Psychoanalysis for Collective Liberation

First published in the New Politics Winter 2022 issue.

Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory is available from Bloomsbury in paperback and ebook formats

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a humanistic psychoanalyst, writer, and activist who was principally influenced by the theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, though he was critical of both figures. A German-American Jew from an Orthodox, middle-class family, Fromm studied sociology with Alfred Weber (brother of Max), joined the Institute for Social Research—otherwise known as the Frankfurt School—in 1930, and fled Nazi Germany in 1934 for exile in New York. He embarked on his own iconoclastic journey when his erstwhile comrades Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno expelled him from the Institute in 1939 for questioning Freudian orthodoxy about the libido, or human sexuality. Controversially, in place of Freud’s idea that erotic satisfaction is life’s driving force, Fromm suggested that our goals in existence are in fact relatedness, rootedness, identity, a frame of orientation (or object of devotion), and transcendence (or agency).

While this original thinker is perhaps best known for his book The Art of Loving (1956), in which he develops the idea of authentic and productive bonds of love based on mutual recognition, the editors of and contributors to the new volume, Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future,¹ underscore the intellectual’s innovative concepts and enduring relevance to a number of key topics. These include humanism, feminism, the social character, conformity, authoritarianism, and anti-fascism, among others. To this point, co-editor Joan Braune aptly points out the glaring absence of psychoanalysis and critical theory in the numerous books published in recent years that attempt to explain resurgent conservative-authoritarian populist and neo-fascist trends (219, 225n13). New studies of fascism by anarchists are not exempt from this trend, with the result that the left overlooks important considerations and strategies for understanding and resisting the far right. In essence, we ignore Fromm at our peril (40).

Prophetic Messianism, the Social Character, and Trumpism

According to Michael Löwy, one of the contributors to the volume, Fromm was a romantic Jewish intellectual and a “religious atheist,” inspired by the “universal utopian perspective” of Jewish messianism (45). On this reading, Fromm was a “religious romantic anti-capitalist—not [a] Marxist—” who interpreted Weber’s sociology in a critical way (48). Likewise, he hailed the Hasidic Judaic tradition as being critical of capitalist modernity. In The Dogma of Christ (1931), Fromm lauds the early Christian community as an anti-bureaucratic, revolutionary “free brotherhood of the poor” that at once opposed Roman imperialism and instituted “love communism” (49). Anticipating his colleagues Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument about history and fascism in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947), and echoing Karl Kautsky’s own analysis of the foundations of Christianity’s betrayal as starting with the empowerment of the bishops over the prophets and apostles (1908), Fromm traces the integration of Christianity with the state as parallel commentary on the destruction of the Russian Revolution by the Bolshevik Party. In Kautsky’s words, “The organization of a proletarian, rebellious communism thus became the staunchest support of despotism and exploitation, a source of new despotism and new exploitation.” Whereas Löwy suggests that this implicit parallelism communicates Fromm’s disgust with Stalin and sympathy with Trotsky’s analysis in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), it may also convey the psychoanalyst’s convergence with anarchism. Indeed, in 1936, Adorno anxiously complained to Horkheimer about Fromm’s “anarchistic deviations” and “sentimental … blend of social democracy and anarchism,” concluding, “I would urgently advise him to read Lenin” (152). Yet Fromm did read Lenin and considered that the “destruction of Socialism” began with him.²

As a critical social psychologist and public intellectual, Fromm is perhaps best known for his creative, neo-Freudian analyses of political and social authoritarianism. Integrating Marx, Freud, and Weber, Fromm theorized about alienation, neurosis, hierarchy, and sadomasochism. Per Freud, neurotic mood disorders may impart an expression of trauma, unmet needs (“the return of the repressed”), or even a rebellion against dominant norms. Fromm, for his part, concluded that alienation results from one’s embeddedness within defective social relations that build “artificial needs and drives”—namely, the will to power, exploitation, and domination—and so lead to the dehumanization and instrumentalization of self and others. To such understandings, writer Michael Thompson adds that neurotic frustration may signal the breakthrough of critical consciousness over pathological social relations, while communicating the losses and sacrifices we must endure due to the systemic “abuse of the social bond” under the iron cage of capitalism, patriarchy, and the state (27). In contrast, robust bonds promote mutual recognition, community, creativity, knowledge, (self)discovery, and autonomous self-determination.

The contributors to Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory justly emphasize the importance of the humanist’s social-character theory and related insights into the psychosocial aspects of political movements. Social character can be defined as an intermediary between consciousness and the given socio-economic structure: the “most frequent pattern typical in a particular society … and also the dominant characteristic” (194). Generally, social character serves adaptive and stabilizing functions, ensuring the persistence of the “pathology of normalcy” (6). Even so, Fromm identified different types. To name just two: the marketing character, which corresponds to the automaton conformity expected of monopoly capitalism, versus the productive character, which channels adversity into the creation of meaning and love. With Hilde Weiss (1900-1981), a brilliant student of the council-communist Karl Korsch, Fromm designed a study into the social character and political attitudes of German workers toward the end of the Weimar Republic (1929-1931). The findings of this survey, which will be discussed in more detail below, illuminate the great error of Marx’s almost mechanistic faith in the working classes, who are “not reliably socialist or anti-authoritarian” (135). In reality, the Weiss-Fromm study confirmed among many participants simultaneous psychical masochism and the idealization of strong men (144).

Connecting past with present, several of the essayists appearing in this volume seek to apply Fromm’s framework to the project of understanding the growth of extreme right-wing movements. This analysis is most welcome in the wake of the Trump regime and the associated legitimization of neo-fascism. Charles Thorpe views the Trumpist phenomenon as “regressive identification,” to quote the English sociologist Anthony Giddens: The disgraced former president’s foot-soldiers “simply become dependent children again” and so surrender their consciences to the would-be dictator (181). Such a diagnosis is especially apt when considering the attempted coup incited by President Trump on January 6, 2021. In a Frommian sense, reactionary countermovements can be understood, at least in part, as anxious backlashes by those privileged in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality to rapid, progressive societal changes that might threaten their dominance in the social hierarchy (85-86). Like Reagan and the shareholders in the 1980s, who rebelled against “bureaucracy” and “Communism” by imposing neoliberalism, the authoritarian syndrome of Trumpism represents a false revolt that re-entrenches privilege, irrationalism, and established tendencies toward aggressive self-destruction. Although the right in the United States often relies on community-building and the development of familial, in-group bonds for its propagation, rightist politics both presuppose and reproduce the bourgeois coldness of life in the capitalist, imperialist, and settler-colonial United States (167).

Humanism, Feminism, and Social Character in a Mexican Village

George Lundskow, in his essay on “The Necessity of Prophetic Humanism in Progressive Social Change,” differentiates between “two basic forms” of spiritual life: universalist emancipation and xenophobic idolatry. In Freudian terms, this conflict can be reinterpreted as the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, libido and mortido, or “a faith in life and a faith in death” (55). Lundskow’s universalist perspective is intimately connected with biophilia, or love of life, whether human or nonhuman, and the prophetic-messianic Judaic tradition. Concurring (perhaps controversially) with Fromm that evolution demands that we all have a “frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive,” Lundskow discusses Black Panther Huey P. Newton’s passion for revolutionary suicide—to sacrifice oneself for the people—in place of the reactionary suicide demanded by capitalism and authority (53). Channeling Hermann Cohen’s understanding of messianism as “the dominion of the good on earth,” the writer advocates the construction of a new “revolutionary religion” as a means of transforming the world (68). In like manner, in The Ministry of the Future (2020), the science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson depicts one of his characters calling for the founding of a new religion to unite humanity and save the planet.³

In her intervention considering the relationship between humanism and feminism, Lynn S. Chancer rightly chastises Fromm for his distance from the feminist movements that surged in the 1960s and 1970s and his related use of sexist language. At the same time, she praises Fromm’s concept of love as mutual recognition, finding it to be a framework that implicitly challenges the gender binary that encodes sadistic male chauvinism on the one hand and masochistic feminine passivity on the other. The struggle against sadomasochistic character orientations and practices—being “mechanisms of escape” that drive wars, exploitation, ecocide, and aggression—would be a process to redirect society toward a more peaceful, egalitarian, and erotic future (197). In such a world, the interrelated “social defense mechanisms” of sadism and masochism would be attenuated, in both the individual and collective, and interdependence would serve as an alternative to the master/slave relationships of past and present (99). Chancer praises Fromm’s concern for “care, loving, sanity, and reason” as implicit critiques of toxic masculinity, sexism, and heterosexism, being systems that “have coercive consequences by limiting people’s gender and sexual freedoms” (101). While she criticizes the psychoanalyst’s gender essentialism and identifies his lack of interest in human sexuality—what fellow contributor David Norman Smith terms a “desexualized psychoanalysis”—as reflecting a “pre-oedipal” orientation that would stress relatedness over the libido, Chancer does not seem to acknowledge the link between Fromm’s own sex-negativity and heterosexist biases (102-05, 131).

In “Sociopsychoanalysis and Radical Humanism,” Neil McLaughlin and Fromm’s own co-author Michael Maccoby note the following paradox: Though he was trained in sociology, Fromm is marginal to the core of this discipline, as to academia as a whole. This is in stark contrast to Pierre Bourdieu, or indeed, Michel Foucault. Dialectically, Fromm’s academic marginality provided him independence of thought but also disregard from the professoriate (109-10). This is sadly the case for his most scholarly late works, such as Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970) and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). In contrast, Bourdieu played the academic game and enjoyed considerable rewards and privilege as a sociologist in universities in Paris and Lille. While both figures were radical public intellectuals who engaged in similar projects of socioanalysis, or sociopsychoanalysis, and criticized Western and Stalinist crimes alike—with Bourdieu protesting in his writings against the Algerian War and Fromm publicly opposing the Vietnam and Cold wars—Bourdieu made such arguments from within the academy, while Fromm made them from without. Insightfully, Maccoby and McLaughlin tie Fromm’s “intellectual decline” to his numerous conflicts “with orthodox Marxists, Freudians, neoconservatives, anti-humanist thinkers,” and his former comrades from the Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse, who resurrected Adorno’s opportunistic line against him in the 1950s (119).

These contributors productively compare Fromm’s social-character theory to Bourdieu’s theory of an internalized, unconscious habitus. This habitus perpetuates class society and the division of labor by mandating obedient participation and social reproduction. Otherwise known as the “cultural unconscious” or “mental habits,” the theory of habitus, for all its usefulness, “downplay[s] an explicit psychoanalytic analysis of emotions which is the core strength of Fromm’s social character theory” (122-23). Plus, in his focus on elites, structures, and symbolic violence, Bourdieu overlooks the self-defeating and self-destructive psychodynamics that often contribute to the reproduction of exploitation and domination. To this point, he was critical of Frantz Fanon’s concept of internalized oppression. However, Bourdieu’s deficit here can perhaps be corrected by Fromm’s social-character theory, particularly as applied in the Mexican village of Chiconcauc, Morelos state. During the 1950s and 1960s, Fromm and his colleagues carried out an empirical research study there into some of the psychological aspects of class stratification among campesinos (peasants) after the Revolution of 1910-1920. Tellingly, the resulting publication, Social Character in a Mexican Village, found that only single-digit percentages of the villagers interviewed had radically democratic character structures.⁴ The rest were divided among enterprising-sadistic and passive-receptive campesinos, with the divisions correlated to family status before the revolution. Many of those who capitalized on the new opportunities made available by the redistribution of lands had previously been landowners, while those who suffered greater rates of violence and alcoholism were typically descended from peons of the hacienda system imposed by Spanish colonialism (118).

In this sense, Social Character in a Mexican Village provides insight into some of the psychosocial dimensions of class divisions and social hierarchy as a whole. It confirms the Freudian notion that sadomasochism, or authoritarianism, is a psychosocial system with constituent parts that may either accept their socially expected roles or rebel against them—whether productively or destructively. Similar critical studies could be conducted today into gender, class, caste, and ethno-racial inequalities, as well as political differences, throughout the world. Nevertheless, in light of the hostile and supremacist contemporary discourses around the “culture of poverty,” Maccoby and McLaughlin are right that Fromm’s social-character theory risks blaming the victims of given social structures (119-24). This is certainly a quandary that requires more reflection and investigation.

Authority and The Working Class in Weimar Germany

In his inquiry into “Anti-Authoritarian Marxism,” David Norman Smith explains how, in the twilight of the Weimar Republic, Fromm’s cousin Heinz Brandt sought to organize a united front of all anti-fascist forces against the rising Nazi menace. This initiative was promptly crushed by Stalin, in line with the Soviet despot’s disastrous imposition of the doctrine of “social fascism,” which equated the Social Democrats with the Nazis (135-36). Due to such betrayals, Brandt spent a total of 14 years in Nazi and, later, East German prison camps. Intriguingly, Smith traces Fromm’s instinctual revulsion over Stalinist hegemony, and almost unconscious approximation to Trotsky, about whom the psychoanalyst raved: He is “always stimulating, always alive” and “penetrating to the very essence of reality” (138). Such flourishes about the Red Army commander suggest, firstly, that Fromm was ignorant of the fate of the Russian Revolution’s “Third Revolution,” represented by the Kronstadt Commune, the Greens, and the Makhnovist movement: namely, to be crushed by the “People’s Commissar,” Trotsky. Furthermore, despite the analyst’s explicit homophobia, Fromm’s attraction to Trotsky provides evidence of the Freudian theory of universal bisexuality.

Crucially, as well, Smith introduces Hilde Weiss, a Jewish student of industrial sociology, a mass-striker, and an affiliate of the Red Trade Union International (RTUI). Weiss was the primary author of the study on German workers’ attitudes, The Working Class in Weimar Germany, that is more commonly attributed to Fromm himself.⁵ Using social-character theory, Weiss and Fromm predicted that small minorities of workers would be militantly for (10 percent) or against (15 percent) a Nazi takeover of Germany, while the vast majority (75 percent) would remain passive and essentially indifferent (217). The study also found a significant discrepancy between the 82 percent of respondents who professed fidelity to left parties (the Communists and Social Democrats), and the 15 percent who consistently responded with anti-authoritarian views.⁶ In a parallel study, Weiss revealed how workers often deified their bosses, in a revealing example of commodity fetishism and sadomasochism, as well as an exhibition of the persistent psychocultural legacy of Prussian militarism and elitism. These self-defeating ideologies were so pervasive as to even permeate Germany’s pyramidally organized left parties—in turn, laying the groundwork for the rise of Hitler.

Although such critique is very apt, it is unclear why someone like Weiss, who lauded Lenin and conformed to Marxist notions of the “dialectical” use of state authority, should be considered a principled anti-authoritarian herself. After all, she joined the RTUI rather than the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association, co-founded by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Rudolf Rocker, among others, in 1922. In this vein, Weiss echoes the confusions of the libertarian-communist Otto Rühle, author of “The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism” (1939), who cherished his personal friendship with his fellow exile in Mexico, one of the leading Bolsheviks—none other than Trotsky himself (151).

Critique: History, Sexuality, and Internationalism

Whereas Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory is undeniably an important intervention in psychoanalytic, humanist, and radical theory, some caution is needed with an expressly Marxist interpretation of Fromm’s lifework. For example, some contributors express anxiety over the “neo-idealism” of critical approaches based in morality or norms, despite the fact that Fromm himself (like Freud) dedicated much of his life to contemplating the mind, dreams, socialization, and ethics, or the superego (37, 77). Plus, as Maccoby and McLaughlin correctly note, Fromm “rejected the inattention to emotions, morality, and human nature in [the] orthodox version of Marxism” (115). This tension may have to do with an unwillingness on the parts of the editors and contributors to do as Fromm did and criticize Marx himself.

Accordingly, some of the volume’s contributors attempt to defend Marx’s legacy in a way that is at variance with the historical record. For example, Smith claims that “Stalin’s new course—which entailed the violent expropriation of the peasantry, the intensified exploitation of workers, and the eradication of opposition—was a sharp reversal of Marxian doctrine” (132). The distinction made here is questionable, considering how Marx arbitrarily expelled the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the First International in 1872 in order to outmaneuver them, while wrecking the organization, and its cause, in the process.⁷ Additionally, in Capital, volume 1, Marx welcomes both the expropriation of the peasantry and the regimentation of the industrial workers as historically necessary steps in the “dialectical” struggle for communism.⁸ For their part, Lenin and Stalin were enthusiasts of Taylorist and Fordist management styles.⁹

It is true that Fromm’s critical theory elides easy classification as being either primarily Marxist or anarchist. Perhaps, he transcends and sublates both categories. To this point, the Anarchist FAQ Collective identifies the psychoanalyst as a “libertarian Marxis[t] close to anarchism.” Similarly, Roger Foster and Charles Thorpe view Fromm as a socialist interested in “deep democratization rather than a managerial project,” and one who believed in a decentralized, planned economy, as well as humanistic social planning, respectively (90-91, 185). In the end, it was Fromm’s radical iconoclasm, arrived at through reflection and self-discovery, that so disturbed Adorno and doomed the psychoanalyst’s tenure in the Frankfurt School. Then again, it liberated him to follow his own path.

Unfortunately, this volume has little to say about ecological problems such as global over-heating, except in passing, as manifestations of capital’s self-destructive tendencies (75, 184-85, 210). Lundskow curiously equates “raw-food vegan[ism]” with Puritanism, when the Puritans were neither vegetarians nor vegans (59). What is more, in contrast to Puritans, vegans are not necessarily sex-negative. In this vein, we welcome Lundskow’s praise for Huey Newton’s explicit support for the queer community but lament that no one in this volume acknowledges Fromm’s own homonegativity, which is derived from Freud’s paternalistic view that gay people suffer from arrested development (65).¹⁰ Rather than be ignored, such limitations must be brought out and criticized.

In terms of international analysis, Langman and Lundskow use a Marcusean term to hail the Arab Spring as an important “great refusal” of domination, but they do not differentiate among the fates of the different uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (205). Thorpe suggests that the “upsurge of imperialist war in the Middle East has been a major cause of the growth of authoritarianism and nationalism” (177). Presumably, he means war in Iraq, Syria, and/or occupied Palestine, but he does not say. While such a view may partially explain the recent resurgence of the far right in Europe and the United States, it overlooks the specific actors and mechanisms involved in the case of Syria, who are themselves quite authoritarian and nationalist: principally, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. These fascists, in their bloody suppression of the Syrian Revolution over the past decade, have killed up to a million people and displaced millions more across international borders. According to Rohini Hensman, committing atrocious war crimes to provoke mass-refugee flows from Syria has been a deliberate strategy on Putin’s part to destabilize the European Union.¹¹ In the struggle to bring Syrian, Russian, U.S., and Israeli war criminals to justice, and to study their examples in the hopes of preventing similar atrocities from recurring, critical Frommian perspectives have much to contribute.

Conclusion

The co-editors and essayists of Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory have performed an important service by re-engaging the public with the history of Fromm’s sociopsychoanalysis, in the hopes that the theorist’s insights be heeded in the cause of humanistic social reconstruction. Both history and the present attest to the strong anti-humanist tendencies professed by many considered to be on the left—from Georges Sorel and Stalin in the past to the GrayZone of today—thus corroborating Maccoby and McLaughlin’s fitting diagnosis of the left as “contradictory, an admixture of tendencies humanist and anti-humanist” (135, emphasis in original). In light of this problem, as well as the realities of global warming and ecocide, persistent political authoritarianism, entrenched sadomasochistic social systems, and disorganized working classes, we see the prospect of new Frommian studies on social character; humanistic, internationalist resistance toward anti-humanist opportunists; and the integration of left psychoanalysis with labor and community organizing as important components in the ongoing struggle for universal emancipation.

Notes

1. Kieran Durkin and Joan Braune, eds., Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

2. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London: Routledge, 1955), 258.

3. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry of the Future (Orbit, 2020), 254-55.

4. Erich Fromm, Social Character in a Mexican Village (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

5. The version published by Harvard University Press in 1984 lists Fromm as the primary author.

6. Lawrence J. Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (Columbia University Press, 2013), 43-44.

7. Robert Graham, We Do Not Fear Anarchy; We Invoke It (Oakland: AK Press, 2015).

8. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 873-95.

9. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

10. Fromm, The Art of Loving, 31.

11. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Haymarket Books, 2018), 233-38.

Book Review: Richard Gilman-Opalsky, “The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value”

My critical review of Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s The Communism of Love has been published in Philosophy in Review, Vol 41 No 2 (May 2021).

The review, which is available open-access, can be found here. It is reproduced below.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky. The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value. AK Press 2020. 336 pp. $22.00 USD (Paperback ISBN 9781849353915).

In The Communism of Love, Richard Gilman-Opalsky expands on the findings of the critical psycho-analyst Erich Fromm to explain how interpersonal love challenges capitalism, namely by rejecting the place of ownership and hierarchy in social life. ‘Love is communism within capitalism,’ assert Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Bernsheim (87). As such, the experience of love is a unifying, disruptive, and enlivening one connected with affection, hope, and revolt. For Gilman-Opalsky (G-O), it corresponds to a Gemeinwesen, or communal sensibility, and a Gemeingeist, or collective spirit. We humans yearn for humanizing loving connections, and the erotic movement from self to Other functions as ‘connective tissue’ which ensures social reproduction and wards off dehumanization, instrumentalization, and death (197).

Despite having a promising premise, G-O relies on rhetorical manipulation, marring [the text] with conceit. For example, without evidence or argument, he conveys his disagreement with Jacques Camatte’s dystopian insistence on the subjection of all life to capitalist domination, ‘even in the face of more recent ecological catastrophe[s]’ (47). Such a perspective would block out the ongoing melting and burning of the Arctic and Siberia. Likewise, there is a glaring absence in this book of an internalization of Fromm’s principled critique of Stalinism. Instead of discussing the anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman, G-O centers the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai and the Maoist Alain Badiou. Notably, G-O belittles Fromm, who criticized Marx’s centralism and dogmatism in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), as an ‘anemic social democra[t]’ (The Sane Society, Routledge 1956, 251), while he portrays Marx—who expelled the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume from the IWMA in 1872 on baseless charges, and arguably wrecked the organization in so doing—as wholesome (8).

Unconsciously undermining the very raison d’etre for his book, G-O asserts that ‘Fromm’s concept of socialism has been long outstripped in the years after the Cold War and is no longer useful to communist philosophy’ (11). In light of the dire need for the application of Fromm’s anti-bureaucratic politics and anarchistic psychosocial concepts, the social character above all, in the face of Trumpism and global conservative-authoritarian reaction, such a dismissive attitude remains untenable. G-O reproduces the living past, channeling Theodor W. Adorno’s unease about the ideological threat that Fromm’s ‘sentimental… blend of social democracy and anarchism’ might pose to the Marxist-Leninist affirmation of the authority principle.

Considering Adorno’s point, which is not rhetorically far-removed from the stark Lenino-Stalinist dismissal and purge of ‘utopian socialists’ who were, in fact, true revolutionaries, taken together with Fromm’s view of the continuities between Marx and Lenin, it is odd to choose this economist as a source on love. Through his rejection of idealism and psychology, Marx ended up envisioning a totalitarian overcoming of moral and emotional reasoning in the historical process (117-8). Accordingly, the Russian science-fiction writer Evgeny Zamyatin, author of We (Avon 1920), which inspired George Orwell’s 1984, implicitly criticized not only Lenin—being a premonition of Stalin—but also Marx in his dystopian portrayal of a mechanized-centralized future (Stites, R., Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press 1989, 187-8). In parallel, Fromm rejected Marx’s ‘inattention to emotions, morality, and human nature,’ such that his theory improves upon that of his predecessor (Maccoby, M. and N. McLaughlin, ‘Sociopsychoanalysis and Radical Humanism: A Fromm-Bourdieu Synthesis,’ in Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future, ed. Durkin, Joan Braune, Bloomsbury, 2020, 115).

G-O neither mentions that Marx rejected the anarchist call for gender equality and the abolition of the family, nor considers Marx and Engels’ own homophobia, and precisely how their anti-gay animus influenced the decision to summarily expel Bakunin from the IWMA in 1872. Whereas G-O is right to condemn the misogyny exhibited by many queer men toward women throughout history, he does queerness a disservice by implying that male homosexuality tends as through compulsion to be sexist and lesbophobic (66-71). It is also questionable whether sex-love necessarily promotes isolation and privatization, as G-O implies. His own consideration of the love-bonds in war between Socrates and Alcibiades and Spartacus and his newly unearthed female partner contradict such a view.

Despite leaning heavily on Kollontai’s avowal of love as comradeship, G-O admits that this Bolshevik’s approach was ‘too bound up with statist initiatives’ (11). Though Kollontai was a leader of the Workers’ Opposition, such a concession to anarchist readers is unconvincing, in light of the book’s pallid critiques of Leninism, Stalinism, and the Soviet Union. The Russian Civil War ended with the Red Army victorious over the White reactionaries and the ‘Green’ partisans and Makhnovist anarchist peasants; the Kronstadt Commune was suppressed in March 1921, the very day before the Reds publicly celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune in Petrograd. Despite being a far more principled critic than either Kollontai or G-O of Marxism-Leninism, as well as a champion of feminism and free love, Emma Goldman does not appear once in the text. While G-O’s brief integration of bell hooks’ sex-positive ‘anarchism of love’ into the study is welcome, it is significant that Goldman, eyewitness to the Kronstadt massacre, is entirely missing. Other than for one mention on the book’s last page, Stalin, the homophobic patriarchal despot and ally of Hitler, is similarly conspicuous in his absence.

Perhaps, rather than The Communism of Love, this volume might have been entitled ‘The Love of Marxism.’ G-O betrays his biases when he recognizes bell hooks as an anarchist-communist, but then immediately describes her as ‘never [having been] committed to any kind of communism’ (216). Here, we must differentiate between Marxism and communism, for communism is a form of life that originates in our individual and collective development and evolution as a species. It was not invented in modernity, and certainly not by Marx. Indeed, Marxism can be viewed as a problematic theory for the communist goals it proposes. Despite this, in The Communism of Love, Marx often appears as a Deus ex Machina. G-O wants to reinterpret Marxism as anti-state communism, but his account is suspect, for he too easily elides the catastrophes of Stalinism and the Soviet Union, and the obvious links between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism as bureaucratic ideologies. G-O promotes distrust when he implies that Kollontai’s 1923 letter to the Soviet Komsomol (Communist Youth League) was written during the ‘revolutionary period in Russia’ (131). In reality, a reconstituted Tsarist Empire whose survival was secured through the Bolsheviks’ destruction of the Makhnovshchina and the Kronstadt and Tambov Communes, and the forcible reincorporation of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Siberia, and Turkestan, cannot be revolutionary.

In his book, G-O examines familial love, friendship, compassion, and Eros from an anti- Freudian and sex-negative vantage point that is consistent with Marxism’s Victorianism. Accordingly, G-O reproduces the puritanical sexual taboo of early Soviet utopian science-fiction writers. Having teased readers by introducing Rosa Luxemburg’s love-bond with Leo Jogiches, G- O writes: ‘If you would like to pursue that story, you will have to do it elsewhere’ (128). Along these same lines, G-O inconceivably argues that love is fundamentally communist, just as he ‘caution[s] against any romanticization of the power of Eros,’ all the while glossing over Freud’s hypothesis that all love is either libidinally based, or a sublimated libidinality, except in passing (10, 91, 155, 286-7). In this sense, if Fromm improved on Marx and Freud, G-O’s text represents a regression to second-International Marxism and a ‘desexualized psychoanalysis,’ rather than a creative application of the Freudo-Marxism of Critical Theory.

In his zeal to combat ‘romantic individualism,’ ‘romantic utopias,’ and the reduction of partnership to shopping and investment, G-O overcompensates by dismissing free love as ‘bourgeois.’ Making such arguments, he reproduces Fromm’s error in de-emphasizing erotic satisfaction as an important component of human happiness (175, 225, 286). Both thinkers thus miss ‘the indivisibility of love [Eros], friendship and comradeship’ (Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 214). Likewise, G-O does not consider the essentially maternal aspects of love, a point which is emphasized by Freud, Fromm, John Bowlby, and Jessica Benjamin. Rather, he idealizes the patriarchal Marx family as instituting maternal values by somehow not having been governed by exchange relations (110). The author praises Karl’s wife Jenny as an ‘unrecognized coauthor of Marx’s work,’ and mentions Helene Dumuth, the Marxes’ live-in servant, whom Karl may have exploited sexually (112-5). G-O does not pause to question whether this feudal vestige within the Marx household—much less the unit’s maintenance through the profits extracted from the workers employed by Engels’ father—might not challenge his designation of the family as a ‘little commune’ (112).

In summary, G-O’s study on love combines fruitful and thought-provoking scholarship with revisionist, fantastical history. Presumably, this dialectical mosaic seeks to rehabilitate Marxism by simultaneously appropriating its anarchist rival, reinterpreting its own meaning as anti-statist, denying and repressing strong historical and theoretical evidence to the contrary, and transposing it as the sole meaning of communism and love. Undoubtedly, those who live and seek love, especially in the alien globe transformed by COVID-19, also seek a different and better world (271). Yet above all, in the struggle to find meaning and connection in this life by changing the world, we lovers and friends must recognize the revolutionary virtue of truth when confronting history, the present, and the future.

Pëtr Kropotkin, Anarcho-Communist “Intelligent Hero”: An Historical Analysis

This is a video recording of my presentation at the “Life, Freedom, Ethics: Kropotkin Now!” conference on February 7, 2021. I take a biographical and historical approach to Pëtr Alexeevich Kropotkin’s revolutionary life and legacy. Thanks for watching!

Toward an Ecologically Based Post-Capitalism: Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson

Copyright Truthout.org. Reproduced with permission

Kim Stanley Robinson is an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author. A science- and climate-fiction novelist, Robinson has written more than 20 books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and 2312. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

In this interview, Truthout talks with Robinson about his books Green Earth and New York 2140. Set in the present or near future, Green Earth portrays struggles over climate science in the US capital, whereas New York 2140 depicts life in a 22nd century metropolis that has been inundated by the melted polar regions.

Stan, thank you kindly for being open to participating in this interview. First, Ursula K. Le Guin passed away recently. Her influence on your own creative writing is marked. Do you have any reflections on Le Guin’s life and work that you wish to share?

I wrote a memorial statement after her death for Scientific American. What I can add to that now as I continue to feel the loss of her living presence, is that in listening to the science fiction community talk about her, I’m struck by how beloved she was, both her and her work, and I’m thinking now that this was a very unusual quality in her work and her person. Also, less crucially, her work always had a quick sureness about it; she didn’t waste words or pile on details. She cut a clean line, as surfers would say. That’s the mark of a good style: distinctive and clear. Her prose has a poetry to it.

One major theme in Green Earth and New York 2140 is democracy versus capitalism. New York 2140 begins with a statement of Proudhonian or Marxian value analysis: The coders Mutt and Jeff (as workers) create the surplus-value (profit) that drives the capitalist monster which persists even in the year 2140, after it has melted Greenland and parts of Antarctica, raising sea levels by 50 feet and devastating coastal and low-lying regions. You clarify that it is capitalism that is responsible for such ecological catastrophe, in parallel to the grossly unequal wealth and power distribution it engenders. Capital’s class divisions are symbolized in New York 2140 in the struggle between flooded lower Manhattan and the intertidal region versus uptown, where the superscrapers of the rich stand on higher ground. Ultimately, you envision mass popular resistance building up from a rent strike toward a global general strike to overturn this oppressive system. Is this how we should wield revolutionary democracy and organize?

A fiscal strike is one possible way to exert people power. Finance is systemically over-leveraged — and therefore in a precarious position — if something like the 2008 crash were to occur again. Such a crash will happen anytime there is a crisis of confidence in the markets and in the value of money, and the various money-surrogates. People could all together and at once refuse regularly scheduled payments, or less radically, they could together remove their money from banks and put them in credit unions. Done as a mass-action, this would crash the system. After that, there would have to be a plan to rescue the banks by nationalizing them, as we did to [General Motors] in 2009. This is just one tactic and just one step on the road to post-capitalism, but it does point out the power people have as the ultimate source of value, including financial value. Finance is parasitical on ordinary people, so some modes of detoxification are available. The parasites can’t live on their own.

Your exploration of the exercise of autonomy and egalitarian cooperation at the MetLife Tower, transformed into a cooperative living residence, and via the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society in New York 2140 recalls the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s analysis in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Indeed, your Mr. Hexter advises his youthful counterparts that “[h]elping animals or helping people” would be just ways of being in the world. May I ask to what degree libertarian socialism inspires you?

I have never read a definition of the word “libertarian” that makes any sense to me, nor sounds attractive as a principle, so I avoid that word as much as I can. Maybe “democratic socialism” is the better term for me — the idea being that people in democracies would elect representatives that would then pass laws based on socialist principles. That is a story I’m often interested in telling, as something that could and should happen in our near future. It’s my form of utopian science fiction. The social democracies of north Europe and the name “social democrat” also resonate for me, although these political parties, when in power in Europe, have had to make alliances and compromises with capitalism that make them far from satisfactory. But from the viewpoint of the United States, they look like at least a step along the path to more justice. There would be more steps later. I usually favor stepwise reform, but I have to admit we need the steps to come really fast, one after the next, now that climate change is about to overwhelm us.

In both Green Earth and New York 2140, you raise many imaginative possibilities in terms of collective responses to climate catastrophe that we might want to consider: redirecting excess sea-level rise into East Antarctica and inland deserts; introducing Arctic polar bears to Antarctica to avoid extinction; designing floating cities; rebuilding beaches and shorelines; and infusing the Arctic Ocean with vast quantities of salt transported in container fleets in order to restart the thermohaline circulation, or Gulf Stream, threatened by global warming. The emphasis on cooperatives and the commons in New York 2140, in parallel to Green Earth‘s examination of simple living, “freeganism,” and the transition to wind, water and solar energy gives us a lot to think about.

Some of these ideas have been explored by research institutes since I wrote about them in my novels. I don’t think the researchers involved read my novels; I think they are ideas that emerge naturally given the problems we are facing. So, pumping seawater up onto the Antarctic ice cap could be done, but would require something like 7 percent of all the energy humanity creates. Even so, it might be considered a good idea compared to losing all sea level infrastructure and beaches and ecologies. Assisted migration is being planned and even tried experimentally, and this will continue, but polar bears to Antarctica was my idea of a joke. It has been taken up and studied, however. Salting the Gulf Stream would probably not work, and yet it might be tried if the Gulf Stream stalled, just to see.

Still, you have caught the drift of my fiction — I’m interested in describing actions like these. Some are geoengineering, some are political economy and involve return of the commons, socialism, clean energy, etc.

Over the course of Green Earth, we see “gradualist-progressive” elements within the State evermore placing science center-stage in the struggle to curb capitalism’s contributions to climate change. We encounter Charlie Quibler, the young aide to Sen. Phil Chase, drafting a bill to legislate the implementation of recommendations made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), only to have the law inevitably watered down by legislators, including Chase himself. Then, Washington, DC, is struck by a massive storm, and it is on the flooded Mall that Quibler confronts Chase, imploring him to finally do something about climate change. Subsequently, Chase announces his Democratic presidential candidacy at the North Pole — or what’s left of it — and upon being elected as the “first scientific presidential candidate,” he launches an emergency climate mobilization in the “first 60 days” of his administration. In New York 2140, similarly, there is a revolutionary, popular upsurge which follows a massive hurricane that sweeps through the city; yet here, too, the revolt “lives on” through the State. In light of these social-democratic models you present for evidence-based policy-making and your view that scientific inquiry is linked to justice and fairness, what do you make of the status of science now one year into the Trump regime?

It’s been a year of continuous assault on science and justice by the Trump administration, and it’s been shocking to see how many people there are willing to implement such a … wicked vision…. But all of these poor people will immediately run to a scientist the moment they feel sick — that’s their doctors. They believe in science when they’re scared for their lives. What this reveals is their hypocrisy … and greed, but also, the strength of the system they’re attacking, which enfolds them completely. We live in a world that is a scientific achievement, and we can’t live without the scientific achievements, and even though some of the scientific achievements have definitely led us to our current crisis — public health and agriculture leading to quick population rise, and carbon-burning energy leading to climate change — still, it’s science in action that will be involved in all the solutions, along with politics aiming our scientific work.

I think the science is robust and will survive this attack from Trump, his supporters, the Republican Party in the US and capitalism worldwide. There will be damage, and the political battles will never end, but over the long arc of history. You know the rest.

In New York 2140, you cite John Dos Passos recalling a meeting with Emma Goldman at which “everybody [gathered] was for peace and the cooperative commonwealth and the Russian Revolution.” It is clear that your work features several anarchistic characters and themes, yet you also often invoke Lincoln’s vision of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” as an ideal. So, 100-plus years since the Russian Revolution, do you consider the state necessary for the transition to an egalitarian, ecological post-capitalist world?

Yes, I do. This is not an easy thing to say, given how much that is bad has accrued around what we call “the state” in world history. But the term is probably too broad and philosophical. If you want to use it, and speak at that level of broad generality, I’ll join briefly and say, we need the state itself to become just and scientific, and the expression of everyone alive agreeing how to live together. That agreement formalized as laws becomes the state…. Best to focus on creating a good state based on just laws. For getting through the climate change emergency, I think it’s the only way that will work.

In closing, do you have any thoughts for the ongoing struggle of promoting “compassion for all sentient beings” (Green Earth) within the context of the sixth mass extinction?

Time is running short in terms of dodging a really bad sixth mass extinction that would result if we create a much, much warmer world by our burning of carbon into the atmosphere. If we can quickly reduce our carbon burn, which is really what powers our culture now, that would be a huge change and would allow all sorts of other good potentialities to come to pass. We have to keep emphasizing the need to decarbonize fast. Fortunately, the technologies to do this include women’s rights (this stabilizes population) and economic equality (this reduces impacts of poverty and over-consumption). Justice is a climate-change technology of great power, so there is no need to set up false dichotomies as to which good cause we support. The good causes reinforce each other and we need them all at once. This is why capitalism has to give way to an ecologically-based post-capitalism, which, in some features, will be aspects of socialism chosen democratically. We have to figure out a way to pay ourselves to do the work of survival.

Review of Anarchist Encounters: Russia in Revolution and The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921

A. W. Zurbrugg (ed)
Anarchist Encounters: Russia in Revolution
London, Anarres Editions, 2017. 259pp., £10.99 pb.
ISBN 9780850367348

Eric Lee
The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921
London, Zed Books, 2017. 160pp., £12.99 pb.
ISBN 9781786990921

First published on Marx and Philosophy, 14 March 2018

Both of these intriguing new works take critical views of the Russian Revolution, whose centenary has just passed. Anarchist Encounters comprises an edited volume of eyewitness reports written by Spanish and Italian anarcho-syndicalists who visited Russia in the years 1920-1921 that also includes Emma Goldman’s critique of Bolshevik hegemony over the Revolution, based on the two years she spent living there. Eric Lee’s The Experiment examines the relatively unknown Georgian Democratic Republic, a three-year period of Menshevik, social-democratic governance in Russia’s southern neighbor and former colony that was crushed by the Red Army in 1921. According to Ethel Snowden, a Fabian who participated in a delegation including former members of the Second International who visited the Republic in 1920, Georgia under the Social Democrats represented the “most perfect Socialism in Europe.” As Lee explains, it is rather significant that these internationalists traveled to Georgia and not Russia.

True to their leader Karl Kautsky, who also visited Georgia in 1920 and had emphasized in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) that there can be “no Socialism without democracy,” the Georgian Mensheviks opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 together with the one-party State which soon followed, declaring independence in May 1918. The Mensheviks’ relationship with the regional proletariat and peasantry provides a less harrowing example than those seen in Russia during the Civil War years, 1918-1921. In parallel, based on their observations of the “tremendous defects of communist centralisation” (73), as writes Ángel Pestaña Núñez, a delegate from the Spanish Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), many of the syndicalists whose works appear in Anarchist Encounters actively discouraged their labor organizations from affiliating with the Communist International and its Red Trade Union International (RILU).

Vilkens, the pen-name of Manuel Fernández Álvarez, a Spanish journalist associated with the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), observes in his report republished in Anarchist Encounters that, by the time of his visit to the Soviet Union in mid-1920, it was already a clearly defined class society, with “VIPs” receiving higher salaries than the rest of society. Vilkens identifies a sex-economy of sorts among young females who made themselves available to bureaucrats, commissars, and the emerging “Sov-bourg” in exchange for access to greater privilege. He defines the “living conditions of producers in Russia” as “not brilliant,” and identifies compulsory labor under the Bolsheviks’ increasingly bureaucratic-centralist regime to be the continuation of “feudal service” (19). In fact, Vilkens holds the Reds responsible for their shackling of the independent initiative of workers, as is reflected in the Communist Party Central Committee’s decision after October 1917 to favor Taylorism and one-man management over workers’ control via the soviets and factory committees that had (re)emerged during the Revolution. Pestaña, who visited Russia in summer 1920, too, expresses similar concerns about how the committees had degenerated from drivers of the Revolution to an institutionalized “workplace police” (79). Vilkens presents the strike at the Perovo locomotive factory in July 1920 that was met with a show of force by the military and the CheKa, or “Extraordinary Commission,” as a grim “example […] of how the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat imposes suffering on the real proletariat” (34).

Regarding authoritarianism, Vilkens discusses several examples of the Bolsheviks dismissing and invalidating elections of non-Bolshevik delegates to the soviets and laments that the option to recall authorities is effectively absent. As such, he concludes that the soviets have been subordinated to the Red State, such that “a government of bourgeois intellectuals and nobles is imposed on the people: Rakovsky, Manonilsky, Petrovsky, Lenin, Trotsky […]” (50). Indeed, the Bolshevik regime’s continuity with capitalism, according to Vilkens, is starkly illustrated by its delay in the people’s emancipation, seen most clearly in the CheKa dictatorship, which for Goldman represents not just a State within a State but a State over a State. An especially moving episode illustrating such oppression is mentioned by the volume’s editor Zurbrugg: the case of the syndicalist Lepetit, his fellow CGT comrade Vergeat, and Lefevre, French delegates to the summer 1920 Comintern congress, who were denied exit and sent to their deaths in the northern port city of Murmansk once the Red authorities had discovered the delegates’ critical take on the Revolution’s clear betrayal through their refusal to surrender documents.[1]

Furthermore, Armando Borghi, a delegate from the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) at the July 1920 RILU congress, reports a conversation with Victor Serge which belies the former anarchist’s public support for the Bolsheviks: “In the factories, the disciplinary system is ruthless. Trotsky is a perfect tyrant. There is neither communism here, nor socialism, nor anti-communism, but Prussian military discipline” (84).

In his “Nine Points” on the Revolution (1921), Vilkens clarifies that this event cannot be reduced to the Bolshevik Party, which represents a class above the workers and antagonistic to them; that the “true revolutionaries”—“principally the anarchists”—are persecuted, incarcerated, and murdered without due process; and that consequently, self-management of the workers and peasants, the very meaning of the Revolution, is missing. Vilkens here concedes that the imperialist blockade of Russia represents a “monstrous crime,” in parallel to Pestaña, Goldman, and Peter Kropotkin, all of whom went further than Vilkens in refraining from criticizing the Bolsheviks as long as the imperialist onslaught raged. Yet afterward, Goldman would denounce the Reds for imposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which stipulated peace with Germany; commencing the razvyorstka, or grain-requisition regime, which greatly contributed to the famine of 1921-1922; disarticulating the cooperatives; and effectively instrumentalizing the soviets.

Gaston Leval, a CNT delegate to the RILU’s summer 1921 congress in Moscow, observes explicit class divisions in the new education system after visiting a special school in Bolchavo dedicated to the upbringing of the next generation of State administrators and reports meeting Goldman and Alexander Berkman, describing them as highly disconcerted by the recent suppression of the Kronstadt uprising and the ever-burgeoning powers of the police-bureaucracy. In her analysis, Goldman relates her own impression after visiting an official school that this was a mere Potëmkin village concealing widespread hunger and misery.[2] Leval further discusses the Left-Social Revolutionary leader Maria Spiridovna, a former political prisoner from the Tsarist period whom the Bolsheviks imprisoned intermittently from 1919-1921, and Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov, leaders of the Workers’ Opposition within the Communist Party, who outlined a more democratic political structure whereby the State would serve trade unions. The Workers’ Opposition met with Lenin and Trotsky’s reprobation—including, per Leval, a specifically sexist attitude by Trotsky toward Kollontai—and as such was silenced at the Tenth Party Congress of March 1921. In 1936, shortly before the beginning of the mass-purges, Kollontai would observe retrospectively that “[Stalin’s] dictatorship brought with it rivers of blood, but blood was already flowing under Lenin, and doubtless much of it was innocent blood” (11).

Now, in The Experiment, Lee describes the development of the Georgian Menshevik movement in Georgia. In his youth, Noe Zhordania, a central figure within Georgian Menshevism, had identified with Russian Populism, but became a Marxist after encountering Kautsky’s writings. During the 1903 split of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, most Georgian followers of Zhordania sided with the Mensheviks, reflecting their commitment to a mass-party strategy, while a small minority, including Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, joined the vanguardist Bolsheviks. As orthodox-Marxists, the Georgian Mensheviks were committed to a stages theory of history, and so believed that the agrarian and ‘backward’ Georgia required capitalism and bourgeois democracy before progressing to communism. Yet the emergence of the self-governing and anti-Tsarist Gurian Republic among the peasantry in western Georgia from 1902-1906 led Zhordania and other Mensheviks to reinterpret peasants as rural workers, publicly support the uprising, and open party membership to the peasantry.

In Guria, directly democratic village meetings and peasant courts expropriated and redistributed State-owned and private lands, making political demands including calls for a constituent assembly, abolition of the standing army, and freedom of speech and assembly. Interfacing with the Mensheviks, Gurian peasants formed Red Detachments for self-defense, and their efforts, which Lee compares to those of the Paris Commune, met with the support of Tolstoy, who declared that “[w]hat should be done is exactly what the Gurians are doing, viz., to organize life in such a manner that there should be no need for authority” (29). In parallel to the Commune, the first Gurian Republic was suppressed by the Tsar’s overwhelming forces in 1906.

In 1917, according to Lee, Georgian soviets and the State accorded in favoring Menshevik rule, such that there was no dual-power situation in the country, as in Russia: the soviets remained intact and the workers were not disarmed. The Social Democrats rejected Red October and refused to recognize the new regime as legitimate. In April 1918, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan declared independence as the Democratic Republic of Transcaucasia, but its precipitous collapse a month later led the Social Democrats to make an agreement with Germany that permitted the latter’s exploitation of Georgia in exchange for defense against Russia and Turkey. At the end of World War I, the Germans were replaced by the British, who in turn supported the White Armies against which Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike struggled. In December 1918, the Georgian Mensheviks and Armenian Dashnaks engaged in a brief war over disputed territories that was inflamed by chauvinism on both sides.

In Georgia, the liberation of the land came together with anti-imperial struggle, given the concentration of territory held by occupying Russian state. In December 1917, the Mensheviks passed land reforms confiscating the properties of large landowners without compensation and abolishing the sale and purchase of land, though this market was subsequently reintroduced following the People’s Guard’s suppression of agrarian revolts among the Ossetian minority. Lee here shares Teodor Shanin’s critique of the agrarian reform: that it demobilized the Georgian peasantry. While this dynamic limited what was possible, Menshevik Georgia at least avoided war between the city and countryside, as seen in its northern neighbor during War Communism, and numerous strikes broke out under the Georgian Democratic Republic, reflecting workers’ constitutionally recognized right to strike. The Mensheviks proclaimed several other labor rights and supported the expansion of cooperatives but stopped short of nationalizing industry, mirroring their self-conception as intellectuals building capitalism as the basis for the socialism to come. Even so, the relationship between labor and the Menshevik State provides an alternative to the militarization thesis advanced by Trotsky at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions (1920)—a proposal that would have to wait until Stalin for its full application.

Ultimately, chauvinistic Menshevik policy toward ethnic minorities such as the Abkhazians and Ossetians precipitated the collapse of the experiment. Whereas the Bolsheviks lacked support in Georgia outside the peasantry and working class due to Menshevik policy, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze exploited grievances held by national minorities against the Social Democrats. In November 1919, the Reds attempted an unsuccessful coup, and in February 1921, they ordered the Red Army to invade following a putatively staged revolt in the border region with Armenia. Thus was Georgia forcibly reincorporated into the Russia Empire, now the Soviet Union. Yet in 1924, a courageous uprising against the occupation broke out, leading Zinoviev to liken it to the Kronstadt and Tambov rebellions in terms of significance, yet this too was crushed.

Thus, these two volumes, anarchist and social-democratic in orientation, provide critically important perspectives for understanding the myriad failures of the Russian Revolution. Both perspectives rightly repudiate the goal of establishing State capitalism through dictatorship. While The Experiment self-evidently lays bare many of the Georgian Mensheviks’ problems—reformism, chauvinism, and a disposition to terror—the viewpoints of the contributors to Anarchist Encounters may in turn be utilized to reveal the affinities between Menshevism and Bolshevism as statist and effectively bourgeois.

[1] Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montréal: 1975), 321-3.
[2] “Potëmkin villages” refer to the Russian militarist Grigory Potëmkin’s practice of staging fake villages for Empress Catherine II’s review during a 1787 visit to Crimea.

Red and Black October: An Anarchist Perspective on the Russian Revolution for its 100th Anniversary

A hundred years [correction: 100 years and 37 days] from the day that the Winter Palace fell in Petrograd—October 25 in the Julian calendar, November 7 in the Gregorian—we present an anarchist perspective on the Russian Revolution, which began in February 1917 with a mass-mobilization and mutinies that deposed Tsar Nicholas II. Though the Revolution contained an awesome amount of liberatory potential as reflected in workers’ self-management and peasant land-seizures, it took a fatal turn with the seizure of power by the authoritarian Bolshevik Party. #RussianRev100Years #1917LIVE #1917CROWD #1917UNDEAD

Table of Contents

What precipitated the crisis and revolutionary events of 1917?

What helped propel the Revolution?

What was the anarchist role in the Revolution?

How did the events beginning in 1917 present two opposing conceptions of social revolution?

How did the Revolution go wrong?

What was the role of the Bolshevik Party?

What was the Red Terror?

What was the Russian Civil War?

What about the imperialists?

What happened in Ukraine?

Were Makhno and his followers anti-Semitic?

What happened at Kronstadt in 1921?

How did Lenin contradict his supposed anti-imperialist principles while in power?

How did Red October, the Red Terror, and the Civil War lead to Stalin’s rule?

What lessons should we take from the Revolution?

Works Cited

Recommended Statements and Memoirs

Recommended Films

A map of the former Russian Empire using current borders, with important cities, sites, and regions for the Revolution indicated. The black star just west of St. Petersburg corresponds to Kronstadt. Key: red/maroon = Bolshevik control or influence; black = anarchist control or influence; green = Greens or Basmachi presence; pink = Menshevik control or influence

A map of western Russia and Eastern Europe using current borders indicating important cities and sites for the Revolution. The black star just west of St. Petersburg corresponds to Kronstadt.

What precipitated the crisis and revolutionary events of 1917?

Two factors were decisive in the emergence of the Russian Revolution of 1917: the Tsar’s forcible participation in the ongoing First World War, and widespread economic crisis, including near-famine conditions for urban workers. The disorganization of economic life during the war led to critical shortages for both the cities and the Army, thus making the continuation of the war-effort quite impossible. It was in the cities that the Revolution began in early 1917, spreading to the war-front by summer, provoking mass-desertions by conscripted soldiers who had experienced the utter pointlessness of the war firsthand. In fact, the Russian Revolution can in some ways be considered one of the greatest popular anti-militarist uprisings in history.

In February 1917 (March by the Gregorian calendar), starving masses rose up in Petrograd (previously and subsequently again known as St. Petersburg). On the first day of demonstrations, February 24 (Julian calendar), soldiers—perhaps in part with Bloody Sunday in mind—refused to fire on the striking workers and starving women, and the Petrograd garrison increasingly mutinied against the Tsar. Even the Imperial Guards turned on the tsarist police. The regiments in mutiny soon defeated all remaining tsarist forces in the capital, and railway workers defended the revolutionary city by refusing to transport loyalist forces to Petrograd. Finally acknowledging the reality of the situation, Nicholas II abdicated on March 2, ending three centuries of despotism by the Romanov dynasty. The Revolution had begun!

As Voline writes, the February Revolution, “the action of the masses[,] was spontaneous, logically climaxing a long period of concrete experience and moral preparation. This action was neither organized nor guided by any political party. Supported by the people in arms—the Army—it was victorious” (emphasis in original). He clarifies that this incredible historical progression was achieved by the people without leaders, for Yuli Martov (Menshevik) and Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin (Bolsheviks) were all exiled at this time, only to return after February.

What helped propel the Revolution?

Though the February Revolution gave rise to a bourgeois Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky, a social-democratic member of the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party, the emancipatory spirit of the Revolution was carried on by the insurgent peasantry and proletariat. The peasants, who made up 85% of Russia’s population at the time, immediately set about expropriating the land after the fall of the Tsar, and the Petrograd Soviet was resurrected from the 1905 Revolution, once again becoming a trusted voice of the working class and ever-greater segments of the Army. Nonetheless, the Provisional Government perpetuated Russia’s participation in the war, a decisive factor impelling the fall of the Romanov dynasty, and Kerensky even re-established the death penalty at the front. He also ordered a disastrous offensive on the Austro-German lines in June 1917.

In August, the White General Kornilov attempted to crush the Revolution in the name of the Provisional Government, but the workers of Petrograd once again mobilized as they had in February to defend the city with arms and by rerouting forces sent via rail to support Kornilov’s putsch attempt. Subsequently, the Bolsheviks won majorities in the soviets, factory committees, and soldiers’ committees, and in light of the Left-Socialist Revolutionaries’ decision to affiliate with them, the Party gained much sympathy among workers and peasants alike. Thanks to its heroic past, the SR Party, which represented the cause of agrarian socialism, had become the strongest party after February 1917, taking the majority of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, and enjoying the support of the majority of the population due to its “solid backing in the villages as a result of its pre-revolutionary activity and its work in promoting peasant cooperatives” (Maximov 50). This arrangement between the Bolsheviks and Left-SR’s would continue until July 1918, when the latter attempted to overthrow the Red State. Following the Provisional Government’s release of an arrest warrant against Lenin on July 6, 1917, the Red leader went underground to plan an insurrection against Kerensky.

For further reading

• “Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution” (Rod Jones)
• “Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution” (Peter Rachleff)
• “Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (Maurice Brinton)
• “Russian Factory Committees” (Paul Avrich)

What was the anarchist role in the Revolution?

Numerically, self-described anarchists in Russia at the time of the February Revolution were not particularly strong, as the movement was just beginning, while revolutionary syndicalism was similarly germinating, and the most radical element of party politics, the Left-SR’s, was relatively weak in comparison to the Bolsheviks. Besides that, the Left-SR’s were actually in coalition with the ruling Bolshevik Party from Red October until July 1918, when they attempted to overthrow their erstwhile allies. Voline emphasizes that, had the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had more time than they were given before the Bolshevik assault of April 1918, they could likely have influenced the masses to boldly carry on with the project of free initiative and self-organization made possible by the Revolution. Yet he remarks with disappointment upon his return to Petrograd from exile in July 1917 that, “[i]n the fifth month of a great revolution, no Anarchist newspaper, no Anarchist voice was making itself heard in the capital of the country. And this in the face of the almost unlimited activity of the Bolsheviki!” (emphasis in original).

Between May and October 1917, some anarcho-syndicalists voted with the Reds in factory committees in favor of workers’ control, and the resurgent anti-authoritarianism of the Russian masses after February to some extent led the Bolsheviks to converge opportunistically with anti-statist and federalist critiques, thus misrepresenting their own politics (Goodwin 45-6). While the Bolsheviks did want to end Russian participation in World War I and have the land be returned to the peasantry, it is also true that the Bolsheviks ultimately crushed soviet-based democracy—thus contradicting their rhetorical commitment to have “all power” be devolved “to the soviets”—and only retroactively acknowledged the peasantry’s expropriation of private property since February with their Land Decree, proclaimed on October 26, 1917, the day after the fall of the Winter Palace. Additionally, as shall be described more below, the Reds had a prejudiced, authoritarian view of the peasants in line with Marxist ideology which rationalized the commission of several atrocities against them.

Ironically, then, anarchist sailors from Kronstadt played an important role in the insurrection to capture the Winter Palace. The Dvintsi (from Dvinsk) regiment, both comprised of and commanded by anarchists, was similarly critical in the struggle against Kerensky’s forces. Their commander, Gratchov, distributed arms and ammunition to the workers shortly after the October seizure of power, anticipating the danger this posed to the Revolution, but was killed under mysterious circumstances soon after having reported to the Bolshevik authorities. Anatoli Jelezniakov, an anarchist Kronstadter, was the one who ordered the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, announcing that the parliamentarians had “prattled long enough!” Anarchists also participated in the defense against General Kornilov’s coup attempt of August 1917 and organized libertarian-oriented partisan groups, such as the “M. A. Bakunin Partisan Detachment” of Yekaterinoslav or the Black Guards detachments commanded by Maria Nikiforova in Ukraine. Anarchists were moreover critical to the defense against Admiral Kolchak’s White forces in eastern Russia and Siberia.

Grimly, the Red authorities used the pretext of the Moscow Black Guards’ supposed plans for an “anarchist counter-revolution” to suppress the movement in April 1918, by which time the movement in Russia had numbered an estimated 10,000 individuals (Goodwin 48). In parallel, Nestor Makhno’s Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine was organized on anarchist principles, and the Makhnovists played a crucial role in defending the Revolution from the reactionary White Armies led by Generals Denikin and Wrangel during 1919-1920—before they, too, were suppressed by the Bolsheviks. The Greens, a powerful guerrilla movement spearheaded by deserting ex-conscripts, successfully defended the autonomous peasant revolution against Whites and Reds alike in the Civil War (1918-20) until their eventual defeat by the centralizing Bolshevik State.

The Union for Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda began publishing Golos Truda (“The Voice of Labor”) in Petrograd as a weekly in summer 1917, continuing until spring 1918 and then restarting later in Moscow. The Union also founded an Anarcho-Syndicalist publishing house, but both the press and the Union were shut down by the Reds in 1919. Meanwhile, the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Moscow published the daily Anarchy, with an anarcho-communist perspective, carrying on intensive propaganda work from 1917-18. Though Federation members participated with the Dvintsi in the struggle against Kerensky, the Reds repressed the Federation in April 1918, eliminating the last of its militants by 1921. In Ukraine, Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov, Voline, and others were involved in the founding in late 1918 of the Nabat (“Tocsin”) Confederation, which sought a unified anarchist movement, proclaimed the necessity of libertarian social revolution through its Nabat newspaper, and tried to organize a Pan-Russian Anarchist Confederation—a project that was directly stifled by Trotsky. Like the Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, all these anarchist organizations “eventually met with the same fate: brutal suppression by the ‘Soviet’ authority.”

The editors of Golos Truda, who included Voline and Maximov, among others, denounced the ongoing war and called on Russian conscripts to desert the war-effort, thus providing the possibility of an example to the rest of the world’s soldiers, who in unison could ignite a world revolution. The editors considered it their “first duty, our most sacred task, to take up this work immediately in our own land […by ] open[ing] new horizons for the laboring masses, [and] help[ing] them in their quest.” In their initial issues, they emphasized the importance of continuing and deepening the Revolution:

We say to the Russian workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionists: Above all, continue the Revolution. Continue to organize yourselves solidly and to unite your new organizations: your communes, your unions, your committees, your Soviets. Continue—with firmness and perseverance, always and everywhere—to participate more and more extensively and more and more effectively, in the economic activity of the country. Continue to take into your hands, that is, into the hands of your organizations, all the raw materials and all the instruments indispensable to your labor. Continue to eliminate private enterprises.

Continue the Revolution! Do not hesitate to face the solution of all the burning questions of the present. Create everywhere the necessary organizations to achieve those solutions. Peasants, take the land and put it at the disposal of your committees. Workers, proceed to put in the hands of and at the disposal of your own social organizations—everywhere on the spot—the mines and the subsoil, the enterprises and establishments of airports, the works and factories, the workshops, and the machines.

Golos Truda’s editors stress the need for workers and peasants to create autonomous class organizations in order to press forward with the reconstruction of the economy from below, and the need for intellectuals to focus their efforts in helping the masses prepare for the “real Revolution” of socializing production. By means of such class organizations could the economic system realistically transition into serving popular interests. Demarcating their position from all statists, the editors observe that political parties are required for the task of taking power, but,

To take over the economy, a political party is not indispensable. But indispensable to that action are the organizations of the masses, independent organizations remaining outside of all political parties. It is upon these organizations that falls, at the moment of the Revolution, the task of building the new social and economic system.

That is why the Anarchists do not form a political party. They agitate, either directly in the mass organizations or—as propagandists—in groups and ideological unions.

As an illustration of the same, consider the fate of the Nobel refinery in Petrograd: in late 1917, the refinery’s workers decided to manage the site collectively in the wake of its abandonment by the owners during the Revolution, yet the Red authorities completely ignored their will and shuttered it anyway, laying off all the workers. The situation was generally very similar throughout much of Russia and Ukraine, for the Bolshevik authorities prohibited the masses from independent action, maligning such initiative as a “breach of discipline,” and actively suppressed autonomous social movements like those of the anarchists, the Makhnovists, and the Greens, as well as cooperatives, workers on strike, and peasants in revolt.

Golos Truda’s editors summarize it well:

Anarchism is not only an idea, a goal; it is, before anything else, also a method, a means of struggling for the emancipation of [humanity] […]. One cannot achieve Anarchism in any way except by going straight to the goal, by the direct Anarchist road. Otherwise one never will arrive (emphasis in original).

For further reading:

• Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Paul Avrich)
• The Russian Revolution (ed. Robert Graham)
• Timeline of Russian Anarchism, 1921-1953

How did the events beginning in 1917 present two opposing conceptions of social revolution?

Voline emphasizes that, in spite of the “victory” of Bolshevism in power, anarchism represented a real alternative that envisaged “a full and integral social revolution” after February 1917. In 1918, this liberatory alternative posed such a threat to the Red State that the Bolsheviks felt compelled to utterly crush it by means of terror. It was thus through force rather than via discussion or debate that the Reds suppressed the anarchist alternative, initially in April 1918 through outright repression of anarchist individuals and collectives and the shuttering of libertarian social centers and presses, and evermore so between 1919-1921, particularly in Ukraine, where the Makhnovists struggled against White reaction and subsequently against Red betrayal. Voline writes that the period between Red October and the end of 1918 was “significant and decisive, and that it “was in the course of those months that the fate of the Revolution was decided.” Still, it was not until they had suppressed the Kronstadt Commune and otherwise eliminated the libertarian movement by the end of 1921 that the Reds became masters of the political situation, although even then their authority had in reality been destroyed throughout vast swathes of rural regions, as peasants set off mass-rebellions against conscription and the  grain-requisition regimes imposed by the Reds.

Whereas the Bolsheviks implemented statist-authoritarian means as their revolutionary strategy, Russian and Ukrainian anarchists followed Proudhon and Bakunin’s vision of “direct and federative alliance[s]” among the associated workers and peasants with their unions, communes, and cooperatives organized non-hierarchically along local, regional, and international lines. In contrast to the Marxist view of centralization first, followed in theory by an eventual “withering away of the State,” the anarchists stressed the importance of an immediate rather than delayed socialization of the means of production by the working classes. It is therefore untrue that anarchists had no vision for social organization after the Revolution. On the contrary, we see two contrasting principles of organization: namely, the Bolsheviks’ centralist-authoritarian principles versus the anarchists’ libertarian and federative ones. In Voline’s words, “Naturally, the Anarchists say, it is necessary that society be organized. But this new organization should be done freely, socially, and, certainly, from the bottom [up].”

Like Bakunin, Voline sees a role for an “elite” to organize the libertarian social revolution, but such revolutionary organizers must be “true collaborators” with the people, who help them, “enlighten them, teach them, […] impel them to take the initiative, […] and support them in their action,” not “dictators” who hold power dominate, subjugate, or oppress them. This is another key difference with Bolshevism, which prescribes an elite that is to be aided by the masses and armed forces through blind obedience. In contrast, anarchism envisions that, through

The natural interplay of their economic, technical, and social organizations, [and] with the help of the “elite” and, in case of need, under the protection of their freely organized armed forces, the labouring masses should […] be able to carry the Revolution effectively forward and progressively arrive at the practical achievement of all of its tasks.

Against the Reds’ interest in the “organization of power,” anarchists counterposed the project of “organizing the Revolution.” For Voline, there exists “an explicit and irreconcilable contradiction” between the true libertarian social revolution and “the theory and practice” of statism and authoritarianism.

 

How did the Revolution go wrong?

“the forward march of the revolutionary masses toward real emancipation, toward the creation of new forms of social life, is incompatible with the very principle of State power” (Voline).

In contrast to Trotsky’s well-known hypothesis set forth in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), that the “degeneration” of the Russian Revolution came about only with the rise of Stalin in 1924, the Bolshevik seizure of power on October 25-26, 1917, arguably can be considered the beginning of its corruption. Voline describes the storming of the Winter Palace as amounting “virtually [to] a palace revolution” that gave the Reds a clear tactical advantage over the anarchists. That the Russian masses entrusted the fate of the Revolution to the Bolsheviks reflected both the hegemony of statism in the Russian popular imagination as well as the “insufficiency of the preliminary destruction” achieved in the February Revolution. Voline means to say that the people’s toleration of the continued existence of the State after the fall of Tsarism set the stage for the Bolshevik seizure of power and the subsequent deviation and destruction of the Revolution. Instead of the left-wing coalition government favored by the Menshevik Yuli Martov or any sense of direct democracy based on the soviets, the victorious Bolsheviks effectively instituted a one-party dictatorship which claimed baselessly to represent the interests of the proletariat. Subsequently adopting a perspective that in a way anticipated the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s distinction between “friends” and “enemies,” the Reds forcibly disarmed the workers and their organizations and suppressed all alternative factions through the use of terror. As the publisher of Gregori Maximov’s The Guillotine at Work explains, during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920):

all-non Bolshevik elements were dubbed ‘petty-bourgeois and counter-revolutionary elements.’ Right and Left Social-Revolutionists, Social-Democrat[s] of all Shades, Maximalists, Anarchists of every tendency—all were placed in the same category of ‘counter-revolutionists.’ Soon these elements began to crowd not only the Tzar’s empty prisons but the vast number of private buildings converted by the Bolsheviks into prisons. Newly built ‘concentration camps,’ which were unknown to the Tzar’s government, were quickly filled (5-6).

In this way, the Bolshevik regime effectively instituted state slavery to defend its hegemony—such was the conclusion reached by Karl Kautsky, “the most prominent leader of world Social-Democracy,” while Lenin still lived (Maximov 20).

It is therefore highly ironic yet also revealing to consider that Lenin’s popularity after the February Revolution followed in large part from the entirely misleading vision he sets forth in the “April Theses” (1917), which argue that the Bolsheviks seek a “second revolution” that would overthrow the Provisional Government; abolish the police, military, and bourgeois State apparatus; and champion soviet power in its place. Acutely aware of the strong libertarian-humanist element in Russian socialism, the former exile knew that openly presenting his political project as Marxian centralism would be a non-starter in the motherland (21-3). Instead, he would attract the masses by appealing to the liberatory memory of the 1871 Paris Commune (31). In fact, such rhetorical “deviations” led several more moderate Russian Social Democrats to criticize Lenin’s call for immediate revolution as a reversion from Marxism to “Bakuninism”: Georgii Plekhanov especially made this connection, judging Lenin’s advocacy of the overthrow of the Provisional Government as “an insane and extremely harmful attempt to sow anarchist turmoil on the Russian Earth” (emphasis in original). In parallel, the Menshevik Martov considered Lenin’s advocacy of bypassing the “objectively necessary” historical stage of bourgeois democracy as a dangerous reorientation of the struggle from Marx to Bakunin (Goodwin 45-7).

Nevertheless, this feigned affinity with anarchism was purely instrumental and opportunistic: while in opposition to the Provisional Government, Lenin had militated greatly against the reinstatement of the death penalty in the Army, immediately upon taking power in October, he took steps to ensure that the revolutionary announcement abolishing the death penalty made on October 26, 1917—the day after the Winter Palace had fallen—was a mere formality. Instead, Lenin greatly impressed the need for the persistence of capital punishment. The appeal to the Paris Commune, therefore, was mere “bait,” a “weapon clearing the road to power” (Maximov 28-34). As the Red leader himself put it, “Do you really believe we shall be able to come out triumphant without the most drastic revolutionary terror?” (29).

Like his lieutenant Trotsky, then, Lenin was a State Terrorist, the “initiator and ideologist of terror in the Russian Revolution modeled upon the terror of the French Revolution” (Maximov 30). By suppressing not only the capitalists but also the rest of the non-Bolshevik left after October, these two figures bear principal responsibility for the vast suffering and death brought about by the Civil War. In targeting socialist-democratic forces of the Revolution for destruction, the Reds similarly targeted the masses of workers and peasants who supported these forces. In contrast, Maximov speculates that, had the broad Russian left been united rather than dealing with a treacherous war launched on it by the Bolsheviks, the “resistance” of the landowners and reactionaries who would go on to comprise the White Armies would have been easily defeated, and the need to resort to terror quite baseless (32-3). Instead, a myriad of socialist and anarchist groups, trade unions, and cooperatives became the regime’s adversaries (37). In parallel, workers and peasants who resisted Bolshevik policies—such as in the case of the latter, vast grain requisitions taken indiscriminately by the Red Army from rich and poor peasants alike to feed the cities—were depicted as “enemies of the people” (39). For this reason, many were targeted for arrest or assassination by the CheKa, or the Extraordinary Committee, which Lenin established in December 1917 (54-6).

For Maximov, then, the Marxist-Leninist centralized State views virtually the entire population as its enemy, with its only “friend” being the minority of pro-Bolshevik workers. This political strategy of championing the dictatorship of the proletariat—or really, the Party over the proletariat and the peasantry—hence inevitably becomes “a slaveholders democracy, which, as distinguished from the one of the ancient world, has for its aim freedom, economic equality, freeing the entire population from slavery, and all this is to be realized… by enslaving the entire population! Could there be a more absurd theory?” (41). Maximov here echoes Bakunin’s prescient warnings about the the risks associated with a Red bureaucracy: “Take the fiercest revolutionary and put him on the All-Russian throne or give him dictatorial power, […] and he will become worse than Alexander Nikolaevich [Alexander II] himself in a year.”

In light of the constellation of forces after Red October, it is quite unsurprising that freedom and equality came to be associated under Lenin with bourgeois delusions, and the critical victories over Tsarism represented by the securing of the freedom of the press, association, and organization in February thus easily rolled back (Maximov 42-3). Voline observes with reason that this suppression of freedom of speech, press, organization, and action “is fatal to true revolution.” Indeed, the Bolshevik regime revealed its autocratic character through its mass-violation of the formal abolition of capital punishment that had been decreed the day of the fall of the Winter Palace in October 1917 (55). The regime even wantonly executed followers of Tolstoy for observing their religious beliefs regarding non-cooperation with war in refusing conscription for the Red Army (10, 195). Ultimately, Lenin’s terroristic employment of the CheKa was in no way accountable to the soviets but rather a consciously elitist effort to “direct” the Revolution toward the Reds’ consolidation of power by means of the suppression of various rivals on left and right (57-8). In specifically targeting the libertarian movement, the Bolsheviks suppressed the Revolution itself. As Voline recounts:

Thus, inch by inch, the rulers become the absolute masters of the country. They create privileged classes on which they base themselves. They organize forces capable of sustaining them, and defend themselves fiercely against all opposition, all contradiction, all independent initiative. Monopolizing everything, they take over the whole life and activity of the country. And having no other way of acting, they oppress, subjugate, enslave, exploit. They repress all resistance. They persecute and wipe out, in the name of the Revolution, everyone who will not bend to their will.

To justify themselves, they lie, deceive, slander.

To stifle the truth, they are brutal. They fill the prisons and places of exile; they torture, kill, execute, assassinate.

That is what happened, exactly and inevitably, to the Russian Revolution.

For further reading:

• “The Russian Revolution” (Anarchist FAQ)
• “The Bolsheviks and Workers Control” (Maurice Brinton, Solidarity)
• “Lenin and Workers Control” (Tom Brown, SWF)
• “How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?”

• “Organizational Platform for a General Union of Anarchists” (Makhno, Arshinov, et al.)

 

What was the role of the Bolshevik Party?

The Bolsheviks, the supposed “majority” faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, agitated and organized against the Provisional Government and Russia’s ongoing participation in World War I following the February 1917 Revolution. Yet as Voline observes, the Reds’ most popular slogans—Long live the Revolution! Down with the war! The land to the peasants! The factories to the workers!—were in fact appropriated from the anarchists. As discussed above, moreover, Lenin’s public program, as based on the April theses, invoked the liberatory model of the Paris Commune, thus gravely deceiving the Russian masses as to the Reds’ actual political project: the imposition of State capitalism in the name of communism. Consider Lenin’s comments from “The Tax in Kind” (1921), that,

[w]hile the revolution in Germany still tarries, our task should be to learn from the Germans how to run state capitalism, by all means to copy it from them and not to spare dictatorial methods in order to accelerate this process of taking over from the Germans, doing it at an even more rapid pace than the one followed by Peter the First in Westernizing barbarous Russia […] (emphasis added).

Wrongly considered the “leaders” of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks in fact usurped power from the soviets and thus from the people through their October 1917 seizure of power, completely deviating the course of the Revolution. Even in November 1917, the editors of Golos Truda had anticipated that the soviets could well become merely executive organs of the nascent Red State; this is unfortunately what happened rather soon after Red October. Besides this, the Bolsheviks’ first major imposition on the masses came with the new authorities’ signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (negotiations for which began in November 1917, with its ratification coming in March 1918), an accord that exchanged control over the Baltic States, Ukraine, and Belarus to the Central Powers for Russia’s withdrawal from the conflict. This deal, the invention of Lenin and Trotsky, greatly contradicted the wishes of the Russian masses, the Left SR’s, the Maximalists, the anarchists, and even the majority of the members of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee, who preferred to continue a revolutionary war against the Austro-Hungarian and German imperialists. Lenin’s self-assertion here presages the ruthless centralism that would govern the Reds’ consolidation of power through the terroristic elimination of political rivals and enemies, and it would serve as the grounds for the Left-SR’s attempt at their overthrow (July 1918).

The Bolshevik Party carried out one of the most disastrous examples of substitutionism in history: that is, the substitution of the autonomous, independent action of the people by the centralized rule of dictatorship. While they claimed to represent the interests of the workers and peasants, the Reds, “a government [comprised] of intellectuals, of Marxist doctrinaires,” in fact greatly oppressed them by means of their imposition of State capitalism over them. Through the Red Terror and during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks practiced self-preservation at the expense of millions of lives of workers and peasants and the very Revolution itself (Maximov 149, 185). The “bourgeois statist-reformers” Lenin and Trotsky essentially employed instrumental thinking and oppression in their own supposed struggle against oppression, which in effect was quite enslaving, and demonstrated clearly for all “how not to wage a revolution.”

The reactionary meaning of Bolshevik rule is illuminated well by the proletarian Communist Party member Gavril Miasnikov, who was expelled from the Party in 1922, effectively for thoughtcrime. Reflecting on the meaning of the Russian Revolution to date, Miasnikov addresses Lenin directly, observing, “To break the jaws of the international bourgeoisie is all very well, but the trouble is that you lift your hand against the bourgeoisie and you strike at the worker. Which class now supplies the greatest number of people arrested on charges of counter-revolution? Peasants and workers, to be sure” (Maximov 271, emphasis added).

For further reading:

• “A Fresh Look at Lenin” (Andy Brown)
• “The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party” (Alexander Berkman)

What was the Red Terror?

“Lenin’s mind, like the mind of any partisan of dictatorship, of any dictatorship, works only along a single track—the police” (Maximov 150).

The infamous Red Terror launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in April 1918 sought to resolve the contradiction between the profoundly libertarian progress seen since February with the Bolsheviks’ authoritarian vision for the region. The Terror is outlined in Lenin’s address on April 29, 1918, “The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power,” which stresses the putative necessity of “halting the offensive upon capital” waged by striking workers and those engaged in self-management and industrial democracy (Maximov 59-62). Acknowledging the “great deal of elemental Anarchism” evident throughout the former Empire, Lenin insists in parallel on the need for an “iron power” to keep the anarchic peasantry under control (63-66). According to Voline, the Bolsheviks saw clearly that allowing anarchists freedom would be equivalent to political suicide. Soon after publishing “The Immediate Tasks,” Lenin reiterated the necessity of an “iron order” and announced a “great crusade” to be comprised of urban workers’ brigades against “grain speculators, Kulaks, village usurers, disorganizers, grafters [… and all] those who violate the strict order established by the State” in the countryside (Maximov 68). The plundering and murders engaged in by Red grain-requisitioners provoked a vast uprising of the peasantry throughout much of Russia and Ukraine—yet rather than lament such a turn of events, Lenin considered it a “merit” that “we [had] brought civil war to the village” (69-71).

The second stage of the Terror, an intensification of the same, began after the Left-SR and ex-anarchist Dora Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918. By means of these two stages, by the end of 1918, the Reds had suppressed civil liberties and banned all non-Communist publications, broken up anarchist collectives and murdered individual anarchists, outlawed the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, suppressed the Left-SR’s, executed a countless number, and incarcerated tens of thousands (Maximov 84). In parallel, the peasantry was used as a target for exploitation and regimentation. Consider this testimony by a Left-SR about the scorched-earth tactics employed by the Reds against the peasants of Tambov:

I was arrested not in January 1921, but in September 1920. There was no wide insurrectionary movement in the government of Tambov, although there were detached cases of armed resistance on the part of the peasants to the requisitioning detachments who were shamelessly looting the villages. On the day of my arrival in Tambov the Central Executive Committee of Tambov Soviets hung out the following announcement, declaring that ‘because of their attempt to disrupt the campaign of grain collecting, the villages Verkhne-Spasskoye (ten thousand population), Koziri (six thousand), and four other villages were burnt, hundreds of peasants were shot, and their property was looted.’ During my six months of confinement in the prisons of the Tambov CheKa I had a chance to see for myself the nightmarish picture of mass-annihilation and ruination of the toiling peasants of the government of Tambov which was carried on by the Communist authorities: hundreds of peasants were shot by the Revolutionary Circuit Courts and the Tambov CheKa; thousands of unarmed peasants were mowed down by the machine guns of the students of military schools and Communists, and tens of thousands were exiled to the far away North, while their property was burned or looted. The same picture, according to the data which the party of Left-Social-Revolutionaries has at its disposal, can be drawn for a number of other provinces: the government of Samara, Kazan, Saratov, in Ukraine, Siberia, etc. (Maximov 87-8).

Official statistics show that there were at least 245 peasant uprisings in 1918, and 99 in the first half of 1919 (Maximov 91). These were cruelly suppressed by the Reds, and such suppression in turn catalyzed further rebellions. Indeed, echoing the Left-SR’s testimony cited above, the CheKa gave explicit orders for the utilization of “mass terror” against villages considered to be supportive of the Green guerrillas, who defended the local peasant revolution (122-3). Additionally, the Reds in 1919-1920 destroyed the Russian cooperative movement due to its ties to non-Bolshevik socialists; as Maximov writes, “the cooperatives furnished an abundant and ever-renewed supply of inmates for the prisons and concentration camps” (132-3). By thus “ruthlessly persecuting all those who differed with them in opinion,” Lenin and Trotsky are clearly responsible for the vast crimes of the Terror, as for preparing the conditions for the 1921 famine, which took the lives of over 5 million people, in accordance with official statistics (96, 185). While 1921 did see drought and a resulting poor harvest, that the peasantry lacked accumulated stock due to the Reds’ grain-requisition regime can explain the breadth and depth of the famine (183-4).

Yet, by this time, Lenin would rationalize such State Terror by saying that the alternative of equality and democracy advocated by Left-SR’s, anarchists, and other democratic critics would necessarily allow the White reaction victory in the Civil War, such that, according to this thought process, Left-SR’s, anarchists, and democrats effectively became imperialist stooges and agents for the “restoration of capitalism.” Lenin explicitly says as much, calling those who “continue to struggle for the ‘equality of labor democracy’ […] partisans of Kolchak,” the leader of the Whites (Maximov 94). In this way, the emergence of the Civil War and the White reaction was utilized as a new and retroactive rationalization of the pre-existing Terror, and grounds for its expansion, as in Petrograd and Astrakhan, where the CheKa in 1919 forcibly suppressed striking workers (99-103). Maximov estimates that in 1919 alone, the Chekist terror took the lives of 25,000, with some 44,000 imprisoned and subjected to starvation, forced labor, torture, and rampant disease (111-2). In the provinces ruled by Trotsky, workers were often shot for “violating labor discipline” (136). This follows from the demand he made at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions (1920) for the “militarization of labor,” and his deluded sense that, the Soviet Union supposedly having become a “Workers’ State,” labor no longer had any need to organize independently of the State.

In February 1920, the CheKa announced the formal abolition of the death penalty in Russia with the exception of the war front, yet in May it was re-established by official decree. Just before the ban came into effect in February, however, CheKa head Felix Dzherzhinsky ordered the mass-execution of those sentenced to death, with the Left-SR A. Izmaylovich recalling the shooting of 150 prisoners in Moscow on the eve of the decree’s proclamation (Maximov 119-20). Red authoritarianism only burgeoned more: in “The Party Crisis” (January 1921), Lenin defended labor’s militarization, dismissed talk of industrial democracy, and identified the heresy of “syndicalist deviation” as something to be extirpated (Maximov 144-5). Whereas the policies of forcible grain requisitions in large part had triggered the 1921-1922 famine, Lenin in no way relieved the peasantry of this yoke but instead continued to demand further extraction, wielding terror against peasants who resisted and restricting the movement of starving peasants to other provinces in search of food by means of military cordons (149-50).

Thus, in contrast to the political opening expected by many leftists, workers, and peasants following the victory over the Whites in the Civil War—the hopes of getting on with the project of instituting a new Paris Commune in Russia, as falsely projected by Lenin in 1917 and 1918—the Reds showed that they were fully prepared to continue using State Terror to hold on to power. Alongside the fate of the Makhnovists, the suppression of the Kronstadt Commune is the best evidence for this sad reality, accounting for a quarter of the estimated 70,000 lives taken by the Red Terror in the year 1921 (Maximov 199).

Altogether, from 1917 to 1924, Maximov estimates that 200,000 lives were taken directly by the Red Terror, and that the Bolshevik experiment overall cost between 8 and 10 million lives, if we factor in victims of the Civil War and the 1921 famine, or between 10 and 13 million, if we incorporate the deaths attributable to the White Terror and reaction as well as the 1924 famine (Maximov 240-1).

For further reading:

• “Bolshevism: Promises and Realities” (Gregori Maximov)

What was the Russian Civil War?

The Russian Civil War, launched by the top-heavy White Army against the Revolution in 1918 with the forces of international reaction behind it, centrally pitted Reds against Whites but also saw important liberatory roles played by the Greens, the Left-SR’s, and the Makhnovists, all of whom opposed Whites and Reds alike. White Armies led variously by Generals Denikin and Wrangel as well as Admiral Kolchak were defeated by the joint action of the people in the revolt, the Makhnovists, the Greens, and the Red Army by 1920. Voline points out that some of this counter-revolutionary militarism was actually supported by Right-SR’s and Mensheviks. Yet by the end of 1919, with “Kolchak and Denikin […] defeated and the movements headed by them […] virtually liquidated,” much of Russia and Ukraine had been “cleared of white guardist bands” (Maximov 113). According to Maximov, irregular libertarian partisans of Russia’s Far East were decisive in the defeat of the Whites in that region (236).

The Greens, so named thanks to their forest and marshland hideouts, united many “deserter comrades” with disaffected peasants impelled by hatred of State exploitation into rural partisan armies that defended the Revolution from Red and White alike in Ukraine, the Volga and Urals regions, Siberia, and some central Russian provinces (Posadskii 8, 11). Makhno, himself a peasant, led the Insurgent Army through Ukraine, inflicting devastating losses on Whites as his liberatory forces went. Influenced by anarchism, Makhno hoped to create a peasant utopia on the land; unlike many Greens, who opposed both Reds and Whites, Makhno engaged in tactical alliances with the Reds until 1920, when the latter betrayed the Makhnovists following their vital services rendered to the defense of the Revolution. Whereas Makhno and his followers together with the Siberian Greens favored free soviets and free federations, the Greens met with a similar fate at the hands of the victorious Bolsheviks: the Red Army engaged in scorched-earth tactics against peasant communities considered to be supportive of the guerrilla movement, specifically targeting family members of known Greens for reprisal in Caucasia, Crimea, and the Don basin (Posadskii 4-14; Maximov 176-7, 194-5).

In response to their perception of the Bolsheviks’ capitulation to imperialism with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left-SR’s assassinated the German ambassador and a high-ranking German officer in July 1918, and they spearheaded a short-lived uprising against the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Later, from 1920-1921, the Left-SR Alexander Antonov led a major Green uprising in the Tambov region, one so menacing Lenin would consider it the single greatest threat to his rule. Yet the Tambov Rebellion, too, was put down using overwhelming force, as detailed above.

The flag of the Green Armies of the Russian Revolution

What about the imperialists?

There is no doubt that the capitalist powers intervened on the side of the Whites against the Revolution in the Russian Civil War. The infamous Czech Legion, for example, seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (completed under Nicholas II) during part of the Civil War, and imperialist governments supplied the Whites heavily with arms and ammunition. The “North Russia” campaign by U.S., British, French, and Polish forces captured the key port city of Arkhangelsk from the Reds in 1918. Nonetheless, such imperialist intervention cannot explain or rationalize the depravity of Bolshevik rule. As Lenin and company often blamed the shortcomings of the Revolution on “capitalist encirclement” and the “inaction” of the global proletariat, they assumed that the success of the Russian Revolution depended on the spread of social revolution to other countries, yet did not stop to think that the very opposite might be true: that the “extension of the Revolution depended upon the results of the revolution in Russia.” In this sense, the lack of an expanding global Bolshevik upheaval perhaps reflected workers’ ambiguities about the meaning of the Russian Revolution after its deviation by the Reds. In July 1918, the Bolsheviks would see the repercussions of their negotiating a peace with the German and Austro-Hungarian imperialists, when the Left-SR’s attempted an abortive uprising to overthrow Lenin and his colleagues due to their desire to defend the Revolution by continuing the war against imperialism.

Soldiers from the counter-revolutionary Czech Legion

What happened in Ukraine?

In Ukraine, Makhno, Arshinov, and Voline worked with the syndicalist Nabat (“Alarm”) confederation once the Revolution broke out. The Makhnovists proclaimed “Land and Liberty,” expropriated the land, and promoted soviet-based democracy in the regions they liberated. In 1919, the Insurrectionary Army led by Makhno hailed the Third Revolution against the Bolsheviks and called for land to be transferred from the Red State directly to the peasantry itself.

In 1919, the Reds conspired to crush the Makhnovists, even as the Insurrectionary Army was holding the line against the White General Denikin’s forces invading from the south. The Bolsheviks’ calculus was that Denikin would annihilate Makhno’s forces, thus eliminating a major rival to their rule, and then the Ukrainian peasantry would rebel against the occupying Whites and so weaken it before a victorious Red Army counter-offensive. Toward this end, in June Trotsky declared illegal the Fourth Extraordinary Convention being organized by the Makhnovists and ordered the arrest and execution of a number of commanders, though Makhno escaped unharmed.

Thereafter, the Insurrectionary Army regrouped and rallied to the defense of the Revolution, wreaking havoc in the rear of Denikin’s forces, which were thereafter easily defeated en route to Moscow by the Red Army (Maximov 108-111). The Reds then re-entered into a tactical military alliance with the Makhnovists to rout the White General Wrangel’s forces in Crimea. Importantly, the text of this pact stipulates that those regions in which the Makhnovists have presence are to be governed by the principles of “autonomy, federalism, and free agreement” in their relations with the Reds (126). Yet once Wrangel too had been defeated, Red Army commanders ordered the Insurrectionary Army to incorporate itself into the Red Army (127-8); when they refused to do so, they were criminalized as “bandits,” and the Reds banned their planned 1920 pan-Russian anarchist congress in Kharkov, ordering Makhno’s arrest as a “counter-revolutionary.” The militants were crushed, and the leadership driven into exile (Avrich 60).

The fate of the Makhnovists followed from the Reds’ premeditated policy of physically destroying popular insurgent movements, both “those that were hostile to them as well as those that fought together with them against Kolchak and Denikin” (173-4). How ironic that the anarchists’ heroic defense of the Southern line against the Whites only facilitated the Reds’ repression of the libertarian movement throughout Russia!

A similar story is seen in Russia’s Far East, where the Reds suppressed anarchists, Maximalists, and Left-SR’s after their critical contributions to the defeat of the White reaction in the region (Maximov 237-8).

For further reading:

• “The Russian Revolution in the Ukraine” (Nestor Makhno)
• “History of the Makhnovist Movement” (Peter Arshinov)
• “Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War” (Michael Malet)

Were Makhno and his followers anti-Semitic?

No, though Red apologists such as Trotsky like to claim that the Makhnovists hated Jews. Against such slanderous charges, Voline cites the example of Grigoriev, an ex-tsarist officer who led a reactionary peasant movement in Ukraine in 1919 that did engage in pogroms: “One of the reasons for the execution of Grigoriev by the Makhnovists was his anti-semitism and the immense pogrom he organised at Elizabethgrad, which cost the lives of nearly three thousand persons.”

He adds several other reasons showing the Makhnovists’ opposition to anti-Semitism, including the facts that a “fairly important part in the Makhnovist Army was played by revolutionists of Jewish origin,” that the Insurrectionary Army counted with several Jewish combatants and contained entirely Jewish fighting units, that Ukrainian Jewish communities provided many volunteers to the Army, and that “the Jewish population, which was very numerous in the Ukraine, took an active part in all the activities of the movement.”

Thus we see that the Makhnovist movement, though greatly inspired politically by the example of Mikhail Bakunin, progressed beyond this anarchist militant’s conspiratorial anti-Semitism to strictly punish chauvinistic acts inspired by such prejudice. For his part, Bakunin believed in the fantasy of universal Jewish power, and he conflates the power of finance capital with delusions about Jewish domination. See Statism and Anarchy.

What happened at Kronstadt in 1921?

The Kronstadt Commune of March 1921 was preceded by strike movements among workers in Petrograd and Moscow who demanded resolution to their starvation conditions as well as a halt to the terror and free soviet elections. The Reds met these striking workers with mass-arrests, lockouts, the declaration of martial law in Petrograd, and ultimately the armed suppression of workers in the city. As Maximov writes, whether ironically or not, “[t]the Petrograd scene strikingly resembled the last week of the Tzar’s absolutist regime” on the eve of the conflict (160). The sailors of Kronstadt echoed their fellow workers’ demands from across the bay, outlining in the Petropavlovsk resolution of February 28, 1921, fifteen demands, including the re-establishment of civil liberties, free elections to the soviets, the release of political prisoners, the review of all cases of those imprisoned and held in concentration camps, the right to organize labor unions, the immediate abolition of grain-requisitions, the liberation of the peasantry, and the abolition of Bolshevik commissars in the military and overseeing workplaces. While the resolution affirmed its demands within the parameters of the Soviet Constitution, Lenin and Trotsky found it profoundly threatening. They feared that its spirit could spread quickly within the armed forces—that the “petty-bourgeois [sic] Anarchist elemental forces [were] the most dangerous enemy, which might draw many sympathizers and partisans, which might obtain strong backing in the country and change the sentiments of the great masses of people” (Maximov 175). As such, they slandered the Kronstadt sailors, insulting them as being the dupes of Socialist Revolutionaries, a former tsarist general known as Kozlovsky, and the proto-fascist Black Hundreds.

The Bolsheviks then declared a state of emergency in Petrograd, clarifying that any crowds “congregating in the streets” were to be immediately shot, with any soldiers resisting such orders themselves to be summarily executed. The Reds also took several relatives of the sailors hostage (Maximov 165). In response, the Kronstadters took up arms to defend themselves and declared the abolition of the death penalty while themselves taking some 280 Reds hostage. Unfortunately, however, the weather was still cold enough to allow for the bay to be frozen over, thus facilitating a ground invasion of the island-fortress. Ultimately, after more than 10 days of artillery bombardment, Trotsky’s battalions, aided by ex-tsarist generals and supported by Chinese and Bashkir reinforcements, overwhelmed the Kronstadters and retook the island on March 17. An estimated 18,000 insurgents were killed in the fighting and executed shortly after their defeat (Maximov 164-8).

On March 18, the Reds held a public celebration in Petrograd marking fifty years since the beginning of the Paris Commune—this, as Kronstadt lay visibly in ruins. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had attempted to intercede before the Bolsheviks to avert the Commune’s violent suppression, listened aghastly to Bolshevik military bands playing “The Internationale” in the streets. Goldman writes that “[i]ts strains, once jubilant to my ears, now sounded like a funeral dirge for humanity’s flaming hope,” while Berkman caustically observes that “Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels.”

How did Lenin contradict his supposed anti-imperialist principles while in power?

Lenin is known for his supposedly innovative characterization of imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism,” and his view that capitalism will be taken down by the revolt of peoples oppressed by imperialism. Lenin expressed concern for the persistence of “Great Russian chauvinism” over the former Russian Empire’s numerous minorities and oppressed nationalities. So what was his relationship to such principles after he seized power over the Russian Empire?

Ukraine

See above. The Bolsheviks clearly did not favor Ukrainian self-determination.

Georgia

In February 1921, the Red Army invaded and occupied its southern neighbor Georgia from  Armenia, reproducing the Red Terror in the newly conquered country. This imperialistic venture followed from the general maxim of the Terror: As Georgian Mensheviks had declared independence in October 1917, this renegade province of the Russian Empire required a coercive corrective to its course. An appeal from Tiflis (Tbilisi) workers to the workers of Western Europe from August 1921 speaks to the repression imposed by the foreign Red rulers:

From the very first days Georgia was conquered, we were placed in the position of and treated as slaves. We were deprived of freedom of speech, of press, assembly, and the right of free association. A regime of military labor service has been imposed upon all the workers of Georgia, irrespective of their occupation. Everywhere Extraordinary Committees (CheKa) have been set up […]. The advanced workers of Georgia, irrespective of their party affiliation, are thrown into prison where they are being decimated by hunger and diseases. Human life has become of no value. Innocent people are shot, even those who never mixed into politics, who never took part in any political struggle. People were shot because they served the democratic government, the State; because in open war they defended their native country from the invasion of foreign troops (Maximov 171-2).

Alongside Mensheviks, then, Georgian national-liberation fighters were targeted for elimination by the occupying Reds (236).

Central Asia: Kirghiz-Kazakh Steppe and Turkestan

A map of Turkestan/Central Asia using current borders

Larger map situating Turkestan in relation to western Russia (using current borders)

In Central Asia, the Reds’ desire to maintain imperial hegemony over the region led it to support Tsarist-era settler-colonists against the indigenous populations, resulting in a popular resistance movement known as the Basmachi (Russian for “raiders”), and subsequently intensify the conflict and ultimately accommodate the resistance movement.

Both armed rebellion in the late Tsarist era and the emergence of the Basmachi movement in Soviet Turkestan had important bases in the colonization of the Central Asian steppe during the Tsarist period. This colonization, greatly enhanced by the onset of the Stolypin reforms (1901-3), which effectively targeted the rural commune for elimination, expelled the indigenous Kirghiz-Kazakh people from the best grazing lands and disrupted their traditional way of life, resulting in annual famines from 1910 to 1913 (Pipes 83; Rywkin 16). Increasingly greater stresses on the Kirghiz-Kazakh caused them to revolt in 1916 after they were targeted for conscription during World War I. One important factor that contributed to the popular resistance to this measure was that these Muslims would be conscripted to fight alongside non-Muslims against the Ottoman Caliph (Pipes 83; Olcott 353). Following repression of the revolt, many Kirghiz-Kazakh fled to Turkestan, and this together with the entirety of the travails experienced by the indigenous peoples during the late Tsarist period caused Kirghiz-Kazakh political leaders to seek the definitive termination of Russian settlement of the region (Rywkin 17). To this end, the Kirghiz-Kazakh had, before the 1917 Revolution, begun to demand territorial autonomy above all else, in the hope that self-rule would allow them to legislate in favor of indigenous peoples and reverse the excesses of Russian colonization (Pipes 85).

Following the Revolution and further armed conflict with Kirghiz-Kazakhs returning from exile, the Russian settler-colonists increasingly came to side with the Bolsheviks, hoping to use the rhetoric of proletarian dictatorship against the indigenous Muslims: Bolshevism, in this sense, was to mean the rule of workers, soldiers, and peasants, and since the Kirghiz-Kazakh supposedly had no such organized classes or groups, they were “not to rule but be ruled” (Pipes 86). Delegates to the 1917 Congress of Soviets, fearful of losing control over the empire’s many disparate nationalities and Central Asia’s lucrative cotton production, voted against any consideration of autonomy for Turkestan and the participation of Muslims in the Soviet administration in Central Asia (Pipes 91; Olcott 359-60).

Following up such rhetoric, the Reds, after their occupation of Turkestan in 1919, excluded local nationalists from political power. Even when the Kirghiz republic was allowed autonomy a few years later, Russian settler-colonists in the area refused to accept its sovereignty and worked to undermine it, and the Kirghiz-Kazakh nationalists, without an army, political organizations, or connections in Moscow, could do little to effectively liberate the region. The 1921 and 1922 famines that struck the Kirghiz-Kazakh steppe affected the indigenous populations significantly, as they had lost much of their livestock following the 1916 rebellion and disproportionately received less food from government distributions. The profound effects of this famine can explain the subsequent lack of indigenous popular resistance to the Soviet regime in the Kirghiz-Kazakh region, in contrast to the case of Turkestan (Pipes 174).

The Basmachi

Soviet rule in Turkestan met with greater challenges than that over the Kirghiz-Kazakh region. Though Soviet rule greatly discounted indigenous interests here as it did in the Kirghiz-Kazakh steppe, it met with opposition from an indigenous Muslim government based in Kokand and, following the breakdown of the Kokand regime, an emerging popular resistance movement known as the Basmachi (Russian for “raiders”). As in the Kirghiz-Kazakh region, Soviet power found support from settler-colonial elements, but here it met opposition from the autonomy-seeking Kokand government, supported by the politically-inclined segments of the indigenous populations and anti-Communist elements. The Tashkent Soviet, in an effort to extend control over rural Turkestan, supported persecutions, expulsions from the land, and looting of the indigenous Muslims, creating a situation which one contemporary Soviet official equated with the “feudal exploitation of the broad masses of the indigenous population by the Russian Red Army man, colonist, and official” (Pipes 177-8, emphasis added). Though the Tashkent Soviet firmly controlled urban areas, it had little authority over the countryside, where the populace had been alienated by Soviet cooperation in what it deemed a continued colonization. Tensions at this time between the two rival governments came to a head, and the Tashkent Soviet, fearful of the Kokand government’s emphasis on national self-determination, ordered the city of Kokand destroyed, its government overthrown (Pipes 174-8).

Following this brazen dismissal of indigenous interests, the Tashkent Soviet made little effort to win back the allegiance of its Muslims subjects and made little effort to relieve those affected by the winter famine of 1917-18, thus pushing more Muslims into supporting and joining the Basmachi movement (Rywkin 22-3). To some, the destruction of the Kokand Islamic government and its replacement with a secular, anti-religious State constituted blasphemy and can explain emergent cooperation with the developing Basmachi movement (Olcott 358). The Tashkent Soviet’s efforts at confiscating waqf, or clerical lands, for the benefit of the regime; the closing of religious schools; and the discontinuation of shari’at courts further contributed to popular opposition to the Soviet regime (Pipes 259).

The emergence of the popular resistance movement known as the Basmachi constituted a reaction to perceived Soviet abuses and excesses which, gathering support from the general populace, struggled violently against foreign occupation and resulted in an escalation and intensification of counter-insurgency efforts. In contrast to the later occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Soviets eventually came to realize that brute force itself would not succeed in bringing an end to popular insurrection in Turkestan, and so they successfully co-opted the Basmachi movement from below by responding to the needs and desires of the populace supporting the movement.

Following the fall of Kokand, many indigenous individuals involved in the government, along with others suffering under the requisitions and looting attendant with the Soviet regime, joined the Basmachi, who previously had been feared by the population at large as bandits and common criminals. The group came to represent the struggle for liberation from Soviet rule (Pipes 178; Rywkin 33). The Basmachi soon grew to control the Turkestani countryside, generally enjoying the support of the population and, by violently punishing collaboration with the Soviet regime, coercing those who would think twice about backing them (Rywkin 35; Haugen 89). Though targeted at Bolshevik rule, the Basmachi resistance increasingly came to represent a Muslim struggle against Russians rather than an anti-communist campaign (Rywkin 38). The movement, plagued by lack of unity among its leaders, hoped to overcome these difficulties and approach victory with the defection of Enver Pasha, a former ruler of Turkey whom Lenin had sent to quell the insurgency, yet who ended up joining it himself. Enver’s integration into the Basmachi strengthened the movement, increasing its numbers to twenty thousand members who now could count a number of victories under their belts. Nonetheless, Enver failed to unify the resistance, having antagonized other Basmachi commanders with his vision of a pan-Turkic Muslim empire (Pipes 258; Rywkin 39). With his death in battle against the Reds in 1922, all hopes to consolidate the resistance movement ended (Pipes 259).

The Soviet regime coupled military escalation in response to Basmachi with political concessions. The combination of these two factors undermine popular support for the Basmachi and thus their effectiveness. Moscow saw in the emergence and perpetuation of the Basmachi movement the persistent refusal of the Tashkent Soviet to grant autonomy to indigenous peoples, such that, in 1918, Stalin ordered Turkestan autonomous. However, the non-cooperation of local communists with this directive caused it to be irrelevant until Lenin later intensified central pressure on the Tashkent communists (Pipes Ibid 179, 183). The result of heavy pressuring, the 1920 Seventh Congress of Soviets was the first to allow Muslim participation, but few would-be delegates attended for fear of reprisals from the then-raging Basmachi movement (Rywkin 26). The Eighth Congress, though, yielded an indigenous majority in the Tashkent government, thus arousing the hopes of Turkestani intellectuals for self-determination. Although Lenin, in contrast to the Russian settler-colonists in Turkestan, may have favored real autonomy for the Muslim peoples of the region in theory, he was not willing to countenance an autonomy that would threaten the unity of the Soviet regime and the centralized rule of the Communist Party (Rywkin 32).

Following these political concessions came a burgeoning Soviet military presence in Turkestan. Eventually, Soviet and local leaders increasingly came to realize that the coupling of military escalation with political half-measures would not bring order to the region. To this end, the administration overturned the most unpopular reforms: the waqf was returned, Koranic schools were legalized, shari’a courts were granted increased autonomy, taxes were cut by half, and food supplies to indigenous peoples were increased (Pipes 259; Rywkin 41; Olcott 360). Moreover, the introduction of the New Economic Policy permitted a return to private trade, and ended the forced requisitions of food and cotton, the origin of much resentment toward the Soviet regime (Pipes 259; Rywkin 41). Given these substantial concessions, much of the previous support for the Basmachi dissipated, and order was restored for the Communist Party in much of the region.

How did Red October, the Red Terror, and the Civil War lead to Stalin’s rule?

As we have seen, the Bolshevik seizure of power gave rise to the Red Terror and the Civil War. According to Maximov, the “entire country was turned into a prison” so that Bolshevik control of the State would persist (192, emphasis in original). The Reds never once tried to negotiate peaceful settlement of conflicts during the Civil War or thereafter, but simply resorted to intimidation as based on the real threat of physical annihilation by means of the Red Army and the CheKa plus its successor, the GPU (State Political Administration) (179, 207). In quashing all alternatives to Bolshevik hegemony, including striking workers and peasants in revolt, the Reds exhausted the sources of resistance that could have averted Stalin’s rise or reversed it shortly after its emergence. By 1922, the rate of State repression against socialists and anarchists lessened to some degree simply because most of them had by this time already been suppressed (213-223). In cultural terms, Lenin’s partner, N. K. Krupskaya, circulated a list of forbidden literature that included Kant, Plato, the Gospels, Schopenhauer, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Bakunin in 1923, demanding that libraries remove these authors and works from circulation immediately (221-2). Of course, the Nazis would publicly burn books by many of these same authors in the years to come.

As Paul Mattick argues, there is very little in Stalinism that did not also exist in Leninism or Trotskyism. Indeed, it is quite telling that a variation on the same boast Trotsky would make after the April 1918 raids against the anarchists—that “At last the Soviet government, with an iron broom, has rid Russia of Anarchism”—would be used by Stalin’s hangmen to hail the purges against Trotskyists and Old Bolsheviks fifteen years later.

For further reading:

• “How Lenin Led to Stalin” (WSM)
• “Stalin Did Not Fall From the Moon” (WSM)
• “From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Stalinist Totalitarianism” (Agustin Guillamon)

What lessons should we take from the Russian Revolution?

Metaphorically, the Russian Revolution illustrates “the resplendent rays of freedom” melting away an ossified despotism, thanks to the action of “the common people [who] swept over the land like spring floods and washed away the debris of the old regime” (Maximov 336). The heroic, libertarian mass-mobilizations of February 1917 opened the horizon of possibility, astonishing the rest of the world through the suddenness of their overthrow of the Tsar. In this Revolution, the peasantry retook the land and many workers engaged in cooperative self-management of production. Yet the historical burdens of Tsarism put the working classes at a disadvantage, in the sense that they could not self-organize openly as long as Nicholas II ruled. Following his abdication, the absence of workers’ class-organizations which could serve as “receiving sets” for the implementation of anarchism in Russia and throughout the former Empire greatly hampered the cause in the struggle between libertarian and authoritarian socialism that characterized the years 1917-1921. To a considerable extent, this lack can explain the defeat of the anarchists by the Reds in the Red Terror and Civil War.

The anarchist Revolution, of course, can only begin through the action of the masses in conjunction with specifically anarchist militants, who must not be allowed to hold coercive power over the people. The success of this Revolution depends ultimately on whether its emancipatory nature can win over the “neutral” mass through its positive results. A final essential element is working toward the ideological destruction of what Voline terms the “political principle”: statism and authoritarianism.

We close with the most hopeful interpretation of the tragedy of the Russian Revolution, one that is not specific to this event but rather to all other major historical setbacks: “Let Russia serve as a lesson to all other nations. Let the mountains of corpses and the oceans of blood shed by its people be a redeeming sacrifice for all nations, for the toilers of all countries” (Maximov 334).

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Works Cited

Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

Bakunin, Mikhail. Statism and Anarchy, trans. and ed. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counter-Revolution, ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, California: AK Press, 2017).

Goodwin, James. Confronting Dostoevsky’s Demons (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).

Haugen, Arne. The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Maximov, G. P. The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Chicago: Globus Printing, 1979 [1940]).

Olcott, Martha B. “The Basmachi or Freeman’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918-24.” Soviet Studies 33.3 (July 1981): 352-69.

Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Posadskii, A. V. Девятнадцатый, зеленый… («Зеленое» движение в годы Гражданской войны в России) (Saratov: Publikatsiya RFFI, 2016).

Rywkin, Michael. Moscow’s Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990).

Skirda, Alexandre. Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland: AK Press, 2004).

Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1975 [1947]).

Recommended Statements and Memoirs

• Mollie Steimer, “On Leaving Russia” (1923)
  • Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)
  • Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy (1922)
• Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans in Soviet Russia, trans. and ed. William Edgerton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Recommended Films

• Battleship Potëmkin, dir. Sergei Eisenstein (1925)
• The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, dir. Esfir Shub (1927)

• October, dir. Sergei Eisenstein (1928)

• From Tsar to Lenin, dir. Herman Axelbank (1937)

• Doctor Zhivago, dir. David Lean (1965)

• Reds, dir. Warren Beatty (1981)

• Red in Blue, dir. Thibout Bertrand (2017)

Review: The Anarchist Roots of Geography

Originally published on Marx and Philosophy, 28 March 2017

In The Anarchist Roots of Geography, a “proverbial call to nonviolent arms,” Simon Springer discusses some of the past, present, and future relationships between anarchism and geography. He mobilizes the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus, and Lev Tolstoy to denounce global capitalism and oppression—declaring, with Kropotkin, that anarchism is “what geography ought to be”—while also affirming the more contemporary approaches of Saul Newman and Todd May, who have advanced the idea of “post-structuralist anarchism” in opposition to classical approaches through a turn to thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among others. Springer therefore presents his own perspective as amounting variably to “anarchism without adjectives” or “post-anarchism,” neither of which is the same. The former refers to the synthesist approach favored by Voline and others in opposition to the anarcho-communist Platformism advanced by Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov, and other exiled militants following the defeat of the Russian Revolution. Post-anarchism, a more recent development, integrates the nihilism, irrationalism, and defeatism of postmodern analyses in expressing opposition to social revolution and universalism as “totalizing narratives.” In this way, while The Anarchist Roots of Geography provides many compelling insights, it itself presents a synthesis of a number of anarchist or anarchistic approaches that cannot so readily be melded together.

Springer’s main project in this volume is to bring geography back to its radical anarchist roots, thus issuing a course correction of sorts beyond those set by the hegemonic presence of Marxists within academic geography departments starting in the late 1960s. The author presents the works of Kropotkin and Reclus as luminous alternatives to the ethnocentrism and state-centricity that has plagued the discipline since its origins. Springer wishes to wield anarchism, defined as the practice of mutual aid with the concern for universal geography in mind, to undermine statism, capitalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, imperialism, and speciesism (or anthroparchy). For him, anarchism is the “only meaningful form of postcolonialism” (38), as the State-form effectively continues colonization even after formal independence, and—following Reclus—it must centrally express concern for the integrity of the planetary system by means of nature conservation, vegetarianism, and opposition to animal cruelty. Springer here traces the philosophical arc linking Reclus with social ecology and the animal-rights and animal-liberation movements. The author holds that direct action, cooperation, and prefigurative politics can allow humanity to affiliate by free federation, reestablish equality among humans, rebuild the commons, and overturn the domination of nature. Taking after Proudhon (1840), who analyzed property as originating in the Roman concept of sovereignty, or patriarchal despotism, Springer defines property as violence and calls for insurrection—but not revolution—against oppression. Echoing Reclus, he emphasizes the place of beauty in the struggle, citing Albert Einstein’s view that “[o]ur task” must be to “wide[n] our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty” (137), and he declares the importance of unity for anarchy, in parallel to the teachings of Taoism, Buddhism, and Baruch de Spinoza.

Some of the specific suggestions Springer makes for future research into the intersection of anarchism with geography include the following topics:

• State theory and sovereignty
• Capital accumulation and flows, land rights, property relations
• Gentrification, homelessness, housing, environmental justice
• Labor, logistics, policing, and incarceration geographies
• Critical geopolitics, geographies of debt and economic crisis, geographies of war and peace, etc.

In advocating an anarchist understanding of geography, Springer seeks to depose the dominance of Marxian and Marxist approaches within the discipline, holding these responsible for the perpetuation of State-centric analyses in place of a geographical exploration of alternatives to the State altogether. Springer argues against Marx’s statism and “dialectical” enthusiasm for colonialism, defending instead the anarchist emphasis on the need for consistency between means and ends. Stating openly that “[f]lirtation with authority has always been a central problem with Marxism” (158), he discusses how anarchists do not share Marx’s positivistic-utilitarian enthusiasm for the centralizing and despotic features of capitalism. In the anarchist view, capitalist exploitation and imperial domination are not considered necessary parts of the Geist. “The means of capitalism and its violences do not justify the eventual end state of communism, nor does this end justify such means” (52). For Springer, then, anarchism is a more integral approach than Marxism, as the former recognizes the multiple dimensions of oppression in opposition to the latter, which is said to focus almost exclusively on class, while misrepresenting anarchism as being opposed only to the State. Springer believes that Marxism allows no space for addressing oppressions outside of exploitation. Moreover, anarchists prescribe action in the here and now, rather than advocating a dialectical waiting period until the “objective conditions” are supposedly ripe.

Indeed, Springer shows how Proudhon’s analyses of property, the State, wage labor, exploitation, and religion were highly influential for Marx, despite the fact that the German Communist was reticent to acknowledge as much. As Proudhon wrote after Marx’s diatribe against him in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847): “The true meaning of Marx’s work is that he regrets that I have thought like him everywhere and that I was the first to say it.”

Springer also communicates the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker’s view that it was Proudhon who first expressed the labor theory of value, and he hypothesizes that it was Kropotkin’s years spent in Siberia which led this anarcho-communist to emphasize a naturalist, decentralized, agrarian, and cooperative vision for the future, in contrast to Marx’s centralist and industrialist-positivist views. For the present and future, the author calls for the creation of radical democracy, which arises when la part sans-part (“the part without part”) intervenes to disturb the established sovereign order, rebuilding the commons where now prevail exclusive spaces, whether they be private or public. Springer particularly endorses Murray Bookchin’s concept of the “Commune of communes” as a restatement of the “continua[l] unfolding” of organization by free federation, and affirms Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of struggle to be a means without end, or infinitely demanding (Simon Critchley).

Springer certainly presents several critical contributions to a revolutionary analysis and understanding of geography. Yet as stated before, there are philosophical and political tensions among the variegated sources he calls on to develop his argument. To take one example, he initially affirms the views of several classical anarchist revolutionists but then challenges Neil Smith’s call for a “revival of the revolutionary imperative” against capitalism and the State, preferring instead insurrection—defined as prefiguration, spontaneity, and a Stirnerist sense of disregarding oppressive structures rather than overthrowing them—because revolution is putatively governed by a “totalizing logic” and somehow “ageographical” (68). This questionable understanding of revolution to the side for the moment, it bears clarifying that Max Stirner was a reactionary individualist whose views are incompatible with those of the anarcho-communists. Yet this lapse on Springer’s part is one with his general approach of blurring distinct anarchist philosophies with ones that may seem anarchistic—most prominently, post-structuralism. To return to the question of revolution, the author favorably reproduces Newman’s dismissal of social revolution as a rationalist, Promethean, and authoritarian project, noting that “not everything needs to be remade” and that revolution is inseparable from tyranny (88). This attitude fundamentally contradicts the thought of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus, and other anarchist militants. Indeed, absent a commitment to revolutionism, it becomes difficult to claim that “post-structuralist anarchism” is anarchist. The same is true for “post-anarchism,” a category that Springer embraces on multiple occasions in the text. To weld “post-anarchism” together with classical anarchism would require more than passing references to the supposed superiority of more contemporary anti-essentialist perspectives informed by Foucault, Butler, and company. Amidst the Sixth Mass Extinction, the accelerating destabilization of the climate, and Donald Trump’s war on the scientific method, why should we accept post-anarchism’s rejection of science, truth, and ethics? In point of fact, classical anarchism shows itself more appropriate to the times.

In distinction to the author’s endorsement of post-anarchism, Springer’s Tolstoyan advocacy of a peaceful uprising is intriguing but not entirely clear. The author argues that anarchism typically had a pacifist orientation to social change before Errico Malatesta, Alexander Berkman, and other militants came to publicly endorse tactics of assassination. Springer fails to mention that Kropotkin did so as well, and he misrepresents Emma Goldman’s trajectory as initially being supportive of counter-violence but then coming to pacifism by her life’s end—for the geographer overlooks Goldman’s support for armed struggle in the Spanish Revolution. Like Goldman, Springer is not a strict pacifist in that he allows for violent self-defense and endorses insurrection as forms of “permanent resistance.” Still, he is not very precise in the parameters of violence, nonviolence, and self-defense he discusses. What is clear is that the very possibilities for peace and emancipation require a different society. In this sense, Springer’s citation of Edward Said is poignantly apt: the “stability of the victors and rulers” must be “consider[ed] […] a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction.” Under the prevailing conditions in which capitalism and militarism indeed threaten human survival and planetary integrity, Springer is correct to emphasize the importance of “perpetual contestation” and “[e]xperimentation in and through space” (3). We must become the horizon!

“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.

“Murió por la anarquía”

Sobre el Retorno del Compañero Ricardo Flores Magón

Versión original publicada el 27 de febrero de 2015 en Counterpunch.  Elaborada por el entrevistador y María A. Castro, la traducción fue publicada el 12 de marzo de 2015 en el Portal Libertario OACA.

Primera parte

Profesor Lomnitz, agradezco mucho su voluntad de hablar conmigo acerca de su nueva biografía colectiva, El Retorno del Compañero Ricardo Flores Magón (The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014).  Igual le quiero agradecer a mi compañero Allen Kim por haberme recomendado este libro tan maravilloso, obra que presenta un examen íntimo y amplio de la vida del anarquista mexicano Ricardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) y de sus compañeros más cercanos—principalmente, sus hermanos Jesús (mayor) y Enrique (menor), Librado Rivera y Práxedis G. Guerrero, todos integrantes de la Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM).  Como resultado de su compromiso durante toda su vida a la causa de la revolución social, Ricardo estuvo encarcelado en calidad de preso político durante gran parte de su vida: de hecho, pasó más de la quinta parte del curso de su vida en la cárcel.  Murió en noviembre del 1922 tras dos años de encarcelamiento en la Prisión Federal de Leavenworth en Kansas por haber hecho un llamamiento a sus compañer@s mexican@s a alzarse en armas en contra de l@s blanc@s racistas en Tejas y del ejército reaccionario de Venustiano Carranza.  Podemos afirmar de esta manera que tanto la vida de Magón, como la de sus compañer@s estuvo colmada de Eros y Thanatos, o revolución y represión.

Ante todo, Profesor Lomnitz, me gustaría que hablara acerca del título que eligió Ud. para su obra.  Su idea era hacer referencia al “retorno” procesional del cuerpo de Magón a México Distrito Federal tras su muerte en Leavenworth, o tal vez desea implicar que hoy en día se ve un resurgimiento o hasta una regeneración del espíritu contenido en la alternativa anarco-comunista del PLM, como una aparición shakespeareana o hegeliana—le revenant (“la fantasma,” o literalmente “lo que vuelve”) de la que habla Jacques Derrida en Espectros de Marx?

Quisiera comenzar agradeciéndote por haber tomado el tiempo y las dificultades para leer El Retorno de Compañero Ricardo Flores Magón. La labor de l@s lectores es crítica y fundamental, nunca fácil.  Gracias especialmente por eso.

Como dijiste, el título está lleno de sentido.  En primer lugar, se refiere al retorno de Ricardo a México (como cadáver tras su muerte), lo cual implícitamente plantea la cuestión del significado de su exilio: ¿por qué Ricardo volvió como cuerpo venerado?  ¿Cuál fue la razón de la contradicción entre ausencia física y presencia espiritual en México?  Se podría decir que el título representa un reconocimiento de la cuestión histórica central del libro, es decir, la relación entre ideología y exilio en la Revolución Mexicana.

También hay un segundo aspecto que resumiste mucho mejor en tu pregunta de lo que yo podría haber hecho. Se trata de la relevancia y de la sensibilidad del movimiento con respecto al apoyo mútuo, tanto como proyecto político como imperativo biológico.  Dada esta relevancia, ya existen formas de anarquía y organización social comunista en el horizonte de la posibilidad, y el personaje de Ricardo sigue conteniendo ese poder fantástico/fantasmagórico al que haces referencia.  Sí, el poder de una aparición shakespeareana.

El Retorno del Compañero Ricardo Flores Magón es un estudio importante de las dimensiones específicamente transnacionales de la Revolución Mexicana—como explica Ud. en la introducción al libro, donde dice Ud. que los esfuerzos organizativos revolucionarios de los anarquistas de la Junta Organizadora del PLM y de sus colegas socialistas, tant@s mexican@s como estadunidenses, constituyeron la “primera red de solidaridad entre l@s mexican@s y l@s estadunidenses.”  Usted agrega que esta historia es “la historia de una red transnacional revolucionaria que colectivamente se pensaba a sí misma como portadora de un ideal inspirado en la novela de Don Quijote, una historia de hombres y mujeres que dedicaron su tiempo a leer libros y a actuar de acuerdo con sus lecturas. Sus actos se consideraron excéntricos.  Como en el caso de Don Quijote, su actuación parecía estar fuera de lugar—ser utópica—o con más precisión, fuera del tiempo.” Le pido el favor de explicar de qué manera estos personajes fueron percibidos como loc@s, quijotesco@s y utopic@s.

Sus acciones se consideraron excéntricas debido a que en realidad así fueron, tal como explico en el libro.  En este milieu había un elemento de revolución sexual y familiar que fue muy transgresivo y que se manifestó de varias maneras.  Elizabeth Trowbridge, una bostoniana de dinero, se casó con Manuel Sarabia, un revoltoso mexicano encarcelado, y pagó su fianza antes de convencerle de huir junto con ella a Inglaterra para evitar su condena judicial.  Ricardo Flores Magón vivió en pecado con María Brousse y consideró a la hija de ella como suya propia.  Enrique Flores Magón escribió acerca de la ignominia de la brutalización y el trato despectivo, abusivo y controlador por parte de los esposos a sus esposas. De manera similar, Emma Goldman fue una gran defensora de la utilización de métodos anticonceptivos, posición que Enrique y Ricardo apoyaban en Regeneración.  Naturalmente, a los integrantes del PLM no se les permitió casarse por la Iglesia Católica.  En los Estados Unidos, much@s de l@s radicales mexican@s fundaron hogares híbridos, compuestos por familiares y no-familiares.  Este fenómeno se observa igualmente en el hogar—tipo comuna—que ocuparon Enrique, Ricardo, y sus familias, junto con varias otras familias, en las afueras de Los Ángeles. De hecho, algun@s de los aliad@s estadunidenses y europe@s, como el socialista Job Harriman, crearon comunas agriculturales en los Estados Unidos.  Además de la existencia de este nivel íntimo de “locura,” hubo un nivel político de excentricidad: la clandestinidad, el trabajo de propaganda, las huelgas, el apoyo a revueltas armadas, y más.

No creo que este grupo se autoconsiderara utópic@—sino que al contrario, sus participantes creían que había posibilidades reales e inmediatas para la institución de sus ideales, particularmente tras el inicio de la Revolución Mexicana, durante la Primera Guerra Mundial y en el periodo inicial de la Revolución Rusa.  Esta idea de las posibilidades inmanentes decayó después.  Ricardo ya no vivía en ese entonces, pero Enrique sí continuaba vivo.  Ya en las décadas de 1940 y 1950, Enrique consideró que sus ideales libertarios anteriores no se podrían realizar en el presente.

Por supuesto que much@s contemporane@s del PLM creían que sus ideas ácratas eran utópicas, entre ell@s integrantes de renombre del PLM e incluso miembros de la Junta.  Militantes tales como Juan Sarabia y Antonio I. Villarreal, quienes participaron activamente en la Revolucion Mexicana pero creyeron en el incrementalismo y en la participación en la política liberal-democrática mexicana.  Así que la cuestión de si su estrategia fue utópica o realista es una cuestión a debatir.

En cuanto a la cuestión de que sí estos personajes fueron quijotescos o no, es algo asimismo complejo.  Sin duda, todos los que etiquetan a este grupo como “precursores de la Revolución Mexicana” los consideran quijotesc@s, en el sentido de anacrónic@s—antes de su tiempo, en su lucha por algo que aún no se podía lograr.  Claro que éste no fue el propósito de los integrantes del PLM.  Hubo otra manera en la cual los integrantes del PLM podrían haberse visto a sí mismos como quijotesc@s ya que pasaron sus vidas leyendo y actuaron de acuerdo con los principios de sus lecturas.  No fueron lectores pasivos.  Además, dieron todo y renunciaron a todo a favor del mundo que estaban imaginando y creando.  En este sentido, creo que varios de estos militantes se habrían identificado con el Quijote por propia voluntad.

Ud. afirma que ningun@ de l@s militantes estadunidenses que colaboraban con la “Causa mexicana” sentía atracción o conexión con México, con su gente, con su historia o con su política, antes de sumarse a los esfuerzos del PLM en contra de Porfirio Díaz en 1908, y ¡Ud. sostiene también que ningun@ de ell@s hablaba el castellano hasta ese momento! En su consideración y reflexión tanto sobre las denuncias, expresadas en Regeneración, de la terrible esclavitud impuesta y administrada por el Porfiriato como sobre las dimensiones feministas, proletarias, cristianas, cosmopolitas e internacionalistas que parecen haber contribuido al apoyo que est@s norteñ@s dedicaron a la causa— incluyendo los enlaces creados entre el PLM y l@s Obreros Industriales del Mundo, Emma Goldman y Alexander Berkman—cree Ud. que la participación de tod@s ell@s en la lucha refleja una manifestación particular de la lucha mundial por la justicia social?

Yo diría eso sin duda, y tod@s ell@s también lo dirían, probablemente sin excepción alguna.

Como explica Ud., el PLM y sus colaboradores estadunidenses establecieron un paralelo importante entre Díaz y el osificado despotismo ruso, liderado por el Zar Romanov Nicolas II.  Este paralelo crítico se iluminó a través de las investigaciones impulsadas por John Kenneth Turner en referencia a la “Siberia tropical” de México, la Peninsula del Yucatán, donde cientos de miles de mayas, yaquis y corean@s fueron esclavizad@s.  Las investigaciones de Turner, publicadas originalmente en American Magazine en 1909 y después en el libro Barbarous Mexico (1910), impactaron de manera importante a lectores estadunidenses, porque estas investigaciones mostraron “la tradición reaccionaria estadunidense de la esclavitud en su penetración y expansion hacia el sur bajo la protección oculta de una dictadura apoyada con entusiasmo por el gobierno y capital estadunidense,” y al mismo tiempo revelaron otra manifestación de la aniquilación de la América indígena—otro Camino de las Lágrimas acontecido en el destino lamentable de los yaquis deportad@s, desplazad@s y masacrad@s.  La lectura del capitulo,“El Pueblo fue el Sacrificio,” me recordó al libro Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World de Mike Davis (2000).  ¿Podría Ud. hablar acerca del significado de la obra de Turner en cuanto a la campaña de cambio de opinión pública mundial con relación a México, frente a la narrativa hegemónica avanzada en ese tiempo por medios de comunicación tales como el San Francisco Chronicle y Los Angeles Times, cuyos propietarios eran entonces William Randolph Hearst y Harrison Gray Otis respectivamente, quienes eran asimismo beneficiarios de 2,5 millones de hectáreas de territorio en Chihuahua y Baja California que Díaz les había vendido—e impulsar un analisis que afirma que el Porfiriato fue el facilitador de una “colonia esclavista-capitalista”?

Porfirio Díaz contaba con una prensa excelente en los Estados Unidos. En parte, esto tuvo que ver con el éxito innegable de los primeros años de su dictadura, cuando creó una coalición que permitió que el gobierno federal mexicano reprimiera a los bandidos de carretera, cubriera su deuda externa, importara capital en cantidades masivas, construyera ferrocarriles y consolidara el mercado doméstico.  También estos éxitos tuvieron que ver con la gran entrada del capital estadunidense a México durante su larga administración.  El historiador John Hart nos ha mostrado que México fue el recipiente de más del 60% de las inversiones estadunidenses en el extranjero, así que defender a Díaz era defender los intereses estadunidenses.  De manera similar, hubo una campaña deliberada y activa que Díaz impulsó para atraer una opinión favorable desde los Estados Unidos, campaña que incluyó la concesión de territorios masivos a un par de magnates: Hearst y Otis, como mencionaste.

La cuestión de cambiar la opinión pública estadunidense con relación a Diaz y México fue una demanda algo exigente.  Una parte de esa transformación dio inicio gracias a los esfuerzos de l@s mexican@s en los Estados Unidos, incluyendo l@s PLMistas, pero no solo ell@s.  Parte de la transformación se dio debido a los sentimientos de l@s estadunidenses en cuanto a la injusticia en México—por ejemplo, existieron cambios de opinión que favorecieron la causa de l@s yaquis en la zona fronteriza de Arizona.  John Kenneth Turner merece ser reconocido por su labor.

En primer lugar, John pudo publicar sus artículos en la prensa de corriente dominante—en el American Magazine, publicación que solía hacer periodismo de investigación—en vez de publicar en la prensa socialista, que en ese entonces tenía muchos lectores, pero que de cierta manera hubiera implicado “predicar a l@s convers@s.”  Él lo pudo hacer así por haberse enfocado tan claramente y de modo tan conmovedor en el problema de la esclavitud y de la destrucción de l@s indigenas.  Y también porque lo pudo hacer a través de periodismo directo y en primera persona.  Fue un gran éxito.  Él tuvo otros éxitos también, pero éste fue clave en su papel de presentar la situación en México como algo escandaloso.

Hablando acerca de la historia familiar de los hermanos Flores Magón, Ud. nos muestra que Enrique, en su autobiografía, intenta presentar su línea paterna ancestral de nobles aztecas como instauradora de un “comunismo primitivo” entre l@s indigenas campesinos mazatecparlantes de Oaxaca que habían sido conquistados por ellos anteriormente.  Su versión de la historia familiar podría evidentemente representar un método de aliviar su ansiedad en cuanto a sus origenes relativamente priviligiados, aunque no parece ser que Teodoro Flores era tan rico como los padres de Práxedis, considerando en particular la compulsión del jóven Ricardo de entrar al mercado laboral como sirviente doméstico a principios de los 1890s, tras las muerte de Teodoro y la encarcelación de Jesús por haber escrito artículos críticos del Porfiriato. De manera similar, Ud. nos enseña que Enrique oculta la afinidad entre Díaz y su padre, y ni menciona la participación de su progenitor en la “Revolución de Tuxtepec” que instaló a Díaz como dictador. Enrique prefería recordar el servicio militar que rindió Teodoro en defensa de la soberanía mexicana y el liberalismo, personificadas en la persona de Benito Juárez y la Constitución de 1857, en contra de los invasores franceses imperialistas y sus aliados mexicanos reaccionarios, quienes de hecho vengaron la resistencia heroica de Teodoro cuando mataron a su padre, a su cuñada y a su esposa en un emboscada cobarde contra la hacienda familiar en 1865.  ¿Ve Ud. la memoria selectiva de Enrique nada más como una expresión normal de la represión socio-psicológica entre las familias, que es aún más aguda en el caso de los hermanos revolucionarios Flores Magón?  Otro ejemplo similar, aunque sea mas desagradable en cuanto a la cuestión del oportunismo, se ve en que Enrique en sus memorias se atribuye haber sido el comandante de la revuelta armada del PLM en 1908, la cual en realidad fue liderada por Práxedis y Francisco Manrique, siendo cierto que Enrique no se encontraba remotamente cerca del sitio de la batalla.

Esta es una pregunta complicada.  La cuestión de la genealogía azteca falsa no era rara entre ést@s militantes, ni fue particular en el caso de Enrique.  Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara la reivindicaba también, y creo que esto tiene que ver con el proceso de autonarración mexicana en los Estados Unidos y tendencia radicalmente indigenista, dado que la opinión pública en Estados Unidos estaba de acuerdo con la idea de que l@s españoles eran asqueros@s, mientras que se veía a l@s indígenas de México en términos nobles.  En el caso de los hermanos Flores Magón, había también un deseo desde México de presentar a su padre como un integrante de una élite indígena, en vez de un hacendado.  De todas maneras, Teodoro no era hacendado de la misma manera que lo habían sido los padres de Práxedis Guerrero y Francisco Manríque, como dices.

Lo que queda de la pregunta tiene que ver con el problema de la memoria dentro de México después de la Revolución.  Enrique sobrevivió a la mayoria de sus contemporane@s principales, y se puede decir que se vio absorbido por la lógica del “Estado Revolucionario.”  En los 1930s estuvo involucrado activamente en el desarrollo de la organización “Precursores de la Revolución Mexicana,” institución que recibía pensiones del gobierno por los servicios proveidos. Enrique y su esposa Teresa Arteaga estuvieron encargados de certificar quiénes eran precursores, y quiénes no lo eran. Además, en los 1940s Enrique escribió semanalmente para El Nacional, narrando historias de l@s revolucionari@s del pasado.

Dentro de tal contexto, no fue fácil admitir las contradicciones de la historia de la revolución, de la historia del PLM y de su propia historia familiar.  Su ruptura con Ricardo, por ejemplo, casi fue totalmente imposible de reconocer en público, y mucho menos explicar a una audiencia mexicana típica.  En ese sentido, estas tergiversaciones por parte de Enrique no son simplemente distorsiones tipicas entre familias. Y es sabido que Enrique en sus últimos años solía inventarse cuentos excéntricos, aunque, como demuestro en la biografia, había una lógica en su enajenación.

Con relación al periodo “bohemio” juvenil de Ricardo en la Ciudad de México, Ud. presenta el enfásis que pone el historiador José Valadés en la importancia de este momento de su vida, cuando Magón llegó a conocer “la realidad en la que vivía el pueblo mexicano” en la que “no había ni paz, ni luz, ni salud para l@s pobres.”  Más tarde, Ricardo escribiría que “sólo [la persona] que sufre puede entender el sufrimiento de los demás.”  Diría Ud. que existe una conexión entre las experiencias de Ricardo durante su periodo bohemio y la declaración pública que hizo en el Primer Congreso Liberal que tuvo lugar en San Luis Potosí en febrero de 1901, declaración que le haría tan famoso, y que indicaría el cambio definitivo impulsado por los redactores de Regeneración de “periodismo jurídico independiente” a “periodismo combativo” en 1900, resumida en la frase “la administración de Díaz es una cueva de ladrones?”

Aunque esa parte de la historia familiar es la más dificil de reconstruir—durante los 1890s, quiero decir—tengo la impresión que sí fue formativa, como lo plantea José Valadés.  Valadés recalca la importancia que tuvo en Ricardo la iniciación sexual con prostitutas en los barrios pobres que los estudiantes solían visitar.  Segun Valadés, Ricardo contrajo cierto tipo de enfermedad sexual entonces, y por eso supuestamente no pudo reproducirse después.  Valadés igual cree que el conocimiento íntimo de las vidas miserables de las prostitutas mexicanas y de sus familias fue importante para el desarollo de la sensibilidad política y la educación de Ricardo.  Valadés tuvo entrevistas directas con l@s contemporane@s de Ricardo a las que no puedo yo acceder, y creo en su palabra.  Tal vez él falla en su análisis sobre la importancia que tuvo este período bohemio en la historia inicial de Regeneración, dado que es obvio que durante esa década, estos jóvenes claramente proseguían el ejemplo de l@s revolucionari@s franceses, y también de los liberales mexicanos.  En mi opinión, la declaración de Ricardo, que “¡la administración de Díaz es una cueva de ladrones!”, repetida tres veces en San Luis Potosí, fue una reinstauración de la declaración de Ignacio Ramírez en 1836 que “¡Dios no existe!” (también repetido tres veces, en Toluca).  Este tipo de actitud teatral en 1900-1 se desarrolló durante el período bohemio.

Es muy conmovedora la historia que Ud. relata en cuanto a la muerte de Doña Margarita Magón mientras que sus hijos Ricardo y Jesús estaban detenidos en la Cárcel de Belem en la Ciudad de México (1901-2) por cargo de libelo por aseveraciones fácticas que habían planteado en Regeneración.  En sus notas acerca de la muerte de Margarita Magón, como nos dice Ud., los medios de comunicación supusieron que la angustia que resultó de ver a sus hijos sufrir de esa manera precipitó su fin—de una manera similar al caso de Anticleia de la Odisea, quien le dice a su hijo en Hades que “nada más mi soledad y la fuerza de mi cariño hacia ti, querido Ulises, causó que mi vida se terminara.”  En su opinión, ¿cómo se distinguieron las reacciones de los tres hermanos en relación a este lamentable evento—el sacrificio “de su relación mas sagrada […] para la vida política,” evento que reflejó la desgracia que cayó sobre Teodoro por haber servido en la resistencia militar a los invasores franceses—particularmente con respecto a los sentimientos de Ricardo?

Esta es una pregunta crítica para poder comprender las decisiones y también cierta parte de la constitución psicológica de los tres hermanos, y ésta es una cuestión que me preocupa en el libro porque veo que el ser humano tiene la tendencia de imputar sus motivaciones en los demás, sin importar si existe o no existe un interés en su psicología.  Por lo tanto es mejor clarificar, de manera explícita, las ideas acerca de las motivaciones, con el fin de facilitar el debate y el desarrollo de perspectivas alternativas.

En realidad, yo siento que la muerte de Margarita provocó en Jesús, el hermano mayor, la idea de abandonar la alternativa de política clandestina y cualquier práctica política que le llevara a la cárcel de nuevo.  Para Jesús, la muerte de Margarita fue de alguna manera como una repetición, considerando que él fue el primer hermano al que detuvieron, y la primera vez que esto sucedió tuvo lugar sólo cuatro días despues de la muerte de Teodoro, el padre de los tres hermanos.  La primera detención de Jesús dejó a su madre y a los dos hermanos menores en una situación de inseguridad económica, ya que se vieron obligad@s a abandonar su casa y mudarse debido a la falta de recursos, y viéndose Ricardo obligado a trabajar durante un tiempo como sirviente.  Tras la muerte de Margarita y la liberación de Jesús y Ricardo de la carcel, Jesús se casó con su novia, Clara Wong, se hizo abogado y experimentó una profesión política prominente tanto bajo el gobierno de Madero como el de Victoriano Huerta, llegando a diputado del Congreso.

La reacción de Ricardo fue proseguir en la lucha para derribar a Díaz hasta el fin.  Entre sus amigos, él era conocido como ascético y como revolucionario comprometido únicamente a sus ideales, y fue este tipo de dedicación el que le ganó el liderazgo de la Junta Organizadora cuando el grupo del PLM abandonó México hacia el exilio.  Ricardo nunca renunció esa posición en la Junta.  Tampoco se casó nunca, y cuando desarrolló una relación profundamente romántica, fue con una mujer, María Brousse, quien estaba igualmente comprometida con la revolución social.  De hecho, María actuó voluntariamente en el asesinato de un político mexicano famoso, Enrique Creel, para que Ricardo pudiera estar junto a ella y no sentirse que estaba causando una ruptura en la familia.

Enrique tal vez es el hermano mas complejo, debido a su situación ambígua.  Él no estaba encarcelado cuando su madre Margarita falleció, sino que se dedicó a cuidarla durante el último período de su vida, a pesar de su joven edad.  Por eso, él no experimentó ni la culpabilidad ni el arrepentimiento de Ricardo y de Jesús.  De todas maneras, Enrique tampoco se benifició de la idolatría popular que recibieron sus hermanos debido a su sacrificio.  Esta situación le causó oscilar entre seguir el ejemplo de Jesús o el de Ricardo.  Creo que Enrique era un jóven que quería demostrar que era igualmente capaz de cualquier sacrificio—de hecho, más tarde en la vida, se le denegó el acceso a sus hij@s tras un conflicto ideológico con el abuelo materno de sus niñ@s.  Por otra parte, Enrique tuvo por un tiempo la idea de casarse y volver a México.  Fue la experiencia del exilio y sus consecuencias prácticas lo que le provocó continuar en la dirección que Ricardo había impulsado.  Tras el fin de la Revolución, se enfrentó con una situación que fue similar a la de Jesús.

Me gustaría ahora hablar acerca de los precursores filosóficos e ideológicos de la alternativa ácrata avanzada por el PLM y Regeneración.  Ud. enfatiza que el pensamiento de Peter Kropotkin, el “príncipe ácrata”— y particularmente sus investigaciones científicas de apoyo mutuo—influyeron en el pensamiento y la actuación de la Junta Organizadora.  Un buen ejemplo de esta tendencia se ve en el análisis que Magón presenta en una carta escrita en Leavenworth en 1920 a María Brousse en donde argumenta en términos kropotkinianos y naturalistas que el egoismo “es el resultado de siglo tras siglo de una educación y capacitación individualista para las masas,” y que “el instinto primordial del ser humano de cooperar y proveer apoyo mutuo se ha suprimido y a cambio ha aparecido y se ha desarrollado una tendencia que promueve una educación individualista.”  Por su parte, Práxedis favoreció la fundación en México de un contrasistema de educación racionalista para l@s nin@s que seguía el ejemplo del ácrata español Francisco Ferrer.  Además, Ud. nos enseña que el PLM siguió tanto el ejemplo jacobino como la tradición política liberal mexicana en cuanto a su adhesión al anticlericalismo y a la defensa de la democracia popular.  Con relación a la Constitución de 1857, Librado Rivera puntualiza que “La Constitución ha muerto…”

Otro precursor crítico del naciente movimiento liberal mexicano tuvo que ver con las experiencias de la “generación de 1892” a la que Magón y l@s otr@s integrantes del PLM pertenecían.  1892 fue el año en el que Díaz “ganó” su tercera reelección consecutiva, lo cual provocó movilizaciones estudiantiles de resistencia al Porfiriato.  Una acción organizada por estudiantes en mayo de ese año con las consignas “¡Muerte al centralismo!” y “¡Abajo la reeleción!” fue fuertemente reprimida, con docenas de estudiantes detenidos y amenazados con ejecución extrajudicial—en la que Magón y varios de sus compañeros fueron rescatados por “una multitud [que] amenazó asaltar el Palacio Municipal de la Ciudad de México, donde nos tenían encarcelados como resultado de nuestra movilización en contra de la dictadura.”  Ricardo agrega que esta fue su “primera experiencia en la lucha”!

Además, como explica Ud., l@s que sentían atracción hacia el PLM en los años 1900 resistían abiertamente al grupo tecnocrático de los “cientificos” quienes habían ganado poder tras la nueva reelección de Díaz.  Est@s revolucionari@s intentaron utilizar el liberalismo en contra de la corrupción observada que instituía un positivismo institucionalizado amigable al Porfiriato.  Es igualmente curioso que, menos Ricardo, casi todos los personajes centrales del PLM fueron masones comprometidos, tal como dice Ud.  Ahora bien, se sabe que la Junta Organizadora no se presentó públicamente como ácrata hasta que publicó el manifiesto del 23 de septiembre de 1911, tras las derrota militar de su campaña en Baja California y el surgimiento de conflictos dramáticos dentro del mismo PLM, tal como veremos en la segunda parte de nuestra conversación.  Entonces, ¿cómo es que el anarquismo, el jacobinismo, y el liberalismo mexicano se combinaron para inspirar el grupo mas radical dentro del PLM: el de los comunistas libertarios Ricardo y Enrique Flores Magón, Librado Rivera y Práxides Guerrero?  Y por añadidura, ¿Ud. no cree que las influencias ácratas y jacobinas se contradicen entre si con relación a cuestiones de filosofía política, dada la dictadura centralizada que se instaló a través del Comité de la Seguridad Publica Jacobina durante el Reino del Terror en 1793-4?

Esta es una pregunta muy difícil.  Déjame intentar responder brevemente.  El liberalismo mexicano, el anarquismo y el jacobinismo comparten el elemento anticlerical, y eso fue algo en común importante.  La idea de que la religión, o sea la religión organizada, es una fuente de represión y subdesarrollo fue común en las tres escuelas de pensamiento.  Ademas, l@s ácratas sentían apasionadamente que la autoridad religiosa servía para fortalecer el capital y la explotación de las mujeres, y que además era la raíz de la falsa moralidad de su sociedad.  Las tres tendencias compartían el “culto a la libertad,” y el rechazo profundo de la esclavitud y la servitud.  La consigna “Libertad, Igualdad, Fraternidad” fue muy importante para los tres sistemas filosóficos, aunque cada cual la intepretó de manera diferente.  Es por esta razón que la Marseillaise también fue una canción ácrata.

Naturalmente hubo diferencias importantes aparte de estos puntos en común.  Los liberales mexicanos favorecían la propiedad privada y se oponían rotundamente a la propiedad corporativa—no sólo a la propiedad corporativa de la Iglesia, sino que también a la de las comunidades indígenas, mientras que l@s ácratas claramente favorecían la propiedad corporativa comunal.  Los jacobinos compartían con l@s ácratas la creencia en la soberanía popular, directa y sin mediaciones, pero ellos igual creían que la soberanía se materializaba en el control del Estado.  Así que el Terror de Estado fue en cierta manera la consecuencia natural del jacobinismo, porque utilizaron el Estado en contra de los elementos reacccionarios de la sociedad.  L@s ácratas creían en la soberanía popular sin mediaciones y sin Estado.  Su alternativa era la acción directa—el tomar los medios de producción y gestionarlos bajo el control comunitario.

En términos históricos, el Porfiriato es conocido por el “progreso” económico que impulsó: la industrialización, el aumento del extractivismo, y el “liberar” la economía mexicana (mejor dicho, el venderla), con claros paralelos con el momento actual, dominado por el Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).  Bajo Díaz, esta expansión económica dependía de manera crítica del sistema de esclavitud junto con la explotación brutal de la dizque “libre” mano de obra, como se vio en el caso de los obreros en huelga en la mina Cananea en el desierto de Sonora, quienes fueron reprimidos de manera violenta por el Ejército Mexicano en el verano del 1906, evento que llevó al PLM a partir de ahí a planificar e intentar su primera revuelta revolucionaria.  ¿Diría Ud. que la alternativa social que Ricardo y sus camaradas favorecían representaba un verdadero polo opuesto al “México oscuro y satánico” del que fue responsable Díaz, en términos de la contrapropuesta hacia una visión anarcocomunista agraria, à la Lev Tolstoy?  Al parecer, el énfasis que puso Ricardo en la estrategia de acción directa colectiva le separó radicalmente del análisis de algun@s de sus contrapartes socialistas, quienes creían en contra de Magón que México todavía no estaba “listo” para el comunismo.  Nos demuestra que, durante su encarcelación en Leavenworth en 1919, Enrique provee su definición de una “vida que valga vivirla,” la cual incluiría la distribución mundial egalitaria “de las comodidades y avances científicos de hoy” junto con los estilos de vida supuestamente tranquilos de sus abuelos indígenas, “que trabajaban sus tierras comunales […] libres del yugo del patrón.”

La respuesta breve sería que sí.  Una respuesta más matizada tendría que incluir los cambios en las posiciones de Ricardo.  En 1906, el programa que desarrolló la Junta, y que Ricardo apoyaba, más o menos era el mismo que el de l@s socialistas—el promover la reforma agraria, política y electoral así como los derechos sociales y políticos de la clase obrera, pero no la destrucción del Estado.  A pesar de eso, en 1910, y durante el transcurso de la Revolución Mexicana, Ricardo favoreció la acción directa y una visión anarcocomunista.

Para cerrar esta primera parte de nuestra conversación, deberíamos de considerar las condiciones sociales “bastante peculiares” que Ud. identifica que han sido necesarias para “imaginar” y “esforzarse” hacia la revolución ácrata que el PLM avanzaba, lo cual para Ud. fue “la revolución mas radical que produjo la Ilustración.”  Los puntos claves que Ud. identifica incluyen la movilidad de la mano de obra, la migración, el exilio, y el internacionalismo proletario, además del vivir en comun (una dinámica que Ud. llama el “sistema liberal familiar en conjunto” experimentado en las oficinas de Regeneración, de las que se decía que parecían representar una comuna, o uno de los “hospitales” de Thomas More) y tener un amor profundamente apasionado tanto por el pueblo como por l@s camaradas en la lucha.  Esta segunda dinámica se refleja bien en las conexiones diádicas que se desarrollaron entre Práxedis y Francisco Manrique, y Magón con Librado Rivera.  Ud. observa que, en la vida cotidiana de est@s revolucionari@s militantes, el comunismo no era una utopia, sino “una realidad de cada día que se creaba debido a la necesidad de compartir los recursos, […] de derrocar las estructuras familiares tradicionales para poder admitir a desconocid@s en las situaciones más intimas, y […] de construir metas trascendentales ante la plena descomposición de la moralidad tradicional, de las costumbres, y de los hábitos.”  Ud. pone énfasis en este sentido dual del amor platónico y conyugal, y Ud. dice que el amor fue “mucho mas importante para [l@s ácratas], tanto en su faceta ideal como en su práctica cotidiana, que para los Villas y Zapatas, los Obregones y los Pascuales Orozcos.”  ¿Por qué cree que así fue?

Hablaré acerca del significado del amor en este movimiento, y su distinción con relación a los ejércitos revolucionarios en Mexico.  Existen razones ideológicas que favorecen el amor entre l@s ácratas sobre las que aquí no voy a hablar.  Lo que me parece más interesante es que las condiciones sociales de militancia entre l@s integrantes del PLM resultaron en el desarrollo de relaciones amorosas entre hombres y mujeres y también entre amig@s del mismo sexo, fueran éstas segundas relaciones plenamente eróticas o simplemente platónicas.

El PLM creció bajo condiciones de clandestinidad y siempre fue objeto de persecución e infiltración de espías y traidores.  Esto significó que la confianza profunda personal fue crítica, dado que estaban poniendo su vida y el futuro del movimiento en las manos de otras personas. Éste fue un factor que favoreció el desarrollo de enlaces personales profundos, que claramente incluían el amor.  Un segundo factor fue que l@s integrantes del PLM tenían que depender de una autodisciplina tremenda.  Eran ascétic@s en el sentido de que tenían que trabajar por el día y movilizarse por la noche.  Tenían que ahorrar e invertir lo que les sobraba en la causa.  Tenían que leer y reflexionar.  El leer y escribir eran actividades claramente importantes para l@s ácratas, y tendían a impulsar el amor, debido a que era una práctica de correspondencia.  Se podría decir que el movimiento fomentaba investigaciones profundas del ser y del autocultivo, y que esto favoreció el desarrollo del amor.  Además, las comunidades que sirvieron como base del movimiento de exiliados se basaban en la afinidad.  Dada la movilidad intensiva de este grupo, sus integrantes dependían de la afinidad para poder encontrar un hogar a alguien recién llegad@ a una ciudad nueva, o para organizarse.  La solidaridad era necesaria en la vida cotidiana, y esta solidaridad se basaba en la afinidad, factor que asimismo fomentaba el florecimiento del amor.

Para l@s revolucionari@s en Mexico, en contraste, la experiencia de la revolución fue algo como un vendaval que barrió todo en su camino.  La revolución se representó popularmente como la bola.  Los ejércitos revolucionarios pasaron por los pueblos como chapulínes. Muchas personas se unieron al ejército revolucionario en su paso por diferentes comunidades, a veces reclutad@s como soldados o soldaderas.  Los enlaces entre los hombres y las mujeres fueron frágiles por esa razón.  La falta de relaciones matrimoniales no fue el producto de cierto repudio ideológico hacia la Iglesia o la famila como instrumento de opresión, sino que fue simplemente el producto del desplazo y de la vida cotidiana en el ejército.  Los líderes revolucionarios solían tener varias esposas, a veces docenas.  Algunos de tales líderes—Zapata, por ejemplo—intentaron crear enlaces con las comunidades a través de una esposa o amante local.  Es difícil hallar el tipo de relación que se experimentaba entre Ricardo y María o Enrique y Teresa o Librado y Conchita o Práxedis y Francisco Manrique en los movimientos revolucionarios de México.  A lo mejor las relaciones románticas homosociales o homoeróticas eran similares, dado el fenómeno de “compañeros de guerra,” y la confianza profunda entre l@s compañer@s en México.  Pero no es claro que estos enlaces involucraran conexiones tan espiritualmente profundas y las similitudes ideológicas que vemos en una relación como la de Práxedis con Manrique, la cual fue una relación que se gobernaba no tanto por la circunstancia sino por el compromiso mútuo.