada a la sensibilidad humanista y revolucionaria que sentían l@s militantes que formaban parte de este grupo. De hecho, tal conexión filosófica entre el arte y la revolución social ha sido identificada por Herbert Marcuse y Albert Camus y a G. W. F. Hegel se le conoce por la idea de que el heroismo estético se ve en la responsabilidad en la causa de cambiar el mundo.

Aunque sería difícil responder a tal tipo de pregunta en términos del movimiento en general, dadas las variedades entre sus integrantes, se puede decir que el movimiento en general dependía críticamente de la lectura y la escritura, siendo la belleza una razón fundamental para ganar acceso a la alfabetización. Ricardo era muy explícito en sus cartas en cuanto a la importancia de la palabra, del conversar y del pensar. El insistía que era la conciencia y no la violencia la que verdaderamente llevó a cabo la Revolución, aunque hubo mucho más que la cuestión de la propia revolución. En primer lugar, los contenidos de Regeneración y The Border (La Frontera) incluían mucho arte y belleza y se daba énfasis a la poesía, por ejemplo, además de existir un gran interés en el arte gráfico así como en el reconocimiento de autores y obras literarias. Este énfasis también era crítico en el desarrollo de las afinidades interpersonales, las cuales eran un factor indispensable en la vida social del militante, como vimos en cuanto al amor. 

Había asimismo un principio filosófico involucrado en todo esto, expresado en la idea de que el movimiento sentía que las formas contemporáneas de explotación y opresión estaban degradando a los seres humanos del mundo, y que la belleza era clave para la vocación humana. Para poner un ejemplo, en una carta que escribió desde Leavenworth a Ellen White, Ricardo dijo que “No pude evitar reirme un poco—sólo un poco—pensando en tu inocencia. Tú dices que es supérfluo que yo hable de la Belleza, y lo dices cuando es la Belleza aquéllo que yo amo más que nada.” En términos más filosóficos, y otra vez desde Leavenworth, Ricardo escribió al activista socialista Winnie Branstetter que la humanidad “ha violado la Belleza. Siendo el animal más inteligente, y el más favorecido por la Naturaleza, la [humanidad] ha vivido en la suciedad moral y material.”

Diría que la belleza y el arte eran realidades claves en la formación política de l@s militantes, en la socialización del movimiento, en la definición de las metas del movimiento, en la formación de las afinidades espirituales entre desconocid@s que podían entonces apoyarse el un@ al otr@ de manera espontánea, y en la actitud filosófica que les impulsaba a l@s individu@s a rebelarse en contra de la situación que, en caso contrario, se podría haber naturalizado. Esa es una de las razones por las cuales vemos que vari@s militantes importantes crearon obras artísticas en diferentes periodos de sus vidas. En ciertos casos—como el de Práxedis Guerrero, Juan Sarabia o Santiago de la Hoz, por ejemplo—la poesía se creó en el momento cumbre de sus vidas como organizadores políticos. En otros casos—siendo ésta la dinámica de las obras de teatro de Ricardo—la vuelta hacia la producción artística llega a ser un espacio alternativo hacia la militancia y a organización comunal, en un momento histórico en que la eficacia política a través de la lucha armada revolucionaria había decaido de manera significativa. Pero hablando en general, sí es verdad que vari@s militantes escribían poesía o buscaban formas de expresión artística, incluso para atraer a amantes potenciales.

Para l@s que están más familiarizados con una narrativa reduccionista de la Revolución Mexicana (1910-1920) que da prioridad a la Campaña Anti-Reeleccionista del terrateniente reformista Francisco I. Madero—o, al mínimo, a la oposición maderista inicial a la elección que Díaz había hecho para su vicepresidente en los comicios previstos para el año 1910—podría resultar sorprendente considerar que el PLM organizó varias revueltas armadas en la región fronteriza antes de la Revolución, con la esperanza de catalizar una insurrección popular general en México. La primera revuelta tuvo lugar en 1906, la segunda en 1908, y la tercera siendo todavía la Revolución muy joven, en diciembre del 1910, e igual en Baja California durante el primer semestre de 1911. La revuelta armada más ambiciosa fue la primera, siendo organizada para coincidir con el Día de la Independencia en septiembre del 1906 y con las figuras centrales de la Junta Organizadora en participación activa. La idea era asaltar e invadir tres ciudades mexicanas importantes en la frontera: Ciudad Juárez, Nogales y Jiménez. Lamentablemente, los esfuerzos de la red transnacional de espías causaron que fallara la insurrección, y parte de la Junta fue detenida, mientras que la otra parte se escapó. Desde entonces, Díaz decidió dejar que el Estado estadunidense procesara a los revoltosos por haber violado las leyes de neutralidad que se habían establecido durante la Guerra entre España y EUA, a cambio de la no-intervención del dictador mexicano en ese conflicto. Este fue el cargo por el que Magón y sus camaradas fueron encarcelados de nuevo en 1907 por tres años, castigo por la revuelta que habían planificado. La revuelta de 1908, que consistió en un ataque en contra de Las Palomas, Chihuahua, liderado por Práxedis Guerrero y Francisco Manrique mientras los demás integrantes de la Junta Organizadora estaban encarcelados, parece haber sido desaconsejable, y lo mismo tal vez se podría decir de la revuelta de diciembre del 1910 en la que el mismo Práxedis murió.

Además, tomando en cuenta esta nueva encarcelación de varios de los integrantes claves de la Junta Organizadora, el PLM parecer haber sido eclipsado, en los años antes de la Revolución, por el Maderismo, sistema que proveía un alternativa más incrementalista, familiar y complaciente que la que avanzaba el PLM: Francisco I. Madero (“Don Panchito”) representaba “el Estado de Derecho” y la reforma burguesa-democrática, mientras Magón recalcaba la acción directa, la redistribución de las tierras, la expropriación, y la autoemancipación proletaria. Ud. nos cuenta la historia fascinante en la que Madero se aproximó a Magón para ofrecerle la posición de vicepresidente a su lado—siendo ésta una propuesta que Magón rechazó inmediatamente. Entonces, Ud. nos enseña como fue que Madero se apropió del Ejército Federal de Díaz para regular y vencer las fuerzas Liberales que habían tomado Mexicali y Tijuana en los meses antes de la caída de Díaz en 1911, y después que él activó las relaciones diplomáticas con EUA para exigir que la Junta y varios comandantes del PLM fueran encarcelados de nuevo, tras el repudio de Magón hacia Madero, ¡a no ser que Madero hubiera pedido y recibido apoyo militar a los Liberales en un acto de buena fe hasta ese punto en la Revolución! En este sentido, la traición oportunista de Madero claramente demuestra su compromiso al practicar un arte de gobernar autoritario y Weberiano, y puede explicar la razón por la cual Regeneración llegó a considerarle un “dictador,” un “segundo Porfirio Díaz,” y un “dueño de esclav@s.” ¿Podría Ud. hablar más acerca de los varios dilemas con los cuales el PLM se enfrentó en la fase inicial de la Revolución? Ud. plantea que, tras su división con Madero, el PLM se convirtió en una corriente más marginal en el proceso revolucionario, aunque se pudo liberar para expresar su filosofia ácrata abiertamente. ¿Podría haber sido diferente?

Lo hipotético siempre es difícil. La gente siempre va a debatir si Ricardo se equivocó o no al rebelarse en contra de Madero. Por lo menos, y desde una perspectiva política, su sentido del tiempo no fue aconsejable. Ricardo pronunció que Madero era un traidor mientras que la revuelta en contra de Díaz todavía estaba ardiendo. Esta posición abrió al grupo la acusación de que sus integrantes eran traidores financiados por los científicos y de que hacían trabajo sucio para Diaz. Varios auténticos revolucionarios lo sintieron así, entre ellos simpatizantes anteriores del PLM, como Esteban Baca Calderón y Manuel Diéguez, del caso de Cananea. Puede ser que Ricardo creyera que perdería la confianza si apoyaba a Madero y después se rebelaba en contra de él una vez llegado al poder. No es fácil decirlo con precisión. Pero sí es claro que la Junta bajo el liderazgo de Ricardo carecía de un estrategista militar, y que su posición con relación a Madero, y después con Huerta, Carranza, Villa, y los demás, vulneraba el liderazgo militar que sí tenía en México, dado que siempre necesitaban alianzas. Estas alianzas hicieron posible que la Junta de Los Ángeles considerara a los comandantes PLMistas como traidores. En este sentido, la decisión de Magón en cuanto a Madero aseguró una derrota militar rápida, y quizá también causó una influencia ideológica más amplia y duradera.

Para Magón, la lucha armada era indudablemente una táctica importante, pero considerando su opinión de que el dominio contrarevolucionario se concentraba en la hidra de tres cabezas fatales—el capital, el Estado y el clero—la revolución social, según él, se extendía más alla de la insurrección, y de ahí su idea de que el esfuerzo intelectual de agitación se tenía que mantener para inspirar las acciones militantes directas, tal como se ve en los ejemplares de Regeneración. La decisión de Magón tras el fracaso de 1906 y la encarcelación de ciertos integrantes de la Junta para prevenir que su hermano Enrique participara en la revuelta de 1908 y a partir de allí para asegurar la protección de la integridad física de los intelectuales del PLM provocó un conflicto con Práxedis, quien—a lo mejor de manera más verdaderamente ácrata—sentía que no podía pedir a otr@s que arriesgaran sus vidas en la revuelta armada sin hacer él lo mismo. El joven militante de veintiocho anos murió en la revuelta de diciembre de 1910 en observación de este credo, expiando su culpa por haber sobrevivido a Manrique, quien murió en la revuelta de 1908, siendo éste un caso paralelo al del Subcomandante Pedro del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), quien cayó en la insurrección neozapatista de enero del 1994.

Dada esta diferencia de opinión acerca de la relación entre la teoría y la práctica, Ud. pone de relieve que Práxedis tenía más dudas que Magón en cuanto al uso del odio en la lucha revolucionaria. El dijo en algunos de sus últimos artículos en Regeneración que “sin odio se pueden aniquilar los despotismos,” y que “Vamos a la lucha violenta sin hacer de ella el ideal nuestro, sin soñar en la ejecución de los tiranos como suprema victoria de la justicia. Nuestra violencia no es justicia: es simplemente necesidad.” ¿Y cómo veía Magón el odio? Me gustaría añadir que su presentación de la supuesta falta de comprensión juvenil que le faltaba a Práxedis del “valor de la supervivencia,” corre el riesgo de reflejar un sentido discriminatorio por edad. ¿Cómo ve la acusación?

Tu acusación de “discriminación por edad” en contra de mí probablemente tiene razón. No lo había considerado en ese sentido, pero sí hay un tipo de identificación paterna con respecto a la simpatía que siento en referencia al intento de Ricardo de prevenir que Práxedis fuera a la guerra.

Pero de todas maneras, también es verdad que siento más simpatía por Práxedis que por Ricardo en cuanto a la cuestión del odio. Varios de sus ataques en contra de sus enemig@s, y en contra de sus compañer@s a l@s que llegó a ver como enemig@s, son verdaderamente horripilantes. Se puede comprender la razón por la cual Ricardo odía si se contemplan las numerosas dificultades y sacrificios que él experimentó en la vida, pero eso no hace que su actitud fuera atractiva. Ricardo tenía varias virtudes, pero su promoción del odio no se puede incluir aquí. En cambio, Práxedis tenía más conciencia de este problema, y una de las cosas más bellas de Práxedis es que el escribía sus pensamientos acerca de esta cuestión, y los publicaba en Regeneración.

El odio que Ricardo sentía también tenía que ver con su perspectiva histórica, no sólo con el rencor. Él estaba convencido que vivía en el inicio de la revolución mundial, y no era el único que tenía esa opinión, especialmente tras el comienzo de la Primera Guerra Mundial. En cierto sentido, esta consideración podría justificar hasta cierto punto los contínuos llamamientos que Ricardo hacía por la violencia e incluso por los asesinatos, pero tengo que decir que esta parte de la vida de Ricardo es para mí una de las más problemáticas. Se ven los efectos negativos que tuvo esta orientación tanto en las relaciones interpersonales entre Ricardo y algunas de las personas a quienes él consideraba más confiables, como en la decaida de apoyo a la Revolución por un pueblo que estaba agotado por tanta violencia incesante. Esta fue una de las cosas que Ricardo no vivió directamente, pero esta cuestión es muy relevante para poder comprender lo que Enrique y otr@s Liberales experimentaron cuando volvieron a México tras la Revolución.

Durante el desarrollo de la fase inicial de la Revolución y mientras más integrantes del PLM decidieron juntarse a Madero, la red transnacional que apoyaba la “Causa Mexicana” empezó a deteriorarse, como Ud. nos dice—en parte como respuesta a la agresividad virulenta que Ricardo expresaba hacia varios ex-compañer@s que abandonaron el Liberalismo por Madero. Un componente clave de tal actitud impropia entre camaradas tuvo que ver con el prejuicio evidente que Ricardo tenía en contra de la gente LGBTQ. Él expresó su ira de manera particular en contra de la lesbiana Juana B. Gutiérrez de Mendoza, cuando reveló su homosexualidad públicamente tras su deserción, presentándola como alguien “degenerada” que estaba involucrada en una “lucha contra la Naturaleza.” Igual ocurrió en el caso de Antonio I. Villarreal, quien dejó la Junta Organizadora para unirse al maderismo, y después fue acusado de haber tenido relaciones sexuales con cierto peluquero. A pesar de la “traición” de Gutiérrez de Mendoza, hay que clarificar que ella ayudó a Zapata a escribir el Plan de Ayala (1911/1914) tras su desilusión con el reformismo maderista, mientras que Villarreal el socialista sirvió bajo Madero y en cambio fue nombrado coronel antes de que él fundara una versión en la Ciudad de México de Regeneración (que Magón consideraba “Degeneración” o “Regeneración burguesa”), y luego acusara a Ricardo de haberse vendido.

Sin duda, las “acusaciones” de homosexualidad que Magón perseguía se afiliaron con el conocimiento popular del “Escándalo de los ’41,” operación policiaca en contra de un baile de la clase alta en la Ciudad de México en 1901, evento que resultó en la detención de 41 muchachos que estaban bailando el un@ con el otr@, la mitad vestidos de mujer. La implicación fue que la clase dominante del Porfiriato era afeminada, emasculada y “degenerada,” y que lo que se necesitaba era la regeneración masculina, masculinizando una regeneración ¡patriarcal! Lamentablemente, y con relación al momento actual, una dinámica de tono similar parece operar ahora en Mexico, en relación al Presidente Enrique Peña Nieto y Manuel Velasco Coello, Gobernador del Estado de Chiapas. No hay duda que estos priístas son tiranos, pero se conoce que una corriente entre la oposición en contra de ellos se expresa en términos tales como “putos” putativos, casi en estilo magonista. A partir de esto surgen varias preguntas. En primer lugar, ¿hasta qué punto se reflejaban los prejuicios de la sociedad mexicana en la homofobía de Ricardo? Es evidente que este prejuicio viola la filosofía militante y anti-autoritaria del PLM, siendo si no profundamente transgresiva, dado que sus adherentes “se enfrentaban con el status quo e intentaban crear una alternativa frente a ello.” Otra cosa es preguntarle, ¿cuánto es que Ud. cree que la sociedad mexicana ha avanzado, en términos de la diversidad sexual y de género en el siglo que ha pasado desde la Revolución?

Con toda probabilidad, sería imposible evaluar la profundidad o el alcance de la “homofobía” durante la epoca de Magon. Ese término ni existía en ese entonces, y como Carlos Monsivais ha observado, el “Escándalo de los ’41” fue el primer escándalo homosexual en México (1901). Así que mi respuesta a la primera parte de tu pregunta es tentativa, pero aquí va: Tengo la impresión que Ricardo era más intensamente “homofóbico” que vari@s de sus contemporane@s, y creo que así era por dos razones. La primera tiene que ver con la idea de regeneración en sí— idea que dependía de la perspectiva de que México estaba postrado, humillado, esclavizado, etc. Todas estas ideas minaban la virilidad, lo cual era un valor clave en el movimiento. Esta dinámica no necesariamente lleva al pánico homosexual, pero sí puede contribuir al mismo. Creo que en el caso de Ricardo, sí contribuyó.

Un segundo factor, en mi opinion, fue la gran cantidad de tiempo que Ricardo estuvo encarcelado. Las relaciones homosexuales eran muy comunes en la cárcel, y eso se sabía bien en Mexico. Carlos Roumagnac, el principal criminólogo mexicano, publicó un estudio de “tipos criminales” basado en entrevistas de gran duración en la Prisión de Belem—donde Ricardo había estado internado—y concluyó que casi todos los encarcelados tenían relaciones sexuales entre sí. Los cuentos que contó Antonio Villarreal acerca de las experiencias de la Junta en la prisión federal en Arizona se enfocaban asimismo en esta cuestión. Es posible que Ricardo desarrollara una aversión a los avances sexuales que había experimentado en la cárcel, o tal vez existíera para él un enlace entre la homosexualidad y la debilidad, o también es posible que él fuera homosexual, y que le horrorizara la posibilidad de que su homosexualidad se desvelara. No se puede decir nada definitivo a partir de los documentos históricos, pero creo que se puede decir que sus experiencias en la cárcel fueron relevantes.

Por último, el tercer factor es la utilidad política de la acusación. En la prensa, Ricardo era constantemente atacado, y el solía utilizar cualquier cosa que pudiera para profanar a sus enemig@s. La acusación de homosexualidad le era útil, y él la utilizaba. Diría que no sólo la utilizaba, sino que se satisfacía haciéndolo.

En cuanto a la situación de México en la actualidad, yo diría que la sociedad mexicana ha experimentado transformaciones tremendas en términos de género y relaciones sexuales—tremendas. Aún durante el curso de mi vida, ni hablar de lo que estaba pasando durante el Porfiriato. Ahora si, las ideas de la conspiración homosexual, en particular entre la élite, como las teorías conspiratorias antisemíticas, todavía son comunes. En este sentido, Ricardo era mucho menos pernicioso que algunos teoristas de conspiración contemporáneos, dado que él no creía que México estaba bajo el control de un círculo gay. Creo que el hecho de que Ricardo en general era antinacionalista le conservó en cuanto a las teorias de conspiracion de las cuales hablas—las que dicen que la gente es pura, pero que sus explotadores son una camarilla de malditos perversos. La homofobía de Ricardo se dirigía hacia las personas que él consideraba traidoras, pero ést@s según él habian traicionado una Causa en vez de una nación “pura.”

Dado, como dice Ud., que la revolución ácrata es “la revolución más radical que la Ilustración ha engendrado,” siento curiosidad por saber si Ud. tendría algún comentario acerca de la influencia que el posmodernismo y el posestructuralismo han tenido en la tradición ácrata en las ultimas décadas, como se ve por ejemplo en la propuesta para un “anarquismo posestructuralista.” Como sabrá Ud., ambas escuelas rechazan la Ilustración.

No conozco estas tendencias bien, en cuanto a las posibilidades de hacer tal comentario, aunque creo que hay buenas razones por las cuales el posmodernismo y el posestructuralismo tendrían un interés serio en el anarquismo. Para ilustrar, la crítica del Michel Foucault en cuanto al Estado y la soberanía fácilmente podría resultar en la exploración del anarquismo como espacio político alternativo. Además, el rechazo del posmodernismo hacia el grand récit del progreso podría proveer un amplio espacio para la valoración de l@s campesin@s, l@s artesan@s, y los modos de vida que se diferencian del antiguo romance marxista con el proletariado industrial. Esas conexiones siempre fueron muy importante para l@s ácratas, ya que ell@s no tenían el compromiso de despojar a l@s campesin@s y transformarl@s en mano de obra industrial.

Cuando digo que el anarquismo ha sido la corriente más radical de la Ilustración, quiero resaltar la consigna “Libertad, Igualdad y Fraternidad [o Solidaridad].” Estas palabras tuvieron una gran influencia, una influencia máxima.

De manera crítica, Ud. menciona que el vegetarianismo era una práctica social innovadora que algun@s integrantes del PLM y l@s estadunidenses que apoyaban la Causa Mexicana adoptaron: es decir, Práxedis Guerrero y Elizabeth Trowbridge. Es de presumir, como escribe Ud., que l@s dos se convirtieron en vegetariani@s para afirmar su amor hacia los animales y repudiar la crueldad y sufrimiento impuestos sin necesidad hacia estos seres, de manera que su rechazo de la injusticia social entre los seres humanos se extendió hacia la esfera de los otros animales y de la naturaleza. Tal vez en esto les habrían influido los ejemplos del ácrata-pacifista Lev Tolstoy y Élisée Reclus, el “Communard vegetariano,” algo que también se reflejaba en las sociedades vegetarianas que surgieron durante la revolución social de l@s ácratas españoles, además de entre l@s ácratas-vegetarian@s del movimiento Sarvodaya en India y Sri Lanka.¹ Como paralelo a la pregunta que trataba de la emancipación LGBTQ, ¿hasta qué punto ve Ud. progreso o regresión en cuanto a la lucha por los derechos de los animales y su liberación en el momento actual?

Sí, a tu comentario acerca de Tolstoy y Reclus. Creo que la cuestión de los animales y sus derechos es una señal de progreso profundo, y que hoy se extiende mucho más que en la época de Elizabeth y Práxedis, dado que los problemas ambientales y nuestra responsabilidad como sujetos no simplemente de la historia humana, sino de la historia del planeta, actualmente son de un orden distinto al que existía anteriormente. Recuerda que la Revolución Mexicana tuvo lugar antes de que se desarrollaran las bombas átomicas y la energía nuclear. El sentido de que los seres humanos de verdad podían destruir el planeta entero todavía no existía, aunque las ideas de conservar el medio ambiente y oponerse a su destrucción ya existían. Frances Noel, uno de l@s estadunidenses radicales sobre quien escribo, fue un ambientalista que apoyaba la política de conservación en California. Hablando en términos más generales, las cuestiones de salud, aire puro, y medio ambiente formaban parte del discurso entonces no solamente de l@s higienistas y eugenistas, sino que también de l@s organizadores de la clase obrera y l@s reformistas urbanistas. Así que no quiero decir que no existiera el ambientalismo en esa época, sólo que era diferente. Hoy en día, la lucha ambiental tiene una máxima prioridad, mientras que entonces no era así. Esta dinámica causa que el vegetarianismo de un Práxedis o una Elizabeth resulte mucho más interesante, relevante y atractivo actualmente.

Pasando a la consideración de la campaña militar en Baja California (1911)—la lucha armada del PLM más conocida, aunque parece haber sido más un fiasco que una revolución exitosa—Ud. habla de varias problematicas: por ejemplo, que solo un 10 por cien de los insurrectos que “liberaron” a Tijuana eran mexican@s, los demás siendo Wobblies estadunidenses y mercenarios extranjeros. En primer lugar, esta dinámica material resultó en la situación inoportuna en la que los voluntariados anglos con más experiencia militar fueron elegidos oficiales, según los principios ácratas-democráticos, para luchar en la guerra contra l@s mexican@s “leales” a Díaz. Un ejemplo es el caso del aristócrata británico Carl Ap Rhys Pryce, quien anunció sin demora la independencia de Baja California tras la renuncia de Díaz en Ciudad Juárez en mayo del 1911. Junto con las propuestas fantásticas del capitalista “emprendedor” Dick Ferris de colonizar abiertamente la peninsula en interés del capital estadunidense, la decisión de Pryce—que no recibió apoyo ni de la Junta en Los Ángeles, ni de los guerreros Liberales y Wobblies—llevó a vari@s mexican@s a concluir que la campaña Liberal en realidad intentaba facilitar la anexión de Baja California a los EUA, en un paralelo a la pérdida anterior de Tejas, territorio que se convirtió en el Suroeste de EUA tras la guerra iniciada por James K. Polk contra Mexico unos 65 años antes, así que los Liberales eran nada más unos filibusteros, en su opinión.

Esta manera de presentar la campaña en Baja California sirvió para deslegitimizar de inmediato los esfuerzos de los Liberales allí, y de hecho facilitó que Madero utilizara las fuerzas federales que había heredado en contra del PLM. Mexicali y Tijuana cayeron antes de pasar un mes después de la caída de Diaz. Aunque la Junta creía que Baja era un punto rojo entre varios, es de imaginarse que este vínculo que se estableció entre el PLM y el separatismo dañó su relación con la opinión pública mexicana. ¿Considera Ud. que Ricardo se equivocó al permanecer lejos de la operación en Baja, o cree que él no fue suficientemente directo para distinguir entre la campaña Liberal y las acusaciones del filibusterismo que se alzaron en su contra, a pesar del énfasis que el ponía en la acción directa y la expropriación revolucionaria? Como observa Ud., este problema es inherente al anarquismo de la Junta Organizadora, que no se preocupaba por la “integridad nacional,” como sí lo hacen los nacionalistas y estatistas.

Esta es una pregunta difícil de responder, dado que no sabemos lo que estaban pensando Ricardo y los otros integrantes de la Junta, y por eso mi respuesta va a ser muy provisional. Es claro que en 1911 Ricardo ni pensaba ni creía que la situación en los Estados Unidos se acercaba a una revolución—aunque tal vez sí así pensaba en el 1917—pero si él pensaba que los Wobblies y socialistas en el Suroeste estadunidense estaban creciendo rápidamente en fuerza y así podrían estar de camino para tomar el poder en esa región en un futuro próximo, podría ser que a él no le importaba si Baja permanecía en Mexico, se convirtiera en una república independente, o fuera anexada a EUA.

Mi impresión es que no le importaba mucho si Baja llegara a ser independiente, pero que sí se oponía totalmente a su anexión a EUA en ese momento. Ya sabes que todo esto es pura conjetura. Según Ricardo, él rechazaba ambas alternativas y quería que la peninsula permaneciera en México, donde debería de estar—pero todo esto salió después de que le acusaron de ser filibustero. Sin duda, creo que a él no le importaba nada cuáles eran los porcentajes de las fuerzas Liberales, entre mexicanos y extranjeros. La lucha era para la liberación de la explotación económica y política, no para la independencia nacional. Ricardo estaba a favor de extenderles la nacionalidad mexicana a l@s extranjer@s que participaron en la Revolución.

¿Debería haberse ido Ricardo a Baja California a ser comandante? Desde el punto de vista de los guerreros que simpatizaban con los Liberales, sí. Al mínimo, debería de haber estado en mejor contacto. La Junta utilizaba a John Kenneth Turner y a Antonio de Pío Araujo como intermediarios, y los insurrectos en Mexicali y Tijuana nunca recibieron la visita de Ricardo, Anselmo Figueroa o Enrique, quienes eran los integrantes principales de la Junta en ese entonces.

Pero de todas maneras, Ricardo y la Junta siempre consideraron que Baja era sólo un frente, no su meta principal. Desde esta perspectiva, tuvo sentido que Ricardo no viajara hacia allá para mandar, dado que Baja estaba muy aislada en esa época, y él no podía haber encabezado un esfuerzo propagandístico allí, en comparación con lo que podía hacer desde Los Ángeles. No obstante, tras la caída de Tijuana, todos los integrantes de la Junta fueron encarcelados, y les mandaron a la isla de McNeil en el estado de Washington. Por esta razón, es posible que pudieran haber logrado mucho más desde Baja California, después de todo.

Enfrentándose con el “avance” de la Revolución, y en particular con el coup d’etat de febrero de 1913 encabezado por el General Victoriano Huerta que mató a Madero y su vicepresidente Pino Suárez—una toma de poder que la Embajada de EUA ayudó a coordinar, como Ud. dice—Regeneración reaccionó, diciendo que tod@s l@s polític@s eran la misma cosa, fueran tiran@s, reformistas burgueses o generales. No obstante, Ud. implica que este tipo de análisis ultra-izquierdista no lo compartía la mayoría de la sociedad mexicana. Entonces, ¿podría hablar acerca de los conflictos entre el anti-autoritarianismo “vanguardista” del PLM y las realidades de los sentimientos populares en cuanto al curso de la Revolución, especialmente en relación con el fin de Madero?

El difamarle a Madero fue un mal error político que reflejó una falta de consideración por los sentimientos populares en el mismo México. O tal vez, como dices, simplemente reflejaba el grado de movimiento vanguardista y su responsabilidad de educar al pueblo y destetar a la humanidad del engaño. Aunque antes de ocurrir el coup, la popularidad de Madero se estaba cuestionando, en ciertas regiones mexicanas—claramente, en el Distrito Federal—su asesinato fue profundamente repudiado. Las críticas que surgieron en Regeneración en contra de Madero, su esposa, y su familia tras sus asesinatos fueron muy insensibles, y podrían haber garantizado que el movimiento se quedara como marginal en cuanto a fuerza política, si no hubiera sido por el hecho de que ya estaba marginalizado en Mexico en ese período en cualquier caso. Recuerda que mientras que derribaron a Madero, la Junta estaba encarcelada en Washington, y varios ex-militantes del PLM se habían unido a otros movimientos, frecuentemente como los bordes más radicales de tales.

Este fallo táctico aparte, al parecer igual había un desprestigio entre los integrantes de la Junta hacia la reforma liberal-democrática, y es por esto que les veían a Huerta y a Madero como la misma cosa. Sí es verdad que eran muy similares en términos económicos, pero Huerta hasta le dio unas concesiones al movimiento sindical para reforzar su régimen. Las posibilidades de la democracia parlamentaria tenían más valor de lo que el PLM reconocía, en mi opinión, incluso para el futuro del movimiento laboral.

¿Qué nos puede decir acerca de las relaciones entre el PLM y otros movimientos insurgentes que se oponían a Madero y a sus sucesores Huerta y Venustiano Carranza: es decir, Emiliano Zapata y el Ejército Libertador del Sur, o Pancho Villa y su División del Norte? Ud. plantea que Zapata simpatizaba con el manifiesto del PLM de septiembre de 1911, y que él tomó el concepto de “Tierra y Libertad” directamente de los Liberales, con las manifestaciones prácticas de la estrategia zapatista avanzando de cierta manera de acuerdo con le llamamiento de Magón hacia la revuelta armada decentralizada y generalizada para expropriar los bienes de la producción. Sin embargo, la situación parecer haber sido muy diferente en el caso de Villa.

Creo que sí es justo decir que el Zapatismo encontró sus ideas principales en el ejemplo de los Liberales, y que el Zapatismo terminó siendo el mejor ejemplo del tipo de política que Ricardo favorecía. Es obvio que la filosofía no era todo, y mucha de la práctica zapatista tenía que ver con las condiciones particulares de la región sureña mexicana, así que no creo que el PLM tiene toda la responsabilidad por lo que el Zapatismo hizo o no hizo. Su influencia filosófica fue muy real, y hubo varios puntos en común entre los dos movimientos. Los problemas del caudillo y del personalismo preocupaban a los integrantes del PLM, pero probablemente no tanto a l@s zapatistas. De todos modos, dado que el Zapatismo no intentaba tomar el poder federal, esta preocupación terminó siendo secundaria.

El PLM tenía una opinión horrible de Villa y ello se relacionaba mucho con su papel en la lucha contra el PLM bajo el mando de Madero, especialmente dado que él era directamente responsable por la muerte de varios de sus compañeros. Las diferencias con Villa igual transcendieron a esa esfera: para Ricardo, Villa era un politiquillo típico: corrupto, sanguinario, autobombástico, comprado por las autoridades estadunidenses primero, y después por quienquiera pagara más…

Aunque la opinión del PLM era muy negativa en contra de Villa, eso no quiere decir que no existía ningun punto de coincidencia con el Villismo, o el Carrancismo. El manifiesto del PLM de 1906 tuvo mucha influencia sobre el proceso revolucionario mexicano. Dado el odio mutuo entre Villa y el PLM, no había muchos ex-militantes PLMistas en su División del Norte, pero sí había varios individuos prominentes que se afiliaron con Carranza durante un tiempo: gente como Antonio Villarreal y Juan Sarabia, quienes fueron protagonistas en el desarrollo de las ideas agrarias de este movimiento.

Ahora, un siglo tras la Revolución, ¿ve Ud. algún movimiento actual que siga el ejemplo de Magón y el PLM? En una entrevista que dio en abril del 1994, el Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (ahora Galeano) del EZLN explícitamente vinculó el neo-Zapatismo con el pensamiento de Ricardo, entre otras figuras históricas mexicanas, mientras que en Rojava, varios acontecimientos en paralelo entre l@s kurd@s han resultado en el florecimiento del “confederalismo democrático” y la autogestión ácrata durante los últimos años. También es claro que Magón sigue siendo un punto de referencia clave para el movimiento social en México hoy en día.

Ricardo Flores Magón fue unos de los pocos ideólogos de estatura en la Revolución Mexicana. Otras figuras importantes, como Luis Cabrera o José Vasconcelos, muy probablemente fueron mejores analistas políticos que Ricardo, pero ellos no fueron visionarios en el sentido de poder imaginar una sociedad verdaderamente diferente. Por eso, no obstante sus varias deficiencias, el pensar y vivir de Ricardo vuelven constantemente. Además, las dimensiones transnacionales, feministas, antiracistas y antinacionalistas eran únicas en el caso de la Revolución, y han sido una gran inspiración para todos los movimientos mexicanos-estadunidenses auténticos, empezando con el movimiento chicano de los 1970s. La influencia del PLM vuelve en los movimientos sociales, como dices, igual que en la vida de los individuos. Sé que me impactaron mucho los escritos de Ricardo cuando los leí por primera vez a los 17 años (¡ya hace muchos anos!), aunque entonces todavía no sabía mucho de la Revolución, y no tenía ningún interés particular en la cuestión.

De manera similar con el caso de otras figuras complicadas, hay personas que dicen haber sido inspirad@s por Ricardo, pero que no avanzan una política que coincide mucho con la suya. Estas diferencias se deberían de reconocer, sin duda, aunque el punto más profundo es que existen movimientos sociales hoy que buscan instaurar varias formas alternativas de autogestión, democracia, e igualdad que han hallado—y que continuarán hallando—mucho que aprender en el pensamiento de Ricardo, igual que en las experiencias colectivas del PLM y de sus amigos y camaradas.

La subida al poder de Huerta en 1913 provocó en Tejas y otras partes de la región fronteriza una crisis que sería fatal para Magón. Como respuesta a la toma del poder de Huerta, Jesús María Rangel, un comandante Liberal muy respetado, organizó un contingente armado que iba a cruzar a Chihuahua para luchar en contra de los Carrancistas, y después avanzar hacia el sur a enfrentarse con el mismo Huerta, pero a estas fuerzas Liberales les impidieron el paso unos cuantos “Texas Rangers” quien les esperaban en la frontera, donde dispararon y detuvieron a los que sobrevivieron. El PLM de inmediato adoptó la causa de los “Mártires de Tejas” y de los supervivientes presos políticos. Después, en 1915, una revuelta mexicana en Tejas que seguía el Plan de San Diego resultó en una contrareacción brutal en contra de l@s mexican@s que vivían o trabajaban en el estado: miles fueron masacrad@s, víctimas de ejecuciones extrajudiciales y arbitrarias cometidas por paramilitares racistas. Tales atrocidades llevaron a Magón a declarar en Regeneración que no eran los rebeldes de San Diego sino que sus ejecutores los que deberían haber sido fusilados. Fue esta declaración, junto con la designación correcta de Ricardo en cuanto a Carranza, la que le consideraría “otro Díaz” y otro “lacayo de la Casa Blanca” en su esfuerzo por “subordinar el proletariado mexicano y entregarlo a la clase capitalista doméstica y extranjera, atado de pies y manos,” además que la llamada que él hizo hacia los mexicanos que luchaban bajo Carranza para convertir a sus comandantes en blanca, fue lo que les costó a él y a Enrique otra encarcelación (1916), hasta que los empeños de Emma Goldman por pagar su fianza les dio un aplazamiento temporal.

Con el comienzo del Temor Rojo, los hermanos Magón fueron perseguidos por las autoridades, y fueron condenados nuevamente en 1918. Ricardo recibió una sentencia por veintiun años, “gracias” a la ampliación del cargo con la nueva violación de la nueva Ley de Espionaje, que se había promulgado el año previo. Tal sentencia representaba pena de muerte para Ricardo, cuya salud ya se estaba deteriorando. De hecho, dos años después de llegar a la Prisión Federal de Leavenworth en Kansas, donde había pedido asistencia médica unas 22 veces, Magón murió debido a un infarto cardíaco. Su muerte tuvo lugar solo días después de que le habían trasladado a una celda más remota que la de Librado Rivera, quien igual estaba encarcelado en Leavenworth por la misma razón que Ricardo. Aunque no hay duda que Venustiano Carranza ordenó el asesinato de Zapata en Chinameca, Morelos, en 1919, es menos claro que el fin de Magón tuvo que ver con una ejecución extrajudicial propia, en vez de negligencia médica, sea a propósito o no. ¿Cree Ud. que le asesinaron a Ricardo?

Personalmente, no creo que a Ricardo le asesinaran, aunque probablemente nunca sabremos de manera positiva si sí o no. Creo que sí hubo negligencia médica consciente en cuanto a las condiciones serias que Ricardo sufría, y que su muerte podría haberse pospuesto o evitado si hubiera recibido la atención médica adecuada, pero no creo que le estrangularon, como dicen.

Sabemos claramente que una de las teorias de su “asesinato” es falsa, como demuestro en el libro, y también sabemos de la negligencia médica. Podría ser que un guardia le asesinara a Ricardo, y estoy seguro que habrá muchas personas que estarían convencidas de esa teoría.

Las razones por las cuales no creo que le asesinaran son, en primer lugar, que Librado Rivera no dijo que a Ricardo le habían asesinado en una carta que escribió a un compañero desde Leavenworth en la que contaba la historia de la muerte de Ricardo, eso en un momento en el cual Librado no sabía lo que se decía fuera de la prisión. Tras su liberación de Leavenworth, sí aceptó la teoría del asesinato de Ricardo, pero ya en ese momento la productividad de esa narrativa estaba clara, así que contradecirla hubiera sido costoso e insensible, dado que, considerándolo de manera profunda, es muy claro que a Ricardo sí le asesinaron sus opresores.

Otra razón por la cual no creo que a Ricardo le mataran es que entiendo que las autoridades estadunidenses ya no le veían como una amenaza, y el gobierno de Obregón estaba a favor de aceptar su retorno a México. Si Obregón no consideraba a Ricardo amenazante, ¿por qué el gobierno estadunidense? Recuerda que Ricardo casi estaba ciego cuando falleció, y de salud estaba muy mala en general. Al final, la muerte de Ricardo fue una vergüenza para el director de Leavenworth, quien había insistido de manera continua que la salud del preso estaba bien. Su muerte resultó en una investigacion directa desde la Procuraduría Federal. En este sentido, no veo mucho motivo allí tampoco.

Yo creo que la narrativa del asesinato de Ricardo fue una manera de expresar el poder de sus ideas subversivas, y de resaltar la represión que él sufrió bajo las autoridades estadunidenses. Las ideas de Ricardo sí que son poderosas, y sí es verdad que le condenaron a la vida encarcelada, dada su resistencia a la conscripción y a la Primera Guerra Mundial, y su anarquismo. Todo eso sí es verdad. La única cosa es que no creo que le asesinara un guardia en Leavenworth—eso, nada más.

Aunque el crepúsculo de la vida de Magón estuvo lleno de pathos, dadas tanto la decaída de Regeneración, como la miseria y marginación experimentadas por los integrantes de la Junta antes de la encarcelación en Leavenworth, y la separación emocional de Enrique, Ud. clarifica que a Ricardo le inspiraba al fin la idea optimista y casi hegeliana que las Revoluciones Mexicanas y Rusas iluminaban el camino adelante para la humanidad, anunciando el comienzo de una transformación social mundial que destruiría el capital y toda autoridad. En una carta escrita en Leavenworth menos de un año antes de su muerte, Ricardo expresa su certidumbre en cuanto al “futuro brillante que [ahora] se abre a la raza humana,” y hasta la identifica como su “consuelo.” Un poco menos de un siglo después, vemos que la crisis multidimensional del orden-mundial capitalista persiste precisamente porque las revoluciones del siglo XX fallaron en desplazar a los enemigos reaccionarios que Magón había identificado desde el escenario de la historia. Considerando el conocimiento íntimo y profundo de la revolución social que Ud. ha recopilado y presentado en El Retorno del Compañero Ricardo Flores Magón, ¿tiene algunas recomendaciones para l@s ácratas y otr@s radicales de hoy en día que quiere compartir?

Gracias por esta pregunta, no sería ésta una pregunta que me hubiera atrevido a hacerme yo mismo. Aquí viene mi respuesta, en tanto en cuanto no me consideran un oráculo délfico. Creo que la parte más emocionante de esta historia y experiencia es la idea de la centralidad del apoyo mútuo. Además, creo que el feminismo del movimiento, su resistencia meticulosa al nacionalismo, su compromiso con el amor, el arte, la belleza, y su crítica hacia el Estado y la religión organizada son todas cosas maravillosas. No estoy de acuerdo con la afinidad del movimiento hacia la violencia o su teoria de la revolución, que simplemente estaba equivocada.

Con relación a la segunda cuestión, Ricardo creía que cada aldea y comunidad en Mexico reproducía una lucha fundamental entre l@s opresores y l@s oprimid@s, y que una chispa revolucionaria tenía la potencia de explotar la situación entera. En este sentido, se puede ver al Ricardo como un precursor del foquismo y Che Guevara—con algunas de las mismas limitaciones de tal teoría y figura histórica, igual. Lo que Ricardo no veía es que los procesos revolucionarios son guerras civiles, y en las guerras civiles, todas las divisiones sociales se pueden movilizar de maneras productivas, políticas y materiales. La dinámica de la guerra no era, como Ricardo lo imaginaba, un tipo de llama de purgatorio que resultara en el sanamiento de la sociedad y el parto del comunismo puro. No, la guerra civil llegó a ser un proceso en el cual se formaban las coaliciones, los liderazgos, y se negociaban la vida y la libertad de los mejores individuos. Sí es claro que hubo victorias mayores en este proceso, pero costó muchísimo, y los resultados no eran lo que los militantes del PLM habían esperado. Por esa razón, vari@s de sus militantes continuaban en la lucha, y continuaban alzándose en armas hasta que por fin les asesinaron las autoridades. Doy el ejemplo de Lázaro Alanís al principio del libro, quien se levantó por primera vez en contra de Porfirio Díaz, después en contra de Madero, y después se opuso a Huerta y Carranza. Por fin fue ejecutado tras haber participado en la Revuelta De la Huerta contra Obregón.

No me convencen mucho las teorias bakuninistas acerca de la violencia. Pero en mi opinión hay una verdad profunda filosófica en varias de las ideas de Kropotkin y otr@s, quienes creían en la primacia del apoyo mútuo. Igual creo que actualmente hay unos medios de comunicación y organización que podrían facilitar la adopción de los ideales ácratas, en comparación con la situación hace un siglo. Es claro que tendría que haber nuev@s teoristas para poder movilizar estos recursos de manera distinta a la que se intentó en generaciones previas.

Gracias de nuevo Javier, por ofrecerme esta conversación, que me ha proveido mucho para contemplar.

1 John P. Clark, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 145-6, 180, 229.

On the Life and Death of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón

“Against Capital, Authority, and the Church”

This is part II of an interview with Claudio Lomnitz regarding his book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014). Part I can be found here.

Continuing in the vein of the last question from the first part of our conversation, which had to do with the profoundly romantic love-relations, both platonic and sexual, that developed among the central figures of the Junta Organizadora of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and those closest to them, what role would you say art and beauty played in this movement? In the chapter on Magón’s bohemian period, “La Bohème,” you observe that an aesthetic sensibility was intimately related to the humanistic and revolutionary sensitivities felt by the militants affiliated with this group. Indeed, such a philosophical connection between art and social revolution has been identified at different times by Herbert Marcuse and Albert Camus, among others. G. W. F. Hegel is known for his view that aesthetic heroism is seen in one’s commitment to the cause of changing the world.

Although it is tough to respond to a question like this for the entire movement, because there was a fair amount of variation amongst its participants, one can say for the movement as a whole relied crucially on reading and writing—and that beauty was a key reason to gain access to literacy. Ricardo was very explicit in his correspondence on the significance of words, of discussion and thought, and insistent on the fact that it was consciousness, not violence, that really did the work of Revolution. Yet there was quite a lot more beyond the question of revolution itself. First, the contents of Regeneración and The Border included a fair amount of art and beauty—emphasis on poetry, for instance, interest in graphic art, and the recognition of literary authors and works. This emphasis was also critical in the development of interpersonal affinities—a factor that was indispensable for the social life of the militant, as we saw in the discussion of love.

There was also a philosophical principle at stake, which was that the movement felt that humanity was being degraded by contemporary forms of exploitation and oppression, and that beauty was in fact key to the human vocation. So, for instance, in one letter written from Leavenworth to Ellen White, Ricardo wrote: “I could not help laughing a little—only a little—at your lovely naiveté. You say that it is superfluous to speak to me of Beauty, and you say this when it is Beauty what I love most.” More philosophically, again from Leavenworth, Ricardo wrote to the socialist activist Winnie Branstetter that “Man has wronged the Beautiful. Being the most intelligent animal, the one most favored by Nature, Man has lived in moral and material filth.”

I would say that beauty and art were key to the formation of the militants, in the socialization of the movement, in the definition of the movement’s goals, in the formation of spiritual affinities between strangers who could then reach out and support one another spontaneously, and in the philosophical attitude that led individuals to revolt against what might otherwise have been naturalized as “their lot.”

This is also, I think, one of the reasons why we see important militants of the group tending to artistic production at different moments of their lives. In some cases—Práxedis Guerrero, Juan Sarabia, or Santiago de la Hoz come to mind—poetic writing was happening at the height of their role as political organizers. In others—with this to some extent being the case of Ricardo’s plays, for instance—the turn to artistic production is an alternative space for communitarian organization and militancy, at a point in time when political effectiveness in the armed revolutionary struggle had declined significantly. But it is generally true that a great number of militants wrote poetry or found forms of artistic expression, even if it was simply to court a potential lover.

For those who are more familiar with a reductive account of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) that prioritizes the reformist landowner Francisco I. Madero’s Anti-Reelectionist campaign against the Porfiriato—or at least, early on, the Maderista opposition to Díaz’s choice for vice-president in the planned 1910 election—it may come as a surprise to consider that the PLM organized a number of armed revolt in the border region during the lead-up to the Revolution in the hopes of catalyzing a generalized popular insurrection across Mexico. The first came in 1906, the second in 1908, and the third when the Revolution was very young, in December 1910, and then in Baja California during the first half of 1911. The most ambitious of these planned revolts was the first, slated to commemorate Independence Day in September 1906: with the central figures of the Junta Organizadora fully participating, the idea was to attack and take three major Mexican border towns—Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, and Jiménez. However, the machinations of the transnational spy network foiled the uprising, with part of the Junta being arrested and another part managing to escape capture. Díaz thereafter opted to have the U.S. State prosecute the revoltosos for their violation of neutrality laws which had been established during the Spanish-American War in exchange for his non-intervention in that conflict—with this being the very charge on which Magón and his comrades were imprisoned once again for three years in 1907, as retribution for their attempted insurrection. The 1908 revolt, an attack led by Práxedis Guerrero and Francisco Manrique on Las Palomas, Chihuahua, while the rest of the Junta was behind bars, seems to have been ill-advised, and a similar analysis could perhaps be applied to the December 1910 uprising in which Práxedis himself was killed.

In addition, in no small part due to this new jail sentence for many of the key figures of the Junta Organizadora, the PLM seems to have been relatively eclipsed in the years leading up to the Revolution itself by Maderismo, which provided a more incrementalist, familiar, and accommodating alternative to the one advanced by the PLM: for Francisco I. Madero (“Don Panchito”) stood for “law and order,” constitutionality, and bourgeois-democratic reform, in contrast to Magón’s stress on direct action, radical land redistribution, expropriation, and proletarian emancipation. You discuss the fascinating history whereby Madero approached Magón early on to offer him the position of vice-presidential candidate at his side—an offer which Magón readily rejected out of hand. Then, you show how Madero appropriated Díaz’s federal army to reign in and defeat the Liberal troops who had taken Mexicali and Tijuana in the months leading up to Díaz’s fall in 1911, and subsequently activated diplomatic channels with the U.S. to have the Junta and a number of PLM commanders imprisoned once again after Ricardo’s rejection—even if Madero had requested and received military support from the Liberals in good faith up to that point in the Revolution! Madero’s opportunistic traición (betrayal) clearly demonstrates his commitment to practicing authoritarian-Weberian statecraft, and it can explain the reason for which Regeneración came to refer to him variously as a “dictator,” a “second Porfirio Díaz,” and “a slave owner.” Can you expand upon the various dilemmas faced by the PLM in the early phase of the Revolution? You argue that, following its split with Madero, the PLM became a more marginal current in the revolutionary process, even as it became free to openly express its anarchist philosophy. Could it have been different?

Counterfactuals are always difficult. People will always debate whether Ricardo made a mistake in rebelling against Madero or not. At the very least, from a political point of view, his timing seemed ill-advised. Ricardo pronounced that Madero was a traitor while the revolt against Porfirio Díaz was still raging. This opened the group that was loyal to his position to being represented as traitors, paid for by the científicos, and doing Díaz’s dirty work for him. Many honest revolutionaries felt this way—including old PLM sympathizers like Esteban Baca Calderón and Manuel Diéguez, of Cananea vintage. Perhaps Ricardo felt that he would lose credibility if he supported Madero and then rebelled once Madero was in power. It’s hard to say. It is clear though that the Junta under Ricardo’s leadership had no effective military strategist, and its position with regard to Madero first, and then with regard to Huerta, Carranza, Villa and the rest of them, left the military leadership that it had in Mexico very vulnerable, since they always needed alliances, and these alliances opened them up to being labeled as traitors by the Junta in Los Angeles. So Ricardo’s decision on Madero in effect paved the way to a quick military defeat, but perhaps also to more lasting ideological influence.

The Junta Organizadora of the PLM in 1910. From left: Anselmo Figueroa, Práxedis Guerrero, Ricardo Flores Magón (seated), Enrique Flores Magón, and Librado Rivera. Práxedis’ face has been superimposed onto that of another central figure in the PLM, most likely Antonio Villarreal, who broke from the group early on within the development of the Mexican Revolution. Besides the question of Villarreal’s defection to Francisco Madero, Ricardo held his rumored homosexuality in contempt. (Courtesy El Hijo del Ahuizote)

For Magón, armed struggle certainly was an important tactic, but given his view that the counterrevolution was concentrated in the three-headed hydra of capital, State, and clergy, social revolution to him was more expansive than mere insurrection—hence his belief in the need for agitational intellectual work to continue to inspire militant direct action, as through the issues of Regeneración. Magón’s decision after the failure of 1906 and the subsequent imprisonment of the Junta to prevent his brother Enrique from participating in the 1908 uprising and thereafter to emphasize the protection of the physical integrity of the PLM’s intellectuals led to conflict with Práxedis, who—perhaps in a more consistently anarchist way—felt he could not ask others to risk their lives in insurrection without doing the same. The twenty-eight year old militant died in the December 1910 revolt for having observed this belief, thus expiating his guilt for surviving Manrique, who was killed in the 1908 revolt—in a parallel to the fate of the EZLN’s Subcomandante Pedro, who similarly lost his life during the neo-Zapatista uprising on 1 January 1994.

Intriguingly, given this difference of opinion on theory and practice, you discuss how Práxedis was more wary of the employment of hatred than Magón in the revolutionary struggle, with the former declaring in some of his final articles for Regeneración that “[d]espotism can be annihilated without hatred,” and that “[w]e are going off to a violent struggle without making violence our ideal and without dreaming of the execution of our tyrants as if that was the supreme victory of justice. Our violence is not justice; it is simply a necessity.” What was Magón’s take on hatred, in contrast? Beyond this, I will say that your assessment of Práxedis’ supposed youthful lack of comprehension of the “value of survival” potentially runs the risk of betraying ageism. Do you disagree?

Your charge of “ageism” against me is probably right. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but there is a kind of paternal identification in my sympathy with Ricardo’s attempt to try to keep Práxedis away from battle.

Having said that, though, it is also true that I sympathize more with Práxedis than with Ricardo on the question of hatred. I think that Ricardo at a certain point was filled with a lot of bile. Many of his attacks on enemies, and on comrades who he came to see as enemies, are simply horrifying. One can understand why Ricardo hated when one considers the hardship and sacrifices that he endured, but that does not make his attitude attractive. Ricardo had many great virtues; his promotion of hatred was not one of them. Práxedis, by contrast, was more conscious of this problem, and one of the beauties of Práxedis is that he wrote his thoughts on this question down and published them.

Ricardo’s fanning of hatred was also predicated on his view of history, and not only on rancor. He was convinced that he was living at the cusp of world revolution, and he was by no means alone in that belief—particularly after the start of World War I. In some ways this sense might justify to a degree Ricardo’s continuous call for violence and even for murder, but I must say that this aspect of Ricardo is to me one of the most problematic. And one sees its negative effects in some of the people who were closest to him, as well as in loss of support for revolution by a people who were exhausted by continual and unending violence. This was an aspect of the Mexican situation that Ricardo did not live directly, but that is very relevant for understanding what Enrique and other Liberals experienced when they returned to Mexico after the revolution.

As the early phase of the Revolution developed and increasingly more former members of the PLM decided to join Madero, the transnational network supporting the “Mexican Cause” began to break down, as you detail—in part as a response to the virulent aggressivity Ricardo expressed to a number of his former comrades who would defect to Madero. One critical component of this uncomradely behavior has to do with Ricardo’s evident prejudice against non-heterosexuals: he reserved special ire for the lesbian Juana B. Gutiérrez de Mendoza, outing her publicly as a “degenerate” engaged in a “quarrel with Nature” following her break with the PLM, and Antonio I. Villarreal, who left the Junta for Madero and thereafter was accused of having had relations with a certain barber. Despite Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s “betrayal,” she would go on to help Zapata compose the Plan de Ayala (1911/1914) following her disillusionment with Maderista reformism, while Villareal the socialist served under Madero and received a promotion to lieutenant colonel for having done so, before founding a Mexico City version of Regeneración (which Magón considered “Degeneración” or “Regeneración burguesa”) and later charging Ricardo with having sold out.

Of course, the “charge” of homosexuality raised by Magón played into popular knowledge of the “Scandal of the 41,” which refers to a police raid of an upper-class ball in Mexico City in 1901 that involved the arrest of 41 young males who were found dancing with each other, half of them in drag. The implication is that the Porfiriato’s ruling class was effeminate, emasculated, and “degenerate,” whereas what was needed was masculine, masculinizing—and to a certain degree, patriarchal—regeneration! Unfortunately, with regard to the present, a similar dynamic seems to operate to an extent now in Mexico in terms of President Enrique Peña Nieto and Manuel Velasco Coello, State Governor of Chiapas. Certainly, these PRI potentates are horrid reactionaries, but it is known that one current of the opposition against them is expressed in terms of their being supposed putos, or gays (“fags”), in Magonist style. Several questions come to mind. First, to what degree does Ricardo’s homophobia mirror the prevailing prejudices of Mexican society at that time? It rather self-evidently contradicts the militant anti-authoritarian philosophy governing the PLM, which, being profoundly transgressive, “confronted the status quo and sought to create an alternative to it,” as you write. Furthermore, how much do you think Mexican society has progressed on questions of sexual and gender diversity in the century since the Mexican Revolution—no thanks to Magón, unfortunately?

It is probably impossible to gauge the depth or extent of “homophobia” during Magón’s day. The term itself did not exist and, as Carlos Monsivais once pointed out, the affair of the 41 was Mexico’s first homosexual scandal, and it happened in 1901. So my response to the first part of your question is tentative—but here it is: I have the impression that Ricardo was more intensively “homophobic” than many of his contemporaries, and I think that he was that for a couple of different reasons. The first was to do with the idea of regeneration itself—a notion that constantly relied on the view that Mexico was prostrated, humiliated, enslaved, and so on. These ideas all involved undermining virility. And indeed “virility” was a key value for the movement. This does not automatically lead to homosexual panic, but it can play in as a factor, and I think that for Ricardo, it did.

A second factor in my view is Ricardo’s extensive prison experience. Homosexual relations were extremely common in prison, and this was well-known in Mexico. Mexico’s chief positivist criminologist, Carlos Roumagnac, had published a study of criminal types based on extensive interviews in Belem Prison—one of the places where Ricardo had been held—and claimed that almost all of the prison inmates had sex with one another. Antonio Villarreal’s description of the Junta’s experience in federal prison in Arizona also dwelled on this point. It is possible that Ricardo developed an aversion to sexual advances that he’d been subjected to in prison, or that he developed a view concerning homosexuality and weakness, or that he himself was a homosexual and was terrified to be “outed.” We cannot say from the historical documents, but I think that we can say that experiences in prison were relevant.

Finally, the third factor is the political utility of the accusation. In the press, Ricardo was constantly on the attack, and he tended to use whatever he could to defile his enemies. The accusation of homosexuality was useful, and he used it—I would say not only that he used it, but that he indulged.

As for changes with present-day Mexico, Mexico has had tremendous transformations in gender and sexual relations—tremendous. Even in my life-time, let alone with regard to what was happening in the Porfiriato. Now, ideas of homosexual conspiracy, and of homosexual conspiracy in the elite, like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, are still common and commonly indulged. In this regard, Ricardo was much less pernicious than contemporary conspiracy theorists, because he did not believe that Mexico was in the hands of a homosexual ring. I think that the fact that Ricardo was for the most part anti-nationalistic spared him from some of the worst aspects of conspiracy theories like the kind to which you refer, that tend to imagine the nation as pure, and then to posit its exploiters as a cabal of ill-born perverts. Ricardo’s homophobia was also directed to people who he saw as traitors, but to traitors of a Cause rather than traitors of a “pure” nation.

Given, as you say, that the anarchist revolution “was the most radical revolution that the Enlightenment spawned,” I was curious if you have any comments to share about the influence postmodernism and poststructuralism have had on the anarchist tradition in recent decades, as in the concept of “post-structuralist anarchism.” As you know, both these schools of thought reject the Enlightenment wholesale.

I don’t know enough about these tendencies to comment, but I think that there is good reason why postmodernism and post-structuralism would have a serious interest in anarchism. On the one hand, Michel Foucault’s criticism of the State and of sovereignty can easily lead to the exploration of anarchism as an alternative space; on the other, postmodernism’s rejection of the grand récit of progress provides ample space for the valorization of the peasantry, of artisans, and of modes of life that are distinct from the old Marxist romance with the industrial proletariat. Those connections were always extremely important to the anarchists, who were not at all committed to uprooting the peasantry and transforming it into industrial labor.

When I say that anarchism was the most radical current of the Enlightenment, I mean this especially with regard to the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” They took this further than anyone else.

Importantly, you observe that vegetarianism was an innovative social practice taken up by some members of the PLM and U.S.-based supporters of the Mexican Cause: namely, Práxedis Guerrero and Elizabeth Trowbridge, a young Boston heiress sympathetic to socialism who made a substantial proportion of her inheritance available to the struggle. Presumably, as you write, she and Práxedis adopted vegetarianism as an affirmation of their love for animals and a repudiation of the cruelty and suffering unnecessarily visited on them—such that their keen rejection of social injustice among humans was extended also to the animal and natural worlds. Perhaps they were also influenced in this decision by the examples of the anarcho-pacifist Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus, the “Vegetarian Communard,” which were in turn echoed by the vegetarian clubs that arose in the Spanish anarchist cultural revolution as well as among the Sarvodaya vegetarian-anarchists.¹ In a parallel to the question of LGBTQ emancipation, to what extent do you see progress or regression in terms of the struggle for animal rights and liberation at present?

Yes to your comment on Tolstoy and Reclus. I think that the question of animals and animal rights is a sign of deep progress, and extends much further today than it did at the time of Elizabeth or Práxedis, because the question of the environment and of our responsibility as subjects no longer of human history, but of the history of life on the planet, is today of a different order than it was then. Remember that the Mexican Revolution occurred before the existence of the atomic bomb or of atomic energy. The sense that humans could actually destroy the planet was not yet there, even though there were ideas of conservation and concerns with destruction of environments. Frances Noel, one of the American radicals that I write about, was an environmentalist and supporter of conservation in California. More generally, the question of health, fresh air, and environment was part of the discourse not only of hygienists and eugenicists, but also of labor organizers and urban reformers at that time. So I don’t mean to say that environmental issues were absent then, but simply that they were of a different order. Today the environmental struggle is of the very highest priority. It was not then. This makes the vegetarianism of a Práxedis or an Elizabeth all the more interesting, relevant, and attractive today.

With reference to the Baja California campaign of 1911—the PLM’s most famous military struggle, which resembled a fiasco more than any successful revolution—you note a number of problematics: for one, that only an estimated 10 percent of the insurrectos who captured Tijuana were Mexicans, with the remainder being Wobblies from the U.S. and foreign soldiers of fortune. Secondly, this material dynamic led to the awkward situation whereby more experienced Anglo volunteers were elected as officers—in accordance with anarchist-democratic principles—to wage war against Mexicans, as in the case of the British aristocrat Carl Ap Rhys Pryce, who promptly announced the independence of Baja California following Díaz’s resignation in Ciudad Juárez in May 1911. Juxtaposed with the clownish venture capitalist Dick Ferris’ proposal for outright colonization of the peninsula in the interest of U.S. capital, Pryce’s move—which was not supported by the Junta in Los Angeles or by Liberals and Wobblies in the field—inexorably led many Mexican observers to conclude that the Liberal campaign in reality sought to facilitate the annexation of Baja to the U.S., as in the concept of filibusterismo, in a parallel to the previous loss of Texas and the entire Southwest after the war waged by James K. Polk against Mexico some sixty-five years prior.

This framing of the Baja campaign immediately served to delegitimize the Liberal efforts there, and furthermore aided in the ease with which Madero employed the federal troops whose command he had inherited against the PLM—with Mexicali and Tijuana falling within a month of Díaz’s abdication. While the Junta felt Baja was but one among several fronts, or puntos rojos, for libertarian upheaval in the country, this association made between the PLM and secessionism may well have marred its relationship with Mexican public opinion. Do you consider Ricardo’s decision to remain physically aloof from the Baja operation to have been a mistake, or believe that he was insufficiently forceful in distancing the Liberal campaign from the charges of filibusterism raised against it, his stress on direct action and revolutionary expropriation notwithstanding? In part, as you observe, this problem is inherent to the Junta’s anarchism, which was not concerned with “national integrity,” as patriots and statists are.

This is a difficult question to respond to, because we don’t actually know what Ricardo and the Junta was thinking, so my response is very tentative. It is clear that in 1911 Ricardo did not think or believe that the United States was close to a revolution (a notion that he might have thought in 1917), but if he felt that the Wobblies and Socialists in the Southwest were in fact strongly increasing in force and might be building to a position where they might aspire to take power, he might have been indifferent as to whether Baja stayed in Mexico, became independent, or was annexed to the United States.

My impression is that he may not have cared all that much if Baja had become an independent republic, but that he would have been adamantly opposed to annexation by the United States at that time. This is all speculation, you understand. According to Ricardo, he rejected both alternatives and wanted the peninsula in Mexico where it belonged—but this was after he was accused of filibusterism. I certainly don’t think that he cared what proportion of troops were Mexicans and which were foreign. The struggle was for liberation from economic and political exploitation, not for national independence. Ricardo was for extending Mexican nationality to foreigners who participated in the Revolution.

Should Ricardo have gone to Baja California to lead the fight? From the viewpoint of the fighters who sympathized with the Liberals, yes. At the very least, they should have been in more direct contact. The Junta tended to use John Kenneth Turner and Antonio de Pío Araujo as intermediaries, and the troops in Mexicali and Tijuana were never visited by Ricardo, or by Anselmo Figueroa, or Enrique, who were the senior members of the Junta then.

But on the other hand, Ricardo and the Junta always viewed Baja as one front, and not as their principal goal. In this respect, it made sense for Ricardo not to go there to lead the fight, because Baja was extremely isolated then, and he could not have led a propaganda effort comparable to what he could do from Los Angeles. And yet, the Junta was all imprisoned and sent to McNeil Island in Washington State after the fall of Tijuana. So it is possible that they would have been able to do more from Baja California after all.

Faced with the progression of the Revolution and particularly the coup d’etat of February 1913 led by General Victoriano Huerta that killed Madero and his vice president Pino Suárez—a coup which the U.S. Embassy helped to coordinate, in fact, as you show—Regeneración reacted by claiming all politicians to be the same, whether they be dictators, bourgeois reformists, or generals. Yet you suggest that this ultra-left type of analysis was not shared by the Mexican people at large. Could you speak, then, to the tensions between the “vanguardist” anti-authoritarianism of the PLM and the reality of the popular sentiments regarding the course of the Revolution, particularly in terms of the fate of Madero?

Maligning Madero was a bad political mistake that showed lack of regard for popular sentiment. Or maybe, as you say, it simply reflected the degree to which this was a vanguardist movement that saw its role as educating the people and weaning them from deception. Although by the time of the coup Madero’s popularity was very much in question, at least in some areas of Mexico—certainly in Mexico City—his assassination was deeply unpopular. Jibes in Regeneración against Madero and his wife and family at the time of their assassination were deeply insensitive, and might have guaranteed that the movement would remain marginal as a political force, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the movement was so deeply marginalized in Mexico by then in any case. Recall that at the time of the coup, the Junta was in prison in Washington, and many of the old militants of the PLM had left its ranks and joined other movements—often as those movements’ radical fringe.

Beyond the tactical blunder, there seems to me to have also been insufficient appreciation for liberal-democratic reform by the Junta, which is why they viewed Huerta and Madero as being the same. It is true that they were pretty similar from the point of view of economic policies. In fact, Huerta even made some concessions to the union movement in order to buttress some of his popular support. But the fact of parliamentary democracy was more of a value than the PLM recognized, in my opinion, including for the future of the labor movement.

What can you say about the relationship between the PLM and other insurgent movements opposed to Madero and his successors Huerta and Venustiano Carranza: that is to say, Emiliano Zapata and the Ejército Libertador del Sur, as well as Pancho Villa and his División del Norte? You observe that Zapata sympathized with the PLM’s September 1911 manifesto, and he would seem to have consciously taken the concept of “Tierra y Libertad” (“Land and Freedom”) directly from the Liberals, with the practical manifestations of Zapatista strategy arguably advancing in consonance with Magón’s call for generalized and decentralized armed revolt designed to expropriate the means of production. However, the situation would seem to have been rather different in the case of Villa.

I think that it is fair to say that Zapatismo got its main ideas from the Liberals, and that Zapatismo ended up being the best example of the sort of politics that Ricardo was advocating for. Obviously, ideology was not everything—and much of what Zapatismo did responded directly to conditions on the ground, rather than to ideology, so I don’t think that the PLM can take all of the credit, or all of the flak, for what the Zapatistas did and did not do. But their ideological influence was very real, and their points of confluence were many. The problem of the caudillo and of personalismo was a concern for the PLM—probably not shared by Zapatistas overall—but because Zapatismo did not really aspire to take power nationally, this concern was in the end secondary.

The PLM had a terrible opinion of Villa. This was in large part due to Villa’s role fighting the PLM during the Madero revolution, and to the fact that he was directly responsible for butchering many of their comrades. But differences with Villa also went beyond that sphere—to Ricardo, Villa was a typical politiquillo: corrupt, blood-thirsty, self-aggrandizing, in the pay of the Americans at first, and of the highest bidder after that…

The fact that PLM opinion on Villa was so negative, though, does not mean that there were no points of coincidence with this movement, or with Carrancismo, for that matter. The PLM’s 1906 platform had pretty broad influence in the Mexican revolutionary process. Because of Villa’s personal animosity to the PLM, there weren’t a lot of former PLM militants in his movement, but there were many prominent people in Carranza’s camp for a while, including people like Antonio Villarreal and Juan Sarabia, who were relevant players for the agrarian ideas of that movement.

A century now after the Revolution, do you see any movements taking from the example of Magón and the PLM? In an April 1994 interview, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the EZLN explicitly tied Zapatismo to the thought of Ricardo, among others, while in Rojava a number of parallel developments taken up by the Kurds have seen the flowering of “democratic confederalism” and anarchistic self-management during the past few years. Self-evidently, as well, Magón remains a key reference for the movimiento social in Mexico to this day.

Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the few ideologues of stature in the Mexican Revolution. Other important figures, like Luis Cabrera or José Vasconcelos, for instance, were probably much better political analysts than Ricardo, but they were not visionaries, in the sense of imagining a truly alternative society. Hence, despite all of their shortcomings, Ricardo’s thought and experience return constantly. What is more, the transnational, feminist, anti-racist and anti-nationalist component is unique for the Mexican Revolution, as well as being a source of inspiration to any contemporary Mexican-American social movement worth its salt, starting with the Chicano movement in the 1970s. So PLM influence returns in social movements, just as you say, and it also often happens with individuals as well—I know that I was impacted by Ricardo’s writings when I first read some of them, when I was 17 (years ago!) and yet I knew very little about the Mexican Revolution then, and did not have any special interest in the subject.

As with many other complicated figures, there are people who claim inspiration from Ricardo but who have a politics that is not very compatible with his. This deserves to be noted, certainly, but the deeper point is that there are movements today looking to formulate various alternative forms of self-management, democracy and equality that have found—and will continue to find—much to learn from Ricardo’s thought, and from the collective experience of the PLM and of their friends and allies.

Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and Librado Rivera were imprisoned during the First Red Scare for violating neutrality laws and the Espionage Act. This would be Ricardo’s place of death during the early morning of 21 November 1922, whether due to conscious medical neglect or outright murder. (Courtesy John Murray Papers)

The ascendancy of Huerta in 1913 provoked a crisis in Texas and the rest of the border region which would ultimately prove fatal to Magón. In response to Huerta’s coup, Jesús María Rangel, a respected Liberal commander, organized an expeditionary force to cross into Chihuahua, do battle with the Carrancistas, and progress south to deal with Huerta himself, but they were forcibly prevented from doing so by Texas Rangers who met them at the border, fired on them, and arrested the revolutionaries who survived the shoot-out. The PLM immediately took up the cause of the “Texas Martyrs” and the surviving political prisoners. Then, in 1915, a Mexican uprising in Texas following the Plan de San Diego was met with a fierce, all-out reprisal against Mexicans located in the state: thousands were shot, lynched, or otherwise summarily executed by white-supremacist gangs. Such atrocities led Magón to declare in Regeneración that it was not the San Diego rebels but their executioners who should be shot. It was this declaration, together with Ricardo’s apt designation of Carranza as “another Díaz” and another “lackey of the White House” who would work to “subject the Mexican proletarian and turn him [sic] over to the foreign and domestic capitalist class, hand and foot,” as well as the accompanying call he made for Mexicans fighting in Carranza’s army to turn their guns on the officer class which landed him and Enrique once again in jail in 1916, until Emma Goldman’s efforts to raise bail gave them a temporary reprieve.

Then, with the coming of the Red Scare, the Magón brothers were tried and convicted yet again in 1918. Ricardo was sentenced to twenty-one years’ imprisonment, thanks to a new charge of violation of the Espionage Act, which had just been passed the year before. Such a sentence amounted to capital punishment for Ricardo, whose health was already declining. In point of fact, two years after coming to Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas, where he had requested medical assistance no fewer than 22 times, Magón died of a heart attack. Ricardo’s death came just days after he was transferred to a different cell farther away from Librado Rivera, who was also interned in Leavenworth on the same charge as Magón. While there is no question that Venustiano Carranza ordered Zapata’s assassination in Chinameca, Morelos in 1919, it is less clear that Magón’s end was due to outright execution rather than conscious medical neglect. Do you think Ricardo was murdered?

I myself don’t think that Ricardo was murdered, but probably we will never know for sure. I do believe that there was deliberate medical negligence with regard to Ricardo’s serious condition, and that his death might have been postponed or averted had he been given proper medical attention, but I don’t believe that he was strangled, as the theory goes.

We know for sure that one of the theories of his “murder” is false—as I show in the book—and we know for sure about the medical negligence. Whether Ricardo might have been murdered by a guard in any case is possible, and I am sure that there will be many who subscribe to that theory.

The reasons why I don’t think that he was murdered are, first, that Librado Rivera did not say that Ricardo was murdered in a letter that he wrote to a comrade from prison telling the tale of Ricardo’s death, at a time when Librado did not know what was being said outside the prison. After Librado’s release from Leavenworth, he did subscribe to the theory of Ricardo’s murder, but by that point the productivity of that tale was clear, and going against it would have been costly and unnecessary since, in a deeper sense, Ricardo was of course killed by his oppressors.

I also don’t believe that Ricardo was murdered because I don’t think that the Americans saw him as such a threat at that point. The Obregón government was willing to repatriate him to Mexico. If Obregón did not see Ricardo as a threat, why would the US government? Remember that Ricardo was practically blind by the time that he died, and in very poor health. Finally, Ricardo’s death was an embarrassment to the warden of the prison, who had repeatedly claimed that the prisoner’s health was good. It earned him a direct inquiry from the Attorney General. So I don’t see much motivation there either.

My sense is that the story of Ricardo’s assassination was a way of figuring and expressing the potency of his subversive ideas, and a way of pointing to the repression to which he was subjected by the American government. Ricardo’s ideas were indeed powerful. And he was indeed condemned to life in prison because of his resistance to the draft and to World War I, and because of his adscription to anarchism. All of that is true. I just don’t think that he was murdered by the guard, that’s all.

While the twilight of Magón’s life was full of pathos, given the decline of Regeneración, the poverty and marginalization experienced by the Junta members prior to imprisonment in Leavenworth, and the estrangement with Enrique, you make clear that Ricardo was encouraged in the end by an optimistic, almost Hegelian sense that the Mexican and Russian Revolutions illuminated the way forward for humanity, hearkening the beginning of a universal social transformation that would overthrow capital and all authority. In a letter written in Leavenworth less than a year before his death, indeed, Ricardo expressed his certainty regarding the “bright future which is [now] opened to the human race,” and he even identifies this as his “consolation.” A little less than a century on, we see that the multidimensional crisis of the capitalist world-order persists precisely because the revolutions of the twentieth century failed to displace the reactionary enemies identified by Magón from the stage of world history. In light of the intimate and profound knowledge of social revolution you have collected and presented to us in The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, do you have any concrete suggestions to make to anarchists and other radicals today?

Thank you for this question—it is not one that I had dared to ask myself. As long as I’m not taken as some sort of Delphian oracle, here’s my response. I think that the most powerful aspect of this story and experience is the idea of the centrality of mutual aid. Also, I believe that the movement’s feminism, its punctilious resistance to nationalism, its commitment to love and to art and beauty, and its criticism of the State and of organized religion are all exemplary. I do not have as high an opinion of the movement’s embrace of violence or of its revolutionary theory, which was simply wrong.

Concerning the latter, Ricardo believed that each town and village in Mexico replicated a fundamental struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed, and that a revolutionary spark had the power to explode the whole tinder-box. In this sense, he can be seen as a precursor to foquismo and Che Guevara—with some of the same limitations as that theory, too. What Ricardo did not visualize though is that revolutionary processes are civil wars, and that in civil wars all of the fractures of society become politically productive and material for political exploitation. The dynamic of war was not, as Ricardo imagined, a kind of purgatorial fire that would end up cleansing society of its ills and giving birth to pure communism. Instead, civil war proved to be a process wherein coalitions were formed, leaderships emerged, and the life and freedom of the best people were bargained with. There were major gains in the process, to be sure, but the costs were huge, and the results were not what the PLM hoped for, so much so that many of its militants continued to struggle, and continue to rise up in arms until they were finally shot. I give the example of Lázaro Alanís at the very start of the book, who rose up in arms first against Porfirio Díaz, then against Madero, then against Huerta, then against Carranza, and was finally executed after participating in the De la Huerta rebellion against Obregón.

I don’t think much of Bakuninist theories of violence. But to my mind there’s deep philosophical truth in much of the doctrines of Kropotkin and others who believe in the primacy of mutual aid, and I also feel that there are communications media and organizational possibilities in the present that make at least some anarchist ideals more viable today than they were in the early twentieth century. Of course, new theorists will be necessary to put these resources into play in a way that is different from those that were tried in that earlier generation.

Thank you again, Javier, for offering me this conversation, which has given me much to reflect on.

1 John P. Clark, The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 145-6, 180, 229.