The pet I’ll never forget: Gema, the mutual-aid dog

Over a century ago, the Russian anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) challenged Charles Darwin’s emphasis on the centrality of competition in the “struggle for existence,” which Darwin defined as natural selection. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Kropotkin defies this Victorian biologist’s ideas, which gave rise to a social Darwinism that naturalized strife, individual gain, and common ruin. Famously, the Russian scientist argued instead that cooperation is equally, if not more, important than competition in “the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.”

In his study, Kropotkin writes that “[a]ssociation and mutual aid are the rule with mammals.” With regard to “the great tribe of the dogs,” he identifies it as “eminently sociable,” and praises canine collectivity in terms of hunting and self-defense. Indeed, this insight anticipates the “canine cooperation hypothesis,” which explains the close ties between dogs and humans as being based on pre-existing cooperation within wolf packs. In parallel, the sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, in Ministry for the Future (2021), asserts that “[w]e turned wolves into dogs and they turned us into humans.” Such a possibility emerged, on his account, because the canines taught early humans about friendship and cooperation, just as we domesticated them in turn.

In this sense, my experience with Gema, a boxer-lab mix adopted as a rescue puppy by my sister and mother, provides a tender affirmation of Kropotkin’s sense regarding the centrality of “Mutual Aid and Mutual Support” in our lives. Gema was a very sweet companion animal who provided a lot of love to our family and her fellow rescue dog, Rumi. She lived with my mom, who would graciously and surreptitiously bring her to stay with me at my apartment after especially hard days at work—even if this was against the rules. I vividly recall how, one afternoon, as I was visiting with and petting Gema, her happiness was testament to my mother’s spontaneous exclamation: “Life is so beautiful!”

Gema herself not only provided and needed mutual aid, but also, her care uncovered it. When my mom traveled for holiday, particularly to visit my sister, I would come take care of her and Rumi. Besides taking our daily (or twice-daily) walks, we would all cuddle together on the couch while I read some book or another. Once, when Gema was still quite young and energetic, at a time when my sister and I were away, my mom became ill and could not properly care for her. As a result, she asked my good friend Liz to take care of Gema temporarily, and Liz accepted her without hesitation—despite Gema’s mischievous and hyperactive nature then.

Overall, these are my two favorite memories of Gema: first, of the trip that she, my mom, Liz, her dog Lucy, and I took to Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July, 2017; and second, of the picnic that she, my mom, and I had in Griffith Park for my birthday in 2022. This beach trip, which celebrated independence and interdependence, was a lot of fun, as we humans and dogs spent hours swimming and playing in the waves. At Griffith Park (see image above), we hiked until we found a proper grove to eat our falafel, hummus, and tabbouleh in. Of course, as part of this idyll, we undoubtedly shared some of our food with Gema.

Even toward the end of her life, Gema continued to be an exceptionally loving dog. Strikingly, in February 2023, the same day of the book launch for my Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography, she was in especially high spirits. In the hours before the event, as I made final preparations, Gema was even closer to me than usual, making clear her joy through body language. It was almost like she knew about the book launch, and was proud of it! Plus, about ten days before she passed away, when I was house-sitting for my mom and caring for her and Rumi, I had a bit of a stomach ache in bed late at night. Having somehow sensed this using her canine faculties, she immediately offered her body heat to help. Despite her advanced age and widespread arthritis, Gema literally jumped to my side in the dark! My discomfort quickly subsided.

Ultimately, I feel very grateful for having had the chance to get to know and live with Gema. Her last days in the veterinary hospital were heartbreaking. Yet, even while she was there, struggling to survive, we connected both through touch, as through her lovely, blinking eyes. Now, I know that this mutual gaze—which likely has played an important role in canine-human co-evolution—activated oxytocin (the “love hormone”) in us both, despite the sad circumstances.

In this sense, I sympathize with Poppy Noor, who writes: “My dog taught me just how much love I have to give, and that’s a pretty spectacular thing.” I agree: dogs and humans cooperating and loving each other exemplifies mutual aid, a practice which, as Kropotkin describes, “grants the best chances of survival to those who best support each other in the struggle for life.” In this vein, I’m so thankful for Gema, my mutual-aid dog!

Seeking the Anarchism of Love: Transcript

From an online conversation hosted by the Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, 22 March 2023

Joe Scheip: Lev Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, Count Tolstoy, or any other of the many names and titles of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was as diverse in being as in his many names. Complex and sometimes hypocritical, Lev was not just known in his time as a great author and poet, but also as a visionary and a revolutionary in ethics and politics: a believer in Christian anarchism. He challenged power, in all its forms.

Lev Tolstoy lived from 1828 to 1910. He was contemporaneous in his own country with Russian Tsars Alexander II and Alexander III, and later in life, with Nicholas II. He was born into some wealth and rank. Russia at the time was a quasi-feudal capitalist society, with deep disparity in social classes, the scourge of imperial rule, and the horrors of serfdom.

Tolstoy’s life has many epochs: first, a young adulthood that included eventful and traumatizing experiences in the military; then, Tolstoy the great author, writing best sellers even in his own time. Also, Tolstoy the social experimenter: using his homebase Yasnaya Polyana as a springboard for radical experimentation in education, eating, and social ranking. This was a place where holy fools, mystics, seekers and the like would come and stay, to attempt to create new worlds—much to his wife Sofia Tolstaya’s chagrin.

And we shouldn’t leave out Sofia here—as Tolstoy did, deciding to meditate amongst the honeybees during the pregnancy of their first child. Sofia should be credited, amongst many other things, with the countless hours spent copywriting and editing Tolstoy’s work—invisible labor, much like the labor of mothering their 13 children.

And Tolstoy’s hypocrisies and contradictions only continue from there. Yet he seemed to be fully aware. He writes in The Kingdom of God is Within You:

“We are all brothers—yet every morning a brother or sister must empty the bedroom slops for me. We are all brothers, but every morning I must have a cigar, a sweetmeat, an ice, and such things, which my brothers and sisters have been wasting their health in manufacturing, and I enjoy these things and demand them… We are all brothers, but I take a stipend for preaching a false Christian religion, which I do not myself belief in, and which only serves to hinder men from understanding true Christianity… The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man’s conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.”

And while there are many things to examine in Lev’s life, Javier’s project—Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (2023)—focuses on uncovering the both overt and subliminal queerness in Tolstoy’s life and work, and to link his erotic dissidence with his anarchist politics.

Was Tolstoy queer? In the sense of his lack of integration with mainstream society, the answer can only be a resounding yes. Was Tolstoy homosexual? The answer is more complicated. There are, however, many things that point to Tolstoy’s homosexual and homosocial gravitations, including his own words in his diary and Sofia’s later words, asking forgiveness for being the barrier to his encounters with other men.

Along with Javier’s historical, psychological, and social commentary, the book includes a queer reading of War and Peace, which unveils homosexual and double entendres galore.

On queer and queerness: what drove your interest in studying this under-researched area of Tolstoy’s life?

Javier Sethness: My mother María Castro, who is an art historian, would often tell me in childhood that art is usually autobiographical. The filmmaker Federico Fellini agreed. Take Ernest Hemingway or George Orwell’s volunteering in the Spanish Civil War, which yielded such classic books as For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia. Or consider Steven Spielberg’s films—Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan—and Octavia Butler’s novels, The Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. In much the same way, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s art is highly autobiographical. The count drew from personal and family experiences to create most of his best-known artworks, from the “Sevastopol Sketches” to The Cossacks, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” and Hadji Murat, among others. So when I write that queerness permeates Tolstoyan art, I am also suggesting that this artistic queerness represents autobiographical disclosure, as I engage in a kind of self-analysis—to see how queerness influences my own life, along with Tolstoy’s biography and artworks, plus the human condition.

Initially, I had simply planned to analyze Tolstoy’s artistic critique of war and militarism, which is realistic, humanistic, and anti-authoritarian, while considering some of the implications for left-wing internationalism today, especially in light of the resurgence of fascism and neo-Stalinism. But I was struck in my readings by the palpable homoeroticism that pervades Tolstoyan art, so I refocused the project into a psychoanalytical examination of the links between the artist’s erotic dissidence and his anarchist politics: in other words, of his queer anarchism.

Besides Tolstoy’s writings and biographies, this journey led me to research, among others, Bruce Perry’s findings about Malcolm X’s youthful gay relationships, Edward Carpenter’s progressive studies of homosexuality, Russian and Ukrainian LGBTQ history, the lesbian attractions that Tolstoy’s wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya includes in her own art, the lesbian and bisexual women’s participation in the Easter Rising of 1916, comrade-love in the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution, and what the late Chris Chitty describes as the “ancient association of same-sex eroticism with the hatred of tyranny,” which dates back at least to classical Greece.

With time, I noticed that intimate emotional bonds with other men were constants in Tolstoy’s “psychogeography,” both in terms of his life and his imagination, as expressed artistically. Besides including a brief review, in Perry’s style, of the subject’s homoerotic life, Queer Tolstoy features Freudian, Frommian, and Marcusean lenses, in the sense that I apply Sigmund Freud’s concepts of infantile sexuality, universal bisexuality, and polymorphous perversity; Erich Fromm’s critique of necrophilia and authoritarianism and simultaneous promotion of meaning and freedom; and Herbert Marcuse’s championing of Eros, or the life drive, to interpret Tolstoy’s life and art within its political and historical context.

Of these concepts, let me briefly explain Freud’s ideas about universal bisexuality and polymorphous perversity. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, hypothesized that we are all bisexual, in the sense of both integrating male and female elements, and having pansexual attractions. (By the way, Charles Darwin would appear to agree with the former point, considering his view that “every man & woman is hermaphrodite.”) In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud proposes that human beings are sexual from birth, and that our libido (or sex-drive) expresses itself in “polymorphous-perverse” ways. I for one believe that our attachments and attractions manifest in wide-ranging, kaleidoscopic, and, yes, polymorphous fashion. So, while Freud and many of his followers were not necessarily friendly with the LGBTQ community—two of the notable exceptions here being Marcuse and the anarchist psychiatrist Otto Gross—I believe that some Freudian concepts can still be useful to us.

Moreover, by writing Queer Tolstoy, I sought to resist the heterosexist presumption that LGBTQ people and experience should remain invisible, together with the Russian State’s aggressive homonegativity. This is despite its official boosting and opportunistic use of some of Tolstoy’s lyricism, regardless of his excommunication by Russian Orthodox Church. President Vladimir Putin’s queerphobia is crystallized in the criminalization of “non-traditional” sexual relations and gender presentations—previously limited to minors, but now extended to the entire population. The Russian LGBT Network has been officially branded a “foreign agent.” This is not to mention genocidal crimes committed against the LGBTQ community in Chechnya, under Putin’s satrap Ramzan Kadyrov.

I struggle with the word queer, with its history as a pejorative, but preserving the word queer seems crucial in counter balancing the weaponization of terms like traditional family values, and other, related terms that used to suppress sensuality, art, love, and new ways of being. Tell me about your reaction to the term queer? Why do you think it is fitting word to describe Tolstoy?

I hear that concern, although I suspect that there might be a generational gap here. A recent letter to the editors of the Guardian, apparently written by a 55-year old gay man, requested that the paper not use the “Q-word” because he found it “insulting and derogatory.” By contrast, the queer identity resonates more among younger people from the LGBTQ community, of which I am a part.

In the book, I use “queer” to refer both to “sexual deviance and freely chosen LGBTQ+ desire and experience,” as well as the intersection of LGBT experience and political radicalism. Going back to Freud and Marcuse, I believe “queerness” to be a synonym for “polymorphous perversity” and Eros. Along these lines, I emphasize the “lesbian continuum” hypothesized by Adrienne Rich, together with Freud’s ideas about a parallel gay continuum tying together the homosocial, homophilic, and homosexual worlds, while remaining critical of the toxic masculinity often exhibited by gay, bisexual, and straight men—Tolstoy not excluded!

As you rightly pointed out in your introductory comments, Joe, Tolstoy was not homosexual per se. By no means do I mean to erase his long marriage with Sofia Andreevna, who gave birth to thirteen of their children, much less his sexual relationships with other women. If I had to classify the count, I would say he was bisexual (in keeping, indeed, with Freudian theory). With this in mind, plus considering his dikost—a Russian word which means “daring,” “wildness,” or “iconoclasm”—I thought the title Queer Tolstoy was fitting.

In the introduction to my book, which is now available open-access, I briefly review nineteen same-sex relationships that I could glean from Tolstoy’s homoerotic biography. These include bonds with the Chechen Sado Miserbiyev, the revolutionary Russian youth Vasily Alexeev, the Ukrainian Jewish peasant Itzhak Feinermann, the Russo-Ukrainian composer Peter Tchaikovsky, the Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the self-aggrandizing Tolstoyan proprietor Vladimir Chertkov, among others. Lev Nikolaevich himself admits to eight other gay attachments early on in his diaries. Considering the artist’s hyper-sexual impulses, these likely only represent the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” for Tolstoy’s same-sex experiences.

Nina Nikitina, senior researcher at Yasnaya Polyana, writes that Tolstoy “read love signs all the time and was in their power.” He certainly sought love as mutual recognition and connection, as is emphasized by humanistic psychoanalysts like Jessica Benjamin. Such themes feature especially in War and Peace, a canvas on which Tolstoy’s alter egos discover spontaneous same-sex attractions on the battlefields and behind the front lines as comrades collectively resisting Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s onslaught. These include platonic, deeply felt lesbian and gay bonds between Princess Marya Bolkonskaya and Julie Karagina on the one hand, and between Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Captain Tushin on the other. Plus, as during World War I, soldiers will fraternize homoerotically and agree to cease-fires across the lines of control.

Tolstoy is known for bringing the realities of war and imperialism home to Russians. He was critical of the idea of the strong man, the leader who will bring his people glory. This seems to be very fitting, given the current tragedy of Ukraine and the despotism of Putin. What would Tolstoy say today about the current situation?

As Piro Subrat explains in Invertidos y Rompepatrias (2019), a history of the Spanish LGBTQ community, Tolstoy supported the mission of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which was founded by the German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1897. This committee, the first LGBT rights organization in history, sought to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which was used to criminalize male homosexuality from 1871 to 1994. In this light, Tolstoy would likely have been horrified by Putin’s war on the queer community, which has resonated with Republicans in the US.

Both of these conservative-authoritarian power-groups are dehumanizing and inciting violence against us, with the Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles even calling at this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) for trans* people to be “eradicated from public life entirely.” The state of Tennessee has now criminalized drag. Meanwhile, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has sought to cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as retribution for the LGBTQ pride marches the country has hosted—just as Putin’s forces have wielded wanton sexual violence against the LGBT+ community in occupied Ukraine. I believe that Lev Nikolaevich would have spoken out against such queerphobic hatred and ultra-violence.

Although some of his descendants, like the “United Russia” representative Pëtr Tolstoy or Putin’s cultural adviser Vladimir Tolstoy are undoubtedly reactionaries, Lev Nikolaevich, were he alive today, would most likely be condemning Russia’s war on Ukraine and standing in solidarity with Ukrainian defenders and Russian protesters. Concretely, I imagine that he would also be involved with journalistic efforts to uncover the brutal realities of the war, in defiance of State media narratives, official censorship, and Putin’s megalomania, and that he would support war resistance, such as the sabotage taken up by the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK), plus conscientious objection and desertion from the battlefield. He might have highlighted the disproportionate utilization of soldiers from Russia’s ethnic and indigenous communities as cannon fodder, or circulated news about all the land mines planted by the invaders in Ukraine’s agricultural fields. Like his great grand-daughter Maria Albertini, he would likely be involved in directly supporting Ukrainian refugees.

You may have seen that Putin’s regime has cynically used Tolstoy’s face to adorn a high fence set up around the Mariupol Drama Theatre in occupied Ukraine. This was the site of a horrific massacre perpetrated last March by the invading Russians. Up to six hundred Ukrainian civilians were killed as they took shelter there from the ruthless assault. The same month, in Mariupol, a Russian airstrike destroyed the Arkhip Kuindzhi Art Museum, which had hosted paintings by this renowned artist, born in the same city. (His “Rainbow” painting is included in my book.) Needless to say, Tolstoy, who inspired the Revolution so despised by Putin, and who remains excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church, would not conceivably have consented to such use of his image.

Considering the fate of Alexei Navalny, the main leader of the anti-Putin opposition, whose views are much more conservative than Tolstoy’s, and who is currently a political prisoner in a maximum-security facility outside Moscow (as Daniel Roher, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary about his poisoning, reminds us), Tolstoy probably would have been imprisoned or assassinated under Putin’s regime—as the critic Boris Nemstov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, among many others, have been. Indeed, as I discuss in the book, Tolstoy very nearly was imprisoned and executed when the translation of an openly anarchist essay of his appeared in the English press in 1891. It was really only thanks to the intervention of his high-ranking cousin, courtier Alexandrine Tolstaya, that Lev Nikolaevich survived this incident.

It is crucial that Ukraine win this war against Russia, and liberate its occupied territories. As the Russian Socialist Movement points out, “Russian history is replete with examples of military setbacks abroad that have led to major change at home.” Tsar Nicholas I’s death from stress and/or suicide in 1855 as his Empire suffered setbacks in the Crimean War brought Alexander II’s formal abolition of serfdom closer, just as it opened up new possibilities for radical struggle from below. During World War I, Russian casualties, poor morale, and mass-desertion (blamed, in part, on Tolstoy’s ideas) contributed to the coming of the Revolution. Rather than continue to blackmail the world with nuclear weapons and mobilize lies about “Ukrainian Nazis” to rationalize his atrocities, Putin must be thoroughly defeated on the battlefield, so that his regime falls, too.

In his life and his works, Tolstoy points to history not being steered by leaders or great men, but by the people. His critical view on the idealization of the “strong man,” the leader who will bring his people glory, again has parallels to what we are witnessing today with Putin in Russia and the U.S. In contrast, he put his faith in “the People.”

Yes, that’s right. As he describes in A Confession (1882), it was the common people’s faith that saved him from taking his life during the spiritual crisis he experienced at the end of the 1870’s, after finishing Anna Karenina. When he was younger, as well, peasant women saved him from drowning in the Volga River, while his wet nurse was a serf woman named Avdotia Ziabreva. In reality, just before he passed away, Tolstoy was asking about the peasants.

In the book, I describe Tolstoy as a champion of anarcho-Populism, or the anarchist current of Narodnichestvo (also translated as Narodism). This was a revolutionary anti-Tsarist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that envisioned an agrarian-socialist future for Russia. Besides Tolstoy, its main proponents were Herzen, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, and Lavrov. (This was before Plekhanov and Lenin introduced Marxism to the Empire.) Some forerunners of anarcho-Populism included “men of 1812” like Tolstoy’s distant cousin, General Sergei Volkonsky. These “men of 1812” were veteran officers from the 1812 war against Napoleon. Known as a “peasant prince,” Volkonsky was exiled with his wife Marya to Siberian exile for three decades for spearheading the Decembrist conspiracy to overthrow Tsarism in 1825. This man, whose life was spared (in contrast to other Decembrist leaders) only owing to his family’s great prestige—specifically, his mother’s intercession—served as the model on which Tolstoy based Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace. (As a side note, the support of Bakunin’s mother was crucial in convincing Tsar Alexander II to commute the rebel’s prison term to Siberian exile, thus facilitating his escape from the Empire.)

In contrast to direction by “great men,” like the Romanov Tsars, Bonaparte, Trump, or Putin, Tolstoy proposes that history is built from below through the collective action of the People. In War and Peace, he presents several examples of collective resistance to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia which have present-day echoes. These include the need to support Ukraine’s legitimate self-defense against the Russian onslaught; the imperative of unionizing and socializing the global economy; and the necessity of a worldwide transition to wind, water, and solar energy (WWS).

It’s interesting, reconciling Tolstoy’s heroization of the collective resistance of the Russian people to expel Napoleon with his transition to advocate of non resistance. And not just any advocate, but an influencer of peaceful resistance of historic proportions…

You’re right. It is quite the contradiction. Tolstoy espoused pacifism in the wake of his ‘conversion’ to rationalist Christianity after suffering a crisis of depression and suicidality in the 1870’s—mirroring the decline of the radical anti-Tsarist movement under Alexander II. Non-resistance follows from Jesus’ command, made during the Sermon on the Mount, to “resist not the evildoer” (Matthew 5:39). While this directive appears to demand servility and passivity, and thus reproduce abusive dynamics, the Unitarian Universalist Adin Ballou interpreted it as meaning that “we are not to resist evil with evil,” but “[e]vil is to be resisted by all just means.” Gandhi, who corresponded with Tolstoy at the end of his life about this very concept (and founded the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa in 1910), likewise promoted civil disobedience as non-violent resistance to abuse, or Satyagraha, in the struggle against British imperialism in India. In turn, Martin Luther King, Jr., preached Gandhian and Tolstoyan non-cooperation in his dream for the non-violent, anti-racist transformation of U.S. society.

Still, the theory of non-resistance has clear limits. If one takes the injunction not to “resist the evildoer” literally, then the Ukrainians would have to surrender to Putin; the Communards of Paris, the Kronstadt sailors, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Haitians, Syrians, and Palestinians should not have risen up; and workers and minorities should not complain or organize—but simply grin and bear everything. This is a self-defeating current in Tolstoy’s thought that amounts to a “betrayal of the cause of the oppressed,” in the words of the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, and “an enclosure of his own position,” as my comrade Shon Meckfessel writes. Indeed, this tension may speak to Tolstoy’s war trauma and fragmented sense of identity. After all, throughout his life, he resisted abuse, and admired and enshrined resistance to authority.

As you put aptly in your book, “Alienation is universal under capitalism.” I’m all too familiar with the feelings of alienation, and while Tolstoy wasn’t under modern capitalism’s yoke per se, he lived under a system of extreme disparity and social restriction. In reaction to this, his life appeared to be a journey of seeking a better way, a kingdom of God here on earth. As such, he turned to an interesting form of spiritualism. Could you talk more about that?

Yes, of course. While fighting at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, Tolstoy experienced an epiphany just after the death of Tsar Nicholas. He then proposed the “stupendous idea” of founding a new religion based on the actual teachings of Jesus the Nazarene, rather than established church dogmas or mysticism. This dream-state expressed the artist’s therapeutic desire to contest the death-dealing authority of Church and State by promoting union. It is reproduced in War and Peace during Prince Andrei’s trance, as he lies injured at the battle of Austerlitz, and affirms the utopian desire for peace, while experiencing a psychedelic “queerpiphany.” Tolstoy’s passionate engagement with Christianity is based in the evangelical message of the Gospels, not church rituals. His was a non-orthodox Christianity: Tolstoy’s “new translation” of the Gospels (1881) ends with Jesus’ crucifixion at Golgotha and excludes most mentions of miracles, including above all the resurrection.

Although Tolstoy became more openly didactic after his spiritual crisis, his Christian anarchism can also be gleaned from his earlier writings, including War and Peace. In this work, Pierre Bezukhov, another Tolstoyan alter ego, becomes a Freemason after separating from his first wife, Hélène. By introducing this radical homosocial association, which anticipates Pierre’s joining the Decembrists at the book’s end, Tolstoy presents an interpretation of Christianity “freed from the bonds of State and church, a teaching of equality, brotherhood, and love.” Along these lines, the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin admired Freemasonry for advancing self-organization in Russia, while the Tsars feared precisely the freethinking and autonomy it stimulated.

In middle age, the count took up vegetarianism, renounced hunting, adopted strict pacifism, and condemned the libido—regardless of how unhappy this latter position would leave his wife Sofia Andreevna. Such ascetic changes may have resulted from Tolstoy’s encounters with death-anxiety as he aged; an intensification of underlying bipolar depression; a queer dissatisfaction with straight conventions; and/or the artist’s life-long attempt to observe his principles and so prefigure the Kingdom of God. While he did not succeed in meeting his goal of living simply and peacefully in an egalitarian community, much less of redistributing his lands and estates, these contradictions drove the tragic flight of this “proletarian lord” in October 1910.

You delve deeply into philosophy and psychology in Queer Tolstoy, as you have done in your other works, including in your previous work on Marcuse, Eros and Revolution. What gravitates you to these fields? And further, how can we connect Tolstoy’s philosophy to our own lives?

Like Lev Nikolaevich, I am a seeker: a Resident and Stranger. In my writings, I challenge the divisions that are often drawn between mind and body, idealism and materialism, and psychiatry and medicine. As Marcuse, Gross, and Tolstoy knew, these realms are actually connected.

I’m especially fascinated by Tolstoy as a “forerunner” of the Russian (and Mexican) Revolutions, the tragic experience of his followers in the Soviet Union (which confirms the counter-revolutionary nature of Leninism and Stalinism), and the ongoing relevance of Tolstoyan radicalism. I’m intrigued by the artist’s critiques of violence, hierarchy, and despotism; his work in popular education and famine relief; his engagements with Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism; his support for erotic, moral, and political self-determination; his existential emphasis on creating meaning in the face of death; his queerness (of course); and his inspiration of plant-based, pacifist communes guided by ideals of “peaceful revolution” and “universal brotherhood.”

Still, we must learn from Tolstoy’s mistakes: above all, his gross sexism, which is consistent with the toxic masculinity that is prevalent today in much of the gay community and beyond; his ambivalence sometimes expressed, particularly in War and Peace, about White-Russian chauvinism; his masochistic theory of non-resistance, which advises against resisting abuse; and, ironically, his gay timidity—notwithstanding the constraints imposed by Tsarism. The fates of Prince Andrei and Captain Tushin, and Princess Marya and Julie Karagina, reflect his ambivalence over the libido and queer desire. As Freud knew, this shyness only perpetuated his unhappiness!

Politically speaking, there are a myriad of ways that we can connect Tolstoy’s philosophy to the present day. In contrast to Pushkin and Lermontov’s poetry, Tolstoy’s writings about Transcaucasia—including “The Raid,” The Cossacks, Hadji Murat—are generally humanistic, internationalist, and critical of Tsarist regional expansionism. They can be read to highlight the historical continuum of White-Russian violence, which has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chechens since the collapse of the Soviet Union over 30 years ago. In this vein, we must never forget that Tsarist imperialism annihilated the vast majority of the Circassian people, otherwise known as Adyghes, in the Caucasus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this light, we should channel Tolstoyan anti-war realism (but not dogmatic pacifism) to reject the left-right alliance that is converging against Ukraine. Trump, DeSantis, Fox News hosts, and MAGA extremists in the House all proclaim the fascist slogan “America First” in calling for Ukraine to be cut off, while neo-Stalinists and pseudo-anti-imperialists demand that Ukraine surrender to Russia.

History shows that Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War—which was achieved with the support of Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin’s betrayals, and the non-intervention policy of the Western democracies—set the stage for World War II. In much the same way, Putin’s “anti-humanitarian intervention” in 2015 to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship from being swept away by the Syrian Revolution prepared the ground for the ongoing full-scale attack on Ukraine. Given the pressing need to stop Putin, I welcome his recent indictment by the International Criminal Court.

We chose the title “seeking the anarchism of love” as the title of our discussion, so I thought it fitting to pull this quote from War and Peace:

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand. I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”

But what about the anarchism of love? is love integral to anarchism? And is true love anarchic?

Certainly, love, connection, and attachment are integral to anarchism, understood as anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, anarcha-feminism, and Christian anarchism.

Throughout his life, beyond infancy, Lev Nikolaevich missed his mother, Princess Marya Volkonskaya, who passed away at the young age of thirty-nine. Still, he often yearned for her love, even as an old man, and it is evident how much her pro-social personality marked him. One of War and Peace’s main protagonists is based on her, and what is more, the real-life Marya’s unfinished family novel, Russian Pamela, deeply influenced the themes and characters Tolstoy features in his own prose poem. Akin to the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Princess Marya—who received a classical education at Yasnaya Polyana, thanks to her progressive father—was an “unlikely revolutionary.”

In turn, like Leonardo da Vinci, whose mother may have been, according to new research, a trafficked Circassian, Tolstoy identified with his mother and aunts, together with traditionally “feminine” virtues like care and compassion. Plus, as a cadet in the Caucasus, Tolstoy was intensely attracted to the “God of Love and Reason” that he discovered among the natural beauty there, and the social and sexual freedom practiced by his Cossack hosts, at least within their in-group. He was certainly repelled by Cossack violence against the Muslim Chechens. Your apt quote from War and Peace, which appears just after Prince Andrei’s death due to injuries sustained at the battle of Borodino, frames love in Marcusean terms as Eros, eternally struggling against archaic forces and Thanatos (or the death drive).

Many times in War and Peace, we encounter scenes that recall bell hooks’ concept of the anarchism of love, whereby arousal and attachment contest hierarchy and convention, challenge abuse, and tear down walls. Hence, the spontaneous comrade-love that develops on the battlefield between Prince Andrei and Tushin; Pierre’s homoerotic bonds with his Freemason and peasant mentors and serf-soldiers at Borodino; plus Natasha Rostova’s prayer for “one community, without distinction of class, without enmity, united by brotherly love.” Likewise, if we think of Jessica Benjamin’s idea of love as mutual recognition, we can read War and Peace as an allegorical journey of transition and transformation—from the despotism and violence encoded by Tsarism and Bonapartism (reminiscent of biblical captivity in Egypt and Babylon), to a better future characterized by equality, peace, and freedom (that is to say, the Kingdom of God).

Such insurgent passions reverberated in the Russian Revolution, especially in the nearly 100 Tolstoyan communes and cooperatives founded soon after the fall of the Romanov dynasty, as well as in the Mexican Revolution, with the rebels Praxedis Guerrero, Ricardo Flores Magón, and General Emiliano Zapata looking to the Russian anarchist sage for inspiration.

Lastly, in the 1970’s, hippies from the Soviet counterculture rediscovered Tolstoy as a spiritual guide for their anti-authoritarian journeys and pilgrimages, experiments in pacifism and free love, and protests against the Soviet regime.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to donate what you can to Solidarity Collectives.

Links

Queer Tolstoy

Open-access introduction (chapter 2)

YouTube recording

Leo Tolstoy archive (English translations)

Bureau of General Services–Queer Division

Michael Denner, “The ‘proletarian lord’: Leo Tolstoy’s image during the Russian revolutionary period” (2010). doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511676246.012

Irina Gordeeva, “Tolstoyism in the Late-Socialist Cultural Underground: Soviet Youth in Search of Religion, Individual Autonomy and Nonviolence in the 1970s–1980s” (2017)

—, “The Evolution of Tolstoyan Pacifism in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1900–1937” (2018)

Michael Kazin, “Reject the Left-Right Alliance Against Ukraine” (2023)

Mark Mola, “The Circassian Genocide” (2016).

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1939

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

On the Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón

“He died for Anarchy”

Part I of II

First published on Counterpunch, 27 February 2015

Professor Lomnitz, I am most grateful to you for being so kind as to discuss your new collective biography The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014) with me. I wish also to thank my friend Allen Kim for bringing my attention to this marvelous work, which provides an intimate and far-reaching examination of the life of the renowned Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) and of those closest to him—principally, his brothers Jesús (elder) and Enrique (junior), Librado Rivera, and Práxedis G. Guerrero, all of whom were associates of the Junta Organizadora of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). As a result of his lifelong commitment to social revolution, Ricardo was a political prisoner for much of his life: he spent over a fifth of his lifespan incarcerated, in fact. He died in November 1922 after two years’ imprisonment in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas for having called on his fellow Mexicans to take up arms against both white-supremacists in Texas and Venustiano Carranza’s reactionary army. The life of Magón, like those of his comrades, then, was full of Eros and Thanatos, or revolution and repression.

First things first: please speak to the title you chose for your work, if you would. Do you mean to refer to the processional “return” of Magón’s physical body to Mexico City in the weeks after his death in Leavenworth Prison, or do you perhaps mean to suggest that a resurgence or regeneration of the spirit of the Mexican Liberal Party’s (PLM) anarchist-communist alternative is taking place in our own day, like a Shakespearean or Hegelian apparition—le revenant (“the ghost,” or literally “the returning”) discussed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx?¹

I would like to begin by thanking you for having taken the work and trouble to read The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón. The work of readers is critical and precious, and never easy. So thank you, especially for that.

The title is, as you imply, freighted with meaning. It does, in the first instance, refer to the return of Ricardo to Mexico (as a corpse), and thus implicitly raises the question of the significance of his exile: why did Ricardo return as a (venerated) corpse? Why the disjoint between physical absence and spiritual presence in Mexico? At that level, the title is a nod to the central historical question in the book, which is the relationship between ideology and exile in the Mexican Revolution.

But there is also a second aspect, one you summarized in your question better than I could. And this is the currency of the movement’s concern with mutual aid as both political project and as a biological imperative. Because of this currency—because forms of communistic organization and anarchy are today on the horizon of possibility—the figure of Ricardo has that phantasmic power that you refer to. Yes, of a Shakespearean apparition.

The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón is an important study of the specifically transnational dimensions of the Mexican Revolution—a point you stress explicitly in the introduction to the book, where you point to the revolutionary organizational efforts of the anarchists in the PLM’s Junta Organizadora and their fellow socialists, both Mexican and U.S., as amounting to the “first major grassroots Mexican-American solidarity network.” You describe this history as “the story of a transnational revolutionary network that thought of itself collectively as the servant of an ideal [that] could be told in the mold of Don Quijote—the story of a group of men and women who read books and acted on them […]. Their acts were seen as wild. Like Don Quijote, they seemed to be out of place—utopian—or more precisely, out of time.” Please explain how this unique cast of characters was wild, quixotic, and utopian.

Their acts were seen as wild, as I said, in large part because they were. There is in this milieu an element of sexual revolution and of familial transformation that was wild, for example. This manifests itself in different ways. Elizabeth Trowbridge, a wealthy Bostonian, married Manuel Sarabia, an imprisoned Mexican revoltoso, not before having paid his bail, and she then convinced him to jump bail and flee with her to England in order to escape conviction. Ricardo Flores Magón lived in sin with María Brousse and regarded her daughter as his. Enrique Flores Magón wrote pieces about the ignominy of husbands brutalizing and commanding their wives. Emma Goldman, of course, was a great advocate of birth control, and this was also a position supported explicitly by Enrique and Ricardo in Regeneración. Naturally, too, the members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano were not allowed to marry by the Church. In the United States, many of the Mexican radicals created homes that were composite dwellings, that included both kin and non-kin. So there was also some “wildness” there—the dwelling that was occupied by Enrique and Ricardo and their families, along with a number of other families, outside of Los Angeles can be appropriately described as a commune, and indeed some of the group’s old U.S. and European allies, like socialist Job Harriman, for instance, created agricultural communes in the United States. In addition to this intimate level of “wildness,” there was of course also the political level of wildness—clandestinity, propaganda work, striking, supporting armed revolt, and so on.

I don’t believe that this group saw itself as utopian—they believed that there were real and very immediate possibilities for their ideas, especially once the Mexican Revolution began, during World War I, and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This sense of immanent possibilities declined later. Ricardo did not live that moment, but Enrique certainly did. By the 1940s and 50s, Enrique saw their old ideas as not attainable in the present.

Of course, many contemporaries did believe that the anarchist ideas were utopian. This included some prominent members of the Mexican Liberal Party, and even former members of the Junta. Militants like Juan Sarabia and Antonio Villarreal, who participated actively in the Mexican Revolution, but believed in a kind of gradualism, and in participation in Mexican democratic politics. So the question of whether their strategy was utopian or attainable was very much a matter of debate.

As for being quixotic, this too is complex. Certainly everyone who labels this group “precursors of the Mexican Revolution” thinks of them as quixotic, in the sense of anachronistic—prior to their time, fighting a fight that could not yet be won. This, of course, was not this group’s own sense. But there was another way in which its members might well have seen themselves as quixotic: they spent their lives reading, and acted on what they read. They were not passive readers. Moreover, they invested everything, gave everything up, for the world that they were imagining and creating. In this sense, I think that many of these militants would willingly have identified with Quijote.

You observe that none of the principal U.S. militants affiliated with the “Mexican Cause” were attracted or connected to Mexico—its people, history, or politics—in any special way before coalescing in 1908 to support the PLM’s struggle to overthrow Porfirio Díaz, and that none of them even knew Spanish before that time! Considering the PLM’s denunciations in Regeneración of the outright slavery instituted and overseen by the Porfiriato together with the feminist, proletarian, Christian, and cosmopolitan-internationalist dimensions that would seem to have contributed to the Norteños’ collaboration with the cause—including that of the International Workers of the World (IWW), Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman—would you say their participation in the struggle to have reflected a particular manifestation of the universal struggle for justice?

I certainly would say that, and all of them would have said it, too. Probably without a single exception.

As you explain, one key parallel the PLM group and U.S. supporters of the “Mexican Cause” were wont to draw was between Díaz and the ossified Russian autocracy, headed by the Romanov Tsar Nicholas II. One of the most momentous such parallels came to light through John Kenneth Turner’s investigation of Mexico’s “tropical Siberia,” the Yucatán Peninsula, where hundreds of thousands of Mayas, Yaquis, and Koreans were enslaved. Turner’s exposé, first published as two reports in American Magazine in 1909 and thereafter as Barbarous Mexico (1910), resonated importantly with U.S. audiences, as it illuminated, in your words, “America’s reactionary slaving tradition pushing yet farther south under the shadowy cover of a dictatorship that [the U.S. government and capital] enthusiastically supported” while also bringing to light yet another manifestation of the extermination of Native America—another Trail of Tears, as seen in the lamentable fate of the deported, displaced, and massacred Yaquis. To be honest, when reading this chapter of the text, “The People Were the Sacrifice,” I was reminded of Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2000). Could you speak to the significance of Turner’s work in terms of changing international public opinion about Mexico amidst the hegemonic narrative then advanced by media outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times—owned at that time by William Randolph Hearst and Harrison Gray Otis, respectively, who in turn were the respective beneficiaries of two and one-half million acres of land in Chihuahua and Baja California which Díaz had sold them—toward an analysis that affirmed the Porfiriato as effectively facilitating a “capitalist slave colony”?

Porfirio Díaz had really excellent press in the United States. In part, this was due to the undeniable success of the early years of his dictatorship, when Díaz cobbled together a coalition that allowed the Mexican federal government to quash highway banditry, pay its foreign debt, succeed in importing massive capital, build railways, and consolidate a national market. In part this was due to the incredible influx of U.S. foreign direct investment into Mexico during his long mandate. Historian John Hart has documented that Mexico absorbed more than 60% of the US’s investments abroad, so to defend Díaz was to defend American investments. But there was also a deliberate and very active courting of opinion by Díaz, including, as you say, by giving exceedingly juicy concessions to a couple of prominent moguls: Hearst and Otis.

Changing U.S. opinion on Díaz and Mexico was a pretty tall order. Some of that transformation was beginning to happen thanks to the work of Mexicans in the United States including the members of the PLM, but not only them. Some of the transformation was happening because of Americans’ own sentiments regarding justice and injustice in Mexico—for example, there was some turn of opinion in favor of the Yaqui Indians in Arizona border towns. But John Kenneth Turner deserves a lot of credit for his work—a lot!

First of all, John was able to get his pieces into the mainstream press—the muckraking American Magazine—rather than in the socialist press, which had quite large runs in those days, but to some degree implied preaching to the choir. He was able to do this because he focused so clearly and poignantly on the problem of slavery, and on the extermination of the Indians. And because he was able to do this through first-hand, direct reporting. These are major accomplishments. He had others, too, but this was key to his role in making a scandal out of Mexico.

In discussing the family background of the Flores Magón brothers, you relate how Enrique in his memoir attempts to portray his ancestral paternal line of Aztec nobles as instituting a form of “primitive communism” among the Mazatec-speaking indigenous peasants of Oaxaca they had conquered as a means of alleviating his anxiety over hailing from relative class privilege. This point notwithstanding, it does not seem that Teodoro Flores was as wealthy as Práxedis’ family of origin, for example, considering Ricardo’s teenage compulsion to enter the workforce as a domestic servant in the early 1890’s, following Teodoro’s death and Jesús’ imprisonment for writing articles critical of the Porfiriato. You also show that Enrique papers over his father’s closeness with Díaz and the latter’s participation—indeed!—in the 1876 “Tuxtepec Revolution” which installed Díaz as dictator, preferring instead to recall Teodoro’s previous military service in defense of Mexican sovereignty and Liberalism, as embodied in Benito Juárez’s person and the 1857 Constitution, against the imperialist French invasion forces and their reactionary Mexican affiliates, who avenged Flores’ heroic resistance by murdering his father, mother-in-law, and wife in a cowardly attack on the family ranch in 1865. To what degree do you see Enrique’s selective memory as a normal expression of socio-psychological repression within families—one that is accentuated in this case, to accord with the revolutionism of the Flores Magón brothers? A similar example—if more disturbing for its opportunism—is seen in the credit Enrique takes in his memoirs for commanding the PLM’s 1908 revolt, which in point of fact was led by Práxedis and Francisco Manrique, with Enrique being nowhere remotely near the site of battle.

A complicated question. The question of false Aztec genealogy was not unusual among these militants, and not peculiar to Enrique. Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara also had it, for instance, and I think that it is related to Mexican self-narration in the United States, which tended to take a radically Indianist turn, because American opinion agreed that Spaniards were disgusting and tended to see the Indians as noble. In the case of the Flores Magón brothers, there was also some impetus from within Mexico to present their father as member of an indigenous elite, rather than as an hacendado. As you say, Teodoro was not an hacendado in the way that Práxedis Guerrero or Francisco Manríque’s parents had been.

The rest of the question, though, pertains to the problem of memory within Mexico, and after the Revolution. Enrique survived most of his main peers, and he can be said to have been swallowed by the Revolutionary State and its logic. In the 1930s he was actively involved in shaping an organization of “Precursors of the Mexican Revolution” that received government pensions for services rendered, and he and his wife Teresa Arteaga were amongst those charged with certifying and authenticating who was and who was not a precursor. In the 1940s Enrique wrote weekly for El Nacional, telling the tales of that revolutionary group.

In a context of this kind, the contradictions of the history of the revolution, of the history of the PLM, and of their own family history were not easy to admit to. His break with Ricardo, for instance, was virtually impossible to admit, let alone to explain to a general Mexican audience. So that part of Enrique’s distortions are not simply the typical family distortion. Finally, Enrique in his later years was very prone to somewhat wild story-telling. As I show in the book, though, there was method to his madness.

With reference to Ricardo’s youthful “bohemian” period in Mexico City, you present historian José Valadés’ stress on the importance of this life-stage, when Magón came to know “the reality in which the Mexican people lived”: that “there was no peace, light, or health for the poor.” As Ricardo would write later, “only [ze] who suffers can understand the suffering of others.” Would you say there is a direct line between the experiences Ricardo had during his bohemian phase and the public declaration he would make at the First Liberal Congress in San Luis Potosí (February 1901)—the statement which would make him so famous, and that would echo the definitive shift made by the editors of Regeneración from “independent juridical journalism” to “combative journalism” in late 1900—that “the Diaz administration is a den of thieves”?

Although that portion of the family history is the most difficult to reconstruct—during the 1890s, I mean—I do have the impression that it was formative, as José Valadés claimed. Valadés emphasizes the role that sexual initiation with prostitutes and in the low-class dives that the students frequented had in Ricardo. According to Valadés, Ricardo got some sort of venereal disease then, and it was for this reason that he was unable later to have children. He also believes that intimate knowledge of the miserable lives of Mexico’s prostitutes and their families was important for Ricardo’s political sensibility and education. Valadés had direct conversations with Ricardo’s contemporaries that were not available to me, and I tend to believe his account. If anything, Valadés falls a bit short in his analysis of the influence of the bohemian period on the early Regeneración, for what is obvious is that during that decade, these young men actively fashioned themselves not only after French Revolutionaries, but also after Mexican Liberals. To my mind, Ricardo’s “The Díaz administration is a den of thieves!”, repeated thrice in San Luis Potosí, was a re-enactment of Ignacio Ramírez’s 1836 “God does not exist” (also repeated thrice, in Toluca). The self-fashioning and theatrics of the 1900-01 effervescence was crafted in the Bohemian period.

Pathos certainly grips the story you relate of how Doña Margarita Magón died while her sons Ricardo and Jesús were incarcerated in Belem Prison in Mexico City (1901-2) on the charge of libel for factual claims they had made in Regeneración. In their reports on her death, as you relate, the media of the time claimed Margarita’s anguish over her sons’ ordeal to have precipitated her end—much in the way that Anticleia of The Odyssey expresses that it was “only my loneliness and the force of my affection for you, dear Odysseus, that took my own life away.” In your estimation, how did the reactions of the three brothers differ to this tragedy—the sacrifice “of their most sacred relationship […] for political life,” one which echoed the misfortune visited on Teodoro for his military service opposing the French invaders—especially in the case of Ricardo?

This is a crucial question for understanding the decisions, and some of the psychological make-up, of the three brothers, which is an issue that concerns me in the book because I find that one tends to impute motivations on actors, regardless of whether or not one claims to have an interest in their psychology. So it’s best to make one’s views on motivations more, rather than less, explicit, if only for the purpose of facilitating debate and the development of alternative views.

Briefly, then, my sense is that Margarita’s death led the eldest of the brothers, Jesús, to abandon the alternative of clandestine politics and any political practice that would land him in jail again. For Jesús, Margarita’s death was in some regards a replay, since Jesús was the first of the brothers to have landed in prison, and the first time that this had happened to him was but four days after Teodoro, the boys’ father, had died. Jesús’s first imprisonment left his mother and his younger brothers unprotected economically—they had to leave their home and change address for lack of resources, and Ricardo briefly took on a job as a servant. After Margarita’s death and Jesús and Ricardo’s release from prison, Jesús married his girlfriend, Clara Wong, worked as a well-established lawyer, and had a prominent political career under both Madero and Victoriano Huerta (as a member of Congress).

Ricardo’s reaction was to continue in the fight to overthrow Díaz to the bitter end. Ricardo came to be known as an ascetic, single-mindedly committed revolutionary amongst his group of friends, and it was this dedication that gained him the leadership of the Junta Organizadora when that group left Mexico in exile. Ricardo never renounced that position. He also never married, and when he did develop an intensely romantic relationship, it was to a woman, María Brousse, who was equally committed to revolution, and who had in fact even volunteered to assassinate a prominent Mexican politician, Enrique Creel, so that Ricardo could be with her and not feel that he was tearing his family asunder.

Finally, Enrique is in some ways the most complex, because of his ambiguous situation. Enrique was not in prison when his mother Margarita died, but, on the contrary, had been in charge of her during her final period, despite his young age. Thus he felt neither the guilt nor the regret of Ricardo or Jesús. However, neither did he benefit from the popular idolization that his brothers got, precise due to their sacrifice. This situation made him oscillate between imitating Jesús’s choices and imitating Ricardo’s. I think that Enrique was a youth that wanted very much to demonstrate that he, too, was capable of any sacrifice—and in fact, later in life, he lost contact with his daughter and son because of an ideological rift with their mother’s father. On the other hand, for some time Enrique harbored the ideal of marriage and return to Mexico. It was the experience of exile, and its practical consequences, that leaned him so decisively in Ricardo’s direction. But after the revolution, I think that he again found a situation that tended more to Jesús’s position.

“The Constitution has died…” (Librado Rivera) On Constitution Day, 4 February 1904, the staff of the radical newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote gathered to commemorate the death of the 1857 Constitution under Porfirio Díaz.

Let us now please turn to discussing the philosophical and ideological precursors of the anarchist alternative advanced by the PLM and Regeneración. You emphasize the thought of Peter Kropotkin, the “Anarchist Prince”—particularly his scientific investigations of mutual aid—as influencing the theory and practice of the Junta Organizadora. As a reflection of this, writing to María Brousse from Leavenworth in 1920, Magón would argue naturalistically along Kropotkinian lines that selfishness “is the outcome of century upon century of individualistic education and training for the masses,” and that the “primordial human instinct of cooperation and mutual aid has been suppressed in favor of an individualistic education.” Práxedis, for his part, favored the foundation in Mexico of a counter-system of rationalist education for children, following the example of the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer.² Additionally, you show that the PLM took from the Jacobin example and the Liberal Mexican political tradition it nominally adhered to a strong sense of anticlericalism and a championing of popular democracy. With reference to the Liberal Constitution of 1857, in point of fact, Librado Rivera wrote that “The Constitution has died…”

Another critical precursor of the resurgent Liberal Mexican movement, of course, was the experiences of the so-called “generation of 1892” to which Magón and the other principal Liberals belong. 1892 was the year in which Díaz “won” his third consecutive reelection, leading to student protests that openly defied the Porfiriato, with one action in May organized by students crying “Death to Centralism!” and “Down with Reelection!” Such youthful militancy was repressed in turn, with dozens arrested and threatened with execution—until Magón and several other young comrades were saved from this fate by an “indignant mob [… that] threatened to attack Mexico City’s Municipal Palace, where we were being held as a result of our demonstration against the dictatorship.” As a telling sidenote, Ricardo discloses that that was his “first experience in the struggle”!

As you explain, moreover, those who gravitated toward the PLM in the early 1900’s openly resisted the technocratic group of “cientificos” (“scientists”) who had been empowered by Díaz’s reelection, and they sought to wield Liberalism against its observed corruption into an institutionalized positivism that was friendly to the Porfiriato. Save for Ricardo, in addition, most of the central figures in the PLM were committed Masons, as you detail. Now, it is known that the Junta did not come out openly as anarchist until the manifesto it released on September 23, 1911, following the military defeat of its Baja California campaign and the emergence of dramatic fissures within the PLM itself, as we shall explore in the second part of our conversation. So how did anarchist thought, Jacobinism, and Mexican Liberalism combine to inspire the most radical group within the PLM: that of the libertarian communists Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, and Práxedis Guerrero? In addition, do you not think that the anarchist and Jacobin influences contradict themselves in terms of political philosophy, particularly in light of the centralized dictatorship instituted by the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror of 1793-4?

This is a very difficult question. Let me give it a try—but only briefly. Mexican Liberalism, anarchism, and Jacobinism all share the anti-clerical element, and that was one important commonality. The sense that religion—I mean organized religion—was a source of repression and backwardness was common to all three strands; in addition, anarchists felt strongly that religious authority served to reinforce capital, the exploitation of women, the State, and was at the root of the false morality of their society. The three strands also shared in their cult of liberty, and in their deep rejection of slavery and servitude. The slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was very important to all three strands, even if it was interpreted differently by each. That is why the Marseillaise was also an anarchist hymn.

Naturally, there were fundamental differences beneath these points in common. Mexican Liberals favored private property and were adamantly against corporate property—not only the corporate property of the Church, but also of indigenous communities, whereas the anarchists were very much in favor of corporate communal property. Jacobins shared with anarchists the belief in unmediated and direct popular sovereignty, but Jacobins believed that sovereignty was materialized in control of the State. So that State terror was in some ways a natural consequence of Jacobinism: they used the State against the backward elements of society. Anarchists believed in unmediated popular sovereignty, but not in the State. They favored direct action—taking the means of production and placing them in communitarian control.

Historically speaking, the Porfiriato is known for the economic “progress” it brought, in terms of the growth of industry, the burgeoning of extractivism, and the “opening up” of the Mexican economy (or its outright selling off), with clear parallels to the present situation, ruled over by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Of course, under Díaz, this economic expansion depended critically on widespread chattel slavery alongside the brutal exploitation of putatively “free” labor, as in the case of the striking workers at the Cananea mine in the Sonoran Desert who were violently suppressed by the Mexican Army in summer 1906, leading the PLM to plan and attempt to execute its first revolutionary uprising shortly thereafter. Would you say that the social alternative favored by Ricardo and his comrades represented a true mirror-opposite to the “dark and satanic Mexico” for which Díaz was responsible, in terms of counterposing an agrarian anarcho-communist vision, à la Lev Tolstoy in a way? It would seem that Ricardo’s stress on a strategy of collective direct action separated him radically from the analysis shared by many of his socialist counterparts, who held against Magón that Mexico was not yet “ready” for communism. Plus, you show us that, while imprisoned in Leavenworth in 1919, Enrique defines a “life worth living” as one consisting of the universally egalitarian distribution “of the comforts and scientific advances of today,” as integrated with the purportedly tranquil lives enjoyed by his indigenous grandparents, “working on their communal lands […] free of the master’s yoke.”

The short answer to your question is yes. A more nuanced response would have to include changes in Ricardo’s position. In 1906, the program that the Junta developed, and to which Ricardo also subscribed, was pretty much that of the socialist group—promoting land reform, political and electoral reform, social and political rights for workers, but not the destruction of the state. By 1910, however, and throughout the Mexican Revolution, Ricardo favored direct action and an anarcho-communist vision.

To close this first part of our conversation, let us shift to considering the “rather peculiar” social conditions you identify as necessary for “imagin[ing]” and “striv[ing] for” the prospect of anarchist revolution advanced by the PLM, which for you is “the most radical revolution that the Enlightenment spawned.” The key factors to which you point are labor mobility, migration, exile, and proletarian internationalism, in addition to living-in-common (which you refer to as the “Liberal Joint Family System,” as evinced for example in the Regeneración offices, which were said to resemble a commune, or one of Thomas More’s “hospitals”), as well as a profoundly passionate love for “the people” (el pueblo) and for comrades in the struggle. This latter dynamic is reflected well in the dyadic connections forged between Práxedis and Francisco Manrique and Magón and Librado Rivera. You observe that, in the daily lives of these militant revolutionists, communism was not a utopia but rather “an everyday reality, created by the need to pool resources, […] to explode traditional family structures so as to admit perfect strangers to the most intimate situations, and […] to build transcendental goals in the face of the breakdown of traditional morality, customs, and habits.” You emphasize this dual sense of platonic and conjugal love to have been “much more important to [the anarchists], both as an ideal and as a daily practice, than it was for the Villas and Zapatas, the Obregons and Pascual Orozcos.” Why do you suppose this was the case?

I’ll speak to the significance of love in this movement, and its contrast with revolutionary armies in Mexico. There are ideological reasons for favoring love amongst the anarchists which I won’t get into. What I found more interesting is that the actual social conditions of militancy of the PLM led to developing love relationships—amongst men and women and amongst same-sex friends (whether or not the latter developed into fully erotic relationships).

The PLM developed in clandestinity, and was always subjected to persecution and infiltration by spies and traitors. This meant that trust, deep personal trust, was of critical significance, since you were placing your life and the future of the movement in the hands of another. That is one factor favoring the development of deep personal ties, including love. A second is that the members of the PLM had to rely on enormous self-discipline. They were ascetics, in the sense that they had to work by day and mobilize by night. They needed to save their earnings and invest savings in the cause. They needed to read and to reflect. Reading and writing—which was so important to the anarchists—tended to foment love, in that it was a practice of correspondence. One might say that the movement fostered deep investments in the self and in self-fashioning, and that this favored the development of love. Finally, the communities that the exiles built were based to a large degree on affinity. Because of the intense mobility of this group, it relied on affinity in order, for instance, to find lodging when an individual arrived in a new city, or to find work, or to organize. Solidarity was needed in the everyday, and it was solidarity based on affinity—a factor that also fomented the flourishing of love.

For revolutionaries in Mexico, by contrast, the experience of revolution was like a gale that swept everything in its path. The revolution was popularly represented as la bola—sort of like tumble-weed. Revolutionary armies passed through villages like locusts. Individuals joined the revolutionary army as it passed through. Sometimes they were abducted into armies, either as soldiers or as soldaderas. Connections between men and women were therefore fragile. The lack of marriage bonds was not the product of some deep ideological rejection of the church or of the family as an institution of oppression, but simply a product of displacement and everyday life in the army. Revolutionary leaders tended to have multiple wives—dozens, sometimes. A few of them—Zapata is an example—tended to cement ties to villages by having a local wife or lover. One is hard-put to find relationships comparable, say, to Ricardo and María’s or Enrique and Teresa’s or Librado and Conchita’s or Práxedis’s and Francisco Manrique’s in Mexico’s revolutionary movements. Perhaps the homosocial or homoerotic romantic relationships may have been a little more similar—insofar as you had “war buddies,” and deep reliance and trust amongst close comrades in Mexico, but it is not clear that these involved the sort of deep soul commitments and ideological commonalities that we see in a relationship like that of Práxedis and Manrique, a relationship that was not governed so much by circumstance as by mutual commitment.

1 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).

2 Práxedis G. Guerrero, Artículos literarios y de combate: pensamientos; crónicas revolucionarias, etc. Placer Armado Ediciones, 2012 (1924), 80-2.