Christian Ferrer
What will remain of the word “anarchists” in a future dictionary? A footnote, the conceptual definition of a sect of conspirators, the cardiogram that recorded the historical ups and downs of an extreme idea, the silhouette of an extinct animal? It is inevitable that, even in the best of cases, the aberrant features will be highlighted and the archetype that has long identified the anarchist in the political imagination of modern liberalism will end up being faceted: a monster. This spectral shadow ends up being curiously reassuring, as the police, and also—not to mince words—quite a few political philosophers and historians, tend to emphasise the facts of the record in order to leave the motivations behind the acts out of the picture. These are the classic attributes: the bomb, the call to sedition, the blasphemous gesture, the art of the barricade, regicide, the stale air of the catacomb, the undisciplined attitude, the clandestine life; and exaggeration. But this identity-kit is scarcely distinct. Although all the data gathered seems to lead to the antechamber of political hell, the plain truth is that the biographies of anarchists can perfectly well be recounted as the lives of saints. There is of course the violence, and the account of their uprisings is not inaccurate, nor is the “demonic” feature of the events in which they played a leading role negligible. But only contingently were anarchists storm birds; in general, the motive for their activities was constructive, and their lives resembled more those of evangelists and dissidents than those of “cursed poets” or tormented nihilists.
Did they exist? Everything indicates that they did, that they were the wonder of their time and, for a while, the obsession of the secret police of modern states. But their surprising historical appearance has been so improbable that it tempts the historian to ask the counterfactual question: what would have happened if anarchists had not existed? Would another equivalent political group have appeared in their place? Would the question of hierarchy and autocratic power have remained untheorised and unchallenged? Or would they have been presented in milder forms, by liberal thinkers and fugitives from Marxist doctrine? Would the history of dissent be different from how we remember it? Would all the political tension of modernity have been condensed into the struggle between liberalism and socialism; between nationalism and imperialism? Would the libertarian essays of Tolstoy, Orwell, Camus, and Chomsky have been deprived of an important antecedent or an imaginary interlocutor? Would Michel Foucault’s theoretical project have taken shape in the way we know it? Would the question of power in Foucault be discussed in the uncomfortable and vehement way it has been over the last three decades? Furthermore, would certain freedoms, or rather, a certain degree of appetite for radical freedoms, achieved or yet to be achieved, have been set in motion? It is because anarchists did indeed exist that these questions can be asked, and even stated with a certain calm, without the feeling of retrospective political dread that assails those who realise that political life in the 19th and 20th centuries could have been harsher and bleaker. They were splinters, metal spikes, storm clouds, a free and wandering crowd in the psychic hive of bourgeois order; undoubtedly. But in addition, and not only occasionally, anarchists laid the foundations for a libertarian counter-hegemony, that is, they postulated and practised desirable forms of political existence. At the beginning of the 21st century, the West still feeds on the living, or metamorphosed, remains of the innovations scattered by the political imagination of the 19th century, one of the most prolific in human history. We feed on nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, trade unionism, feminism, avant-gardism, Marxism, socialism, federalism, and other minor political crumbs. And yet the radial influence that anarchism had on intellectuals and other social groups, including individualists of all kinds, liberals, anti-clericalists, on the fringes of Marxism, on aesthetic elitism, bohemianism, on the aesthetic manifestos of avant-garde sects, on the radicalised flowering of the left in the 1960s, and on rock and punk, on libertarian tendencies in the human rights movement and on the dissident movement in Soviet countries, and on anti-militarist pacifism, on the demand for the pleasurable use of one’s own body, on the animal liberation movement, and on radical environmentalism today, has been little explored. It could be said that anarchism constituted an important part of the plankton that, to this day, is consumed by the cetaceans of social movements, including some that have yet to fully mature.
The cultural history of anarchism is a field that can still be fruitfully explored. What was its specific mode of existence? What were its ethical inventions? What were the relationships between its practices that shaped existence and the political imagination of its time? These questions must be preceded by certain demographic assumptions; firstly, their scarcity, their small numbers. There were never too many anarchists (except for the anomaly of Spain between 1890 and 1939), and the fact that it was a movement of evangelising ideas never altered this condition of scarcity. By 1910, the police estimated that there were between 5,000 and 6,000 adherents to anarchist ideas in Argentina. That number of organised anarchists was extremely high. In most of the world, only a handful of supporters and sympathisers – most of them immigrants or travellers – were active intermittently, maintaining some correspondence with centres of ideas, getting involved in strikes or publishing a journal. Anarchists, a demographic minority, have always lived on the brink of extinction. However, a second condition both intensified their scarcity and determined the widespread extension of libertarian ideas in their time: the history of anarchists is the history of a successful migratory experience. Almost anywhere in the world, even in the smallest town, there is at least one anarchist. Pointillist implantation: a black rash across the 360º of the Atlas. The reasons behind the triumphant spread of “the idea” – as they called their doctrine – can be traced back to a supposed historical necessity that explains its presence, but it can also be seen as a kind of political miracle, which was always accompanied by the enormous individual effort devoted by each anarchist to the survival of their cause. They were stokers on a ghost train. In any case, their numbers, their “critical mass”, were not an obstacle to the spread of such a demanding political ideology. If anything favoured this spread, it was the absence of an ideological “central switchboard” to inform and discipline the scattered militants about the direction of their action and the content of their proposals. On the contrary, what stands out in anarchist history is the plasticity of theory and praxis, and consequently, the remarkable variety of its flora and fauna. The degree of freedom they enjoyed in relation to the modes of subjectivation that corresponded to them stems from this condition.
This demographic limitation explains why every anarchist’s life became precious, and why life itself, understood as a “moral example”, turned out to be as valuable as the ideas, books, and manifestos they published. In each life, through specific ethical practices, the promised freedom was realised. Each anarchist existence, then, became proof, living testimony, of a freedom to come. They saw themselves as present-day splinters, fragments, of a world whose future was repeatedly blocked by more powerful forces. Hence, the biographies of anarchists are presented to us as the lives of saints, as demanding and sacrificial existences, and they sacrificed everything for the sake of their ideal: friendships, family, social advancement, tranquillity, provision for old age. To this day, there are old anarchists who have refused to apply for state pensions. These deprivations were accepted, if not joyfully, at least convincingly, for anarchism had been promised to them as a demanding experience, though not an impossible one. For them, freedom was a lived experience, the result of the necessary coherence between means and ends, and not an effect of rhetoric, a promise of a “post-state” era. So, for all practical purposes, anarchism was not a way of thinking about a society of domination, but a way of existing against domination. The anarchist idea of freedom contained not only an ideal, but also an objective that required different ethical practices, that is, transmission belts between the present reality of the individual and the realisation of the promised future. Precisely because anarchism did not conceive of the person according to the liberal model of the “subject of rights”, it was imperative for each anarchist to model themselves according to a specific ethic and not in relation to an abstract, comprehensive, and generalisable jurisprudence.
The practices of anarchism sought to disrupt the old psychological, political, and cultural regime of domination, not only because that mode of governing men was coercive, exploitative, and unequal, but also because it forced human beings to become mere shadows of themselves, people incapable of self-dignity. The anthropology underlying the works of anarchist patristics proposed man as a “promise”, as unlimited self-creating energy, even more so in an era they defined as “revolutionary in spirit”, whose citizens were no longer subjects of a monarch to the same extent that they were no longer creatures of a heavenly father. Rationalist self-education, a fertile impulse of the will, an attachment to human camaraderie, the fight against fear and submission as the physiological and psychological bases of domination, anti-clerical imagination and taking the side of the oppressed: these were the pieces that anarchists sought to assemble in each individual. Anarchism has always been an “ideal of salvation” for the human soul, and that is why it was necessary to subvert the historical topography where it had established its existence. In the extreme, social sanctity was aspired to: an anarchist society was not possible until the last inhabitant of the earth had become an anarchist. This does not mean seeking the perfection of souls but purging the idea of revolution of the temptation of the “coup d’état” and distancing it from the dangers that the founding fathers foresaw in the drift of authoritarian ideas propagated by Marxism or “authoritarian socialism”, as they defined it. That is why they insisted that the revolution should be “social” rather than “political”, a revolution which requires a prior cultural maceration of libertarian customs. And even before a social revolution, it was emphasised that it was a personal revolution, that is, the construction of one’s own character or “will” in antagonistic relation to hierarchical powers. The detachment of society from hierarchy began with an awareness of existing misery and the abuses of autocratic governments, but also with strategies for purifying the personality. Joining anarchist groups always involved a conversion, a self-discovery of the “rebellious self”. The goal of such a conversion, and the consequent stripping away of the social vices of domination, was to achieve self-dignity. In the anarchist press of the early 20th century, advice aimed at forging personality is repeated, including becoming aware of the state of the world, not allowing oneself to be trampled on by the powerful and their “henchmen”, acting with reciprocity towards one’s comrades, serving as an example for abused people, abandoning bourgeois vices, in particular alcohol, brothels, gambling for money, and participating collectively in carnival. But self-dignity requires not only avoiding these social evils but also being able to exercise self-control, that is, an appropriation of oneself in order to make room for a free will liberated from bourgeois cultural education. However, this libertarian self-education could not be achieved within sectarian experiences or on the virgin edges of historical experience, as the Fourierists had attempted in their phalansteries and the utopians in their closed communities. The anarchist saw her/himself as a “daughter/son of the people”, the title of one of their best-known hymns. They were a loose atom in the midst of the elemental chain that bound everyone, and whose orbital link with popular culture was paradoxical. Anarchists were very close to popular practices and at the same time stood on the ideological frontier of those practices. Always popular, though not populist; that is, they were never complacent with working-class customs, much less “classist”; they were rather the wild inflorescence of popular practices in formation, or the urban continuity of tribal and peasant traditions of resistance. This paradoxical condition will determine the relationship between libertarian beliefs and practices of subjectivation.
For anarchists, concern for their political condition and concern for the relationship between belief and action (means and ends) became all the more pressing because too often they found themselves isolated in enemy, alienated, or unfamiliar territory. It is important to bear in mind the “number factor” mentioned above. So remembering “who you were” through specific rituals and practices became essential. For example, correspondence (all anarchists responded to mail sooner or later) helped them to connect with each other, and reading books “of ideas” helped them to strengthen themselves in the face of adversity and ideological loneliness, especially during the early period of the dissemination of anarchist ideas, that is, between 1870 and 1900, when three phases of maturation took place, which we can call “carbonarial or conspiratorial”, “messianic or evangelical”, and “individualistic and organisational”. At this stage, anarchism became known as a revolutionary ideology in both the broad and specific sense that old Jacobinism had spread throughout Europe between 1789 and 1871, the emblematic dates of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. But at the same time, anarchism spread as an ideal of the “free man”, as an ethical model to follow. The roots of this model can be traced back to the pedagogical ideals of the Enlightenment, to the styles of intellectual education of the modern freethinker, to the associative practices of the Carbonari conspirators, to the total dedication of vocational revolutionaries such as Auguste Blanqui, to the “romantic” sensibility of the generation of the years 1830 to 1848, and to the activism of famous émigrés fighting for the liberation of unredeemed peoples, the most famous example of which was the cause of the freedom of Poland. All these immediate antecedents converged in the formation of the personality of the anarcho-individualists and the anarchists who defined themselves as “revolutionaries”, the two sub-species of the anarchist genre at the end of the 19th century. The preparation of anarchist subjectivity, of the ethical core of the will, was aimed at sustaining a “revolutionary morality” that served to harden oneself in the face of persecution and not to falter in the face of the meagre results of the propaganda of ideas. It would so ready the individual, that even a single anarchist would feel capable of founding publications or establishing labour unions, libraries and cultural centres. This was also the sentiment and approach of the twelve apostles of Christ. Being a revolutionary meant “having morals”, not only to become an “exemplary case” respected even by one’s political enemies, but also to strengthen the spirit and maintain the faith, just as Christians did in the face of temptation or martyrdom. Even more, to “have morals” in order to become “counterweights” to specific historical circumstances, as happened with defendants who in court were able to “turn around” the arguments of the prosecution or, at the other extreme, with European explorers who were capable of conquering entire regions for their nation on their own. They too had “iron morals”. But no one can sink steel foundations into their soul unless they have faith in the advent of a new world. The anarchists believed. That is a gift that is not granted to everyone. But they were not religious in the usual sense of the word: the mystery of political faith was balanced by a solid rationalist (even, at times, scientistic) education and a taste for Voltairean scepticism. They were centaurs: half reason, half messianic impulse.
But if we momentarily set aside the immediate hatred of the oppressor and the happy images of a world without chains (that is, without a state, without prisons, without armed forces, without police, without a Pope, without bosses, without surplus value, without courts, without noble privileges, without butcheries, etc.), we can then see the cultural achievements of anarchism, and especially the cultural contours of its ethical practices of self-education, which served, first, to help forge revolutionary character, and then to constantly test the relationship between one’s own life and one’s ideals. A first series of “obligations of conscience” distinguished them from other political “partisanship” and operated as a kind of guiding principle in the face of coercive pressure from bourgeois institutions. Anarchists did not accept compulsory military service; they deserted. They did not accept marriage under the regulation of the Church or the State; they freely joined their partners in a practice known as “free love”, which was scandalous for its time. As far as possible, they did not send their children to religious or state schools, but to free or “rationalist” schools. They did not baptise their children following the calendar of saints; they tended to use meaningful names. They did not accept promotions in the workplace or salary hierarchies; they worked alongside their colleagues and on the same pay scale. They also sought to be good workers, to set an example both to the idle, rentier bourgeoisie and to other workers who would one day build a world different from the ruins of the present one. Anarchists should not vote in elections, but should try to reach consensus on the decisions to be taken by their groups or unions. They should refuse to testify in court if this would prejudice someone accused for reasons of state. They should not accept the holidays dictated by the state (an agreement by the FORA, the Argentine anarchist trade union confederation, recommended that its members inform their employers that the only labour holiday they would respect would be 1st of May, the Day of the Worker, which did not exist in the calendar of holidays at that time, and that in the case of state or religious holidays, they would demand to work). Nor should alms or tips be given, as the right thing to do is to ensure a decent wage. Anarchists had to offer hospitality to persecuted comrades. In some extreme cases, many anarchists refused to play cards or gamble money in order not to promote the struggle of “all against all”. Nor were “fifteenth” – la quinceañera– birthdays celebrated. If possible, their newspapers should be sold at cost (some early 20th-century Argentine publications read on their front pages: “Price: from each according to their means”). Eventually, they should practise civil disobedience. Finally, they should be equipped and prepared culturally and politically to stand in the front line alongside the peoples who rebelled. And there were many anarchists who renounced individual graves in their wills, preferring the communal ossuary. Others donated their bodies “to science.”
This ethical decalogue promoted a model of conduct that necessarily required inner strength. A series of introspective practices contributed to self-affirmation, ranging from reading books of ideas, social and historical novels that told stories of heroes and popular revolts, to the first trials by fire of social struggle with which the new adherent to the ideas became intimate, whether they be strikes, pickets, the smuggling of newspapers or weapons, followed by the inevitable periods spent in prison, an amniotic fluid well known to militants, and at the same time a breeding ground for anarchists. All the anarchists’ practices of “self-care” were aimed at developing a powerful subjectivity (a “will”) in the face of state power. We encounter the opposite problem to that of the ancient Stoics: it was not a question of promoting self-restraint in order to be able to govern others, but of containing within oneself a series of well-established principles in order not to be governed. Those who governed themselves and refused to be governed were presented as “rebellious men”, refractory but at the same time enlightened and rational: unyielding debaters. The education of the will was developed mainly in a political, psychological and emotional niche that turned out to be the most striking organisational invention of all those promoted by anarchism: the affinity group, which, until the sudden explosion of trade unions organised around libertarian principles and around 1900, constituted the usual way for anarchists to meet and interact, and they continue to be so to this day. The origins of these groups can be found in their antecedents, the revolutionary club of the French Revolution era and the conspiratorial sects in times of autocratic and repressive governments. But in a subterranean way, the affinity group responded and mirrored the growing importance that friendship as a social practice of equals was beginning to acquire in modern metropolises. It was as if friendship had become a liberated territory, an “outside the state” where the revolutionary political triangle of liberty, equality and fraternity had been transformed into a model of intersubjective reciprocity, even within practices typical of bourgeois sensibilities. The characteristic feature of the anarchist affinity group lay not only in its reciprocal horizontality and the common ideological affiliation of its members, but also in the mutual trust that cemented the contact between its members, and in its empathetic plasticity, because the members related to each other, above all, socially and emotionally. It operated as a counterweight and alternative to the bourgeois family and the labour order, and also constituted a space for learning knowledge or trades. Sometimes, those who joined an affinity group changed their name, choosing a unique nickname, which was not so much an alias or a “nom de guerre”, as the nominal proof of the inner transformation achieved.
Taking ideas seriously meant making them a part of one’s existence, as inalienable as the activity of any other bodily organ. The “idea” settled between the kidney and the lung, or between the stomach and the arterial network: the graft took root until it became flesh. At crucial historical moments or in certain extreme situations, this intimate metamorphosis led some anarchists to produce spectacular acts. The examples of attacks on crowned heads are the most widespread, but not necessarily the most representative. Consider two cases of “sharpening ethical tension” that Luce Fabbri mentions in Historia de un hombre livre [History of a Free Man]. When anarchists were called up as recruits or to perform military service, they often deserted and crossed borders to avoid it. But the decision was not always taken in time. Thus, the inevitable moment of being called up could put a man in a state of intense inner turmoil. Thus, Luce Fabbri recalls the case of the Italian bricklayer Augusto Massetti, who in October 1911 used the rifle he had just been issued to shoot the colonel who was haranguing the new recruits preparing to leave for Libya. The case became a celebrated anti-militarist cause in those years of Italy’s expansionist push toward Africa. The other case concerns the schoolteacher Aldo Bernardi, who threw his rifle to the floor of the barracks from which he was to leave for the front and improvised an anarchist speech right there. He was saved from execution because his relatives were able to pass him off as a madman, although he would die shortly after the war, like so many millions of others, from the Spanish flu.
Conversion practices would begin right after the aspiring anarchist had approached and undergone an initial maceration process within the affinity group. The degree of depth of these practices depended on the context, the stage of historical development of the anarchist movement, and the ideological radicalism of the group to which the new member belonged, but also on the new member’s “free will”. It was common to renounce family wealth, titles of nobility (a tradition that started during the French Revolution), and “bourgeois” customs. However, these renunciations did not correspond to the model of the “proletarianisation” of youth that would become common and mandatory during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, it was about purging oneself of a “false life” or one endowed with privileges and trappings that became meaningless in the new, self-aware stage of life. Occasionally, the person would abandon their old name and choose to “rebaptise” themselves with a pseudonym. Thus, a well-known Colombian anarchist came to be called Biófilo Panclasta (lover of life, destroyer of everything), and names such as Perseguido, Germinal, or Libertario became more and more common. Many also chose an alias when publishing in the anarchist press, as a way of emphasising that opinions, but also the literary works of famous authors, did not belong to the individual but to all of humanity. In other words, the right to intellectual property was challenged; a right, moreover, that anarchists traditionally tend to ignore completely. The practice of renaming oneself is linked to the history of the French Revolution, in whose early stages the years began counting from zero and the months took on the names of natural cycles. The longing for the beginning of a new world was thus backdated, or brought forward. Auguste Blanqui numbered the copies of one of his many newspapers, Ni Dieu ni Maître, according to the Jacobin calendar, and in Argentina, the newspaper La Montaña, founded by Leopoldo Lugones, José Ingenieros and Macedonio Fernández, was dated according to the years that had passed since the Paris Commune. In these cases, it was emphasised that time, although irreversible, could be stopped and diverted in favour of the cause. Likewise, trade unions used to distribute revolutionary almanacs and calendars among their members, in which the saints’ days and state holidays were replaced by events in the history of the labour movement and the birth dates of revolutionaries or benefactors of humanity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, anarchists, particularly in Spain but also in the Río de la Plata region, took to naming their children with relevant and meaningful names that would identify them as the premature offspring of a new order. There were many historical tributes (Spartacus, Volterina, Giordano Bruno, Prometheus), doctrinal affirmations (Acracio, Libertad, Libertario, Alba de Revolución, Ideal, Progreso, Liberata, Liberto), oppressive birthmarks (Oprimido, Siberiano), internal tributes to the anarchist movement (Bakunin, Reclús), natural references (Amanecer, Universo, Aurora, Sol Libertario), and also Eleuterio (free man in Greek), Poema, Amor, Esperanza, Floreal and many others that nourished their own onomastics. This same movement denounced the current situation and challenged the calendar of saints, or paid homage to the fallen and announced the future. The names of many Argentine anarchist newspapers of that era exposed a series of speculative games with their own identity and with the fears of bourgeois society. Some took on names immediately associated with power and affirmation, such as El Oprimido [The Oppressed], El Rebelde [The Rebel], La Protesta [The Protest], La Antorcha [The Torch], Agitadores [Agitators], El Combate [The Combat], Demoliamo [Let’s Demolish], Il Pugnale [The Dagger], Cyclone, Escalpelo [Scalpel], Hierro [Iron], El Látigo del Obrero [The Worker’s Whip], El Martillo [The Hammer], Los Parias [The Outcasts], El Perseguido [The Persecuted], La Rivolta [The Revolt], or La Voz del Esclavo [The Voice of the Slave]. Other titles, which also conveyed positivity, acquired auroral resonances or self-definitions of an enlightened nature, including El Alba del Siglo XX [Dawn of the 20th Century], L’Avvenire [The Future], Ciencia Social [Social Science], Derecho a la Vida [Right to Life], Expansión Individual [Individual Flourishing/Expansion], La Fuerza de la Razón [The Force of Reason], Libre Examen [Free Reflection/Free Examination], La Libera Parola [The Free Word], La Libre Iniciativa [Free Initiative], La Luz [The Light], and Los Tiempos Nuevos [New Times].
The introduction to anarchist ideas was often carried out by “teachers”, who were transmitters of social memory, the history of the anarchist movement, and ideas. Teaching was not necessarily linked to reading books, even though they were highly valued in the anarchist tradition, but rather to the personalised knowledge of someone already experienced in libertarian doctrine. However, those who acted as “teachers” were not required to be “scholars”, but rather a mixture of “initiated” individuals and evangelists. It was common for those with experience to lead “commented readings” in unions and cultural centres for groups of people with no formal education or who were new to anarchism. But despite the fact that cinema, at least in Argentina, and a certain sensitive commonplace of progressivism, have spread the image of the benevolent and ethical “old anarchist”, in truth the task of teaching could fall to very young people who were only five or ten years older than the new militant. It was undoubtedly a relationship between adults and young people, but not in the sense that ages have today. This type of initiation was in force until the 1960s, when youth rebellions and a “youth” centred ideology broke this model of transmission. Since then, entry into anarchism has occurred through contagion, through “gang” activism. Soon after “the teaching”, the new militant underwent initiation tests of another kind, such as trips to publicise ideas in places untouched by libertarian ideas or where very few anarchists resided. Sometimes these pilgrimages were made to support a particular strike or struggle, and the best speakers and organisers were usually the most sought after. These days in no man’s land exposed them to police harassment, but also to the incomprehension of their families, who perceived this activism as a risk to the family’s finances and harmony. The exercises in public speaking, which first took place at cultural centres or trade union meetings, and later at public events, provided training for the traveller. On the one hand, nothing prepared the man of “ideas” for the usual stays in prison. But everyone could rely on the solidarity that would emanate from the other side of the walls. And on the other hand, those who mistreated prisoners, tortured detainees or repressed workers’ gatherings knew that they could be the target of tribal revenge. In any case, in almost all cases of anarchist “vigilantes”, they acted in the utmost solitude.
Every day, experiences were lived together, to be then shared in usually weekly events, events which both socially united the anarchist community and prepared them intellectually and spiritually. A series of rituals of fraternisation and exaltation, which were also shared by other socialist institutions, bound anarchists to their organisation and to their fellow comrades. Active participation in conferences and soirées, attendance at recitals and popular theatre (probably the roots of independent theatre in Argentina), going to fraternisation picnics and comrade lunches, collaboration with strike pickets or solidarity campaigns in favour of prisoners, and taking part in marches and rallies. In all these cases, revolutionary songs and anthems were usually sung. It is also worth noting the participation with active audiences in “reuniones de controversia” [organised debates]. These consisted of public speaking tournaments in which two contenders, one an anarchist and the other a follower of a different philosophy, debated on an agreed-upon topic, such as the existence or non-existence of God, or the importance of Darwin’s theories. In this latter case, the strong belief of anarchists, typical of the time, in the transformative power of public speech is evident. The aim of these rituals and participations was to inspire and shape noble feelings, and to uproot the “evils of subjectivity” that divide human beings. Personal libraries closed the circle. All anarchists, even those who were illiterate, patiently armed themselves with a library of “ideas”. Books contained salvation through knowledge, and the importance of self-education among anarchists is still an unexplored topic. Sometimes, the only luggage anarchists carried with them in their migrations was their basic library. There must have been few political movements less anti-intellectual than the libertarian one, which took care to emphasise the importance of linking manual and intellectual work in a single unbreakable thread. The treasured books included the history of modern revolutions, anarchist classics, biographies of fallen militants, memoirs of well-known anarchists, testimonies of imprisonment and persecution, compendiums of “modern” science, and the inevitable social novels. Of all these, the autobiographies of militants, whose equivalents are too often the saints’ calendars and martyrologies, constitute a fundamental source of information for analysing the anarchist ethical life. Also, of course, there were the minutes of union meetings, what was published in their press, particularly if one analyses the details and the marginalia, and doctrinal works in general. One should not however ignore the analyses of the works of the heretics of the time or of the critics of anarchism. Some proved to be excellent exegetes, negatively, of their modern heresy. There remains one source that historians interested in anarchism have not always been able to access: police archives.
At the beginning of the 20th century, two discourses aimed at caring for the child’s mind and the body in general began to spread among anarchists: that of the modern school and that of eugenics. Rationalist or “modern” schools spread widely in Spain, and there were also some similar, short-lived experiments in Argentina. They spread as alternative institutions and doctrines to the ecclesiastical authority over the pedagogical training of children and to the circulation of state rhetoric in school curricula. There, they instilled scientific knowledge, freedom as an ideal, the comprehensive development of students, and the coexistence of manual and intellectual knowledge. In these schools, punishments and admonitions were eliminated, as well as pre-established hierarchies between teachers and students. The anthropological assumption that guided them presented children as naturally freethinkers, and religious ideas, state patronage, and patriotism as distorting forces of the child’s mind. Educating children for a different world, the one awaited for in the not-too-distant future, also entailed building that world through new generations protected from the clutches of the old society. It is worth noting that, albeit in an incipient manner, anarchists also proposed plans for ideal cities for social life, which should not be confused with the tradition of perfect utopias, but rather with the improvement of working-class living. At the same time, eugenics discourse, while not entirely unrelated to the sanitary and hygienic concerns of the time, was presented as a cultural fringe barely acceptable to bourgeois mentality. In anarchism, eugenics discourse encompassed various concerns: the spread of vegetarianism, nudism, anti-smoking, criticism of alcohol consumption (a book published in Portuguese was titled “Alcoholism or Revolution”), responsible or “conscious” procreation (of neo-Malthusian origins) that preached the need to restrict births in order to avoid working-class misery, the promotion of condom use in working-class neighbourhoods, the advertising of other contraceptive methods in the anarcho-eugenicist press, and general worker health care. All of this intersected with discourses on free love, the importance of elective affinities, and free will. In May 1937, Federica Montseny, anarchist health minister during the Spanish Revolution, authorised public hospitals to treat women who wished to terminate a pregnancy. This was a historic measure that transcended government concern over the practice of clandestine abortion and was part of the more general anarchist attempt to subvert morality, allowing in turn for the public dissemination of a radical knowledge and discourse on sexuality. Eugenics intersects at this point with the critique of “hypocritical” bourgeois marriage and the postulate of the right to one’s own body. The anarchist discourse on sexuality is complex for within it we find scientifically inspired analysis of sexuality, a social concern rooted in medicine and hygiene, and relational ideals nourished by romanticism, which does not exclude a dose of voluptuous discursive eroticization, in which the so-called “Armandists,” followers of the individualist doctrines of E. Armand, excelled. The Armandists, or readers of the Brazilian María Lacerda de Moura, propagandised the right to pleasure as a “natural” right of human beings. Eugenics discourse and the defence of comprehensive and rationalist education had an objective that went beyond even a concern for a healthy life and concern for the child’s mind, as their guiding ideal was a critique of the “false life,” the alienated life characteristic of the bourgeoisie. Thus, eugenics and rationalism sought to reverse the dose of vital alienation introjected by the “false” society, as well as to promote less insincere and healthier existential practices. How many of these practices were actually carried out? Some were carried out extensively; others, scarcely. Some were the hunting ground of those who experimented with different ways of being, of living. Others were sustained within alternative community experiments, and many were assumed only by anarcho-individualists or bohemians. Most of these customs and models of behaviour were neither obligatory nor enforced. Anarchism was never an orthodox sect, nor did it have a “black book” in which a precept could be consulted. The acceptance of practices was free, and they spread like currents of opinion, spreading contagiously or inspiring enthusiasm, but not as a creed. Over the course of a lifetime, adherents of anarchist ideas could go through various stages and degrees of approximation to the ideal of vegetarianism or free love. As anarchism recruited more and more members among the industrial proletariat, the possibility of experimentation on the fringes of bourgeois life diminished, but it never ceased to circulate in the anarchist press and in the lectures of specialists given in unions, athenaeums, and libraries. It could be said that the greatness of this existential panoply can be measured by the degree of its rejection at the time, as well as by the lesser emphasis placed on these issues by other political doctrines.
Both in their public actions, in the discussion of and conversation around certain scabrous or taboo topics, and in the written propaganda of their ideas, anarchists never took refuge in a rhetoric of convenience or in “Machiavellian” or opportunistic strategies, even when the consequences of such actions and opinions were costly, or even lethal to their immediate political survival. In short, they never lied about who they were or what they wanted. The machinations, hypocrisies, disguises, and “operations” that liberals and communists would resort to with such fervour during the Cold War were completely alien to them. Political sincerity was one of their “obligations of identity”, a condition derived from their intransigence regarding ideas (which did not necessarily make them doctrinaire) and from the fact that the rationality of their actions was based on a firm alignment between conduct and stated beliefs. This explains why they tended to identify themselves, without the slightest doubt, as “anarchists” when they were brought before the courts. It also helps to understand the center of gravity of their political drama: absolute responsibility for their own convictions diminished their “effectiveness” (if defined from a “technical” point of view and according to the dominant values ??of the 19th and 20th centuries) and audibility, although it granted them the rare prestige of having an “excess of reason”. Telling the truth is always costly, but in their case, it was perceived as essential: combating government arbitrariness, denouncing the mistreatment of employers and “Cossacks,” recording and bearing witness to the persecution of unions and popular protests. These “excessive truths” received commensurate blows. Political assassinations of anarchist union organisers were common in 1920s Spain and, in general, throughout Latin America. They were deported from Argentina (the 1902 Residency Law); they were expelled from Brazil as “undesirables”; or they received long sentences served in spectral and inhospitable prisons (in Tierra del Fuego, in the Amazon rainforest, near the Guianas); confinement in Siberia or on Italian islets; in Spanish and Portuguese colonial possessions in Africa; or in French Papua New Guinea. And they were also forced into military service, as “asocial” elements, in harsh “disciplinary campaigns” (in Italy, at the time of the war in Libya). Added to this were the cyclical bans on activities and the destruction of printing presses, archives, and newspaper offices. Of course, prisons turned out to be hermetically sealed suitcases, but with a false bottom: they were transformed into spaces for raising awareness among other “social” prisoners. And the prohibitions were nothing more than nuisances, occupational hazards. Not only because they themselves granted themselves the right to publish their “samizdats,” but also because in the field of clandestine activity, the anarchists were experts. Apart from that, no anarchist ever had it easy. It could be said that they lived under conditional freedom. Political sincerity extended to other areas of activity, particularly in relation to the notable scrupulousness maintained regarding monetary matters. The accounting records of the anarchist labour unions were perfect. Many historians of the Spanish Civil War have been able to reconstruct monetary movements from the records of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo – CNT/National Confederation of Labour. The condition of illegality did not exempt militants from this “financial honesty,” even in the “extreme cases,” much debated among them, of “expropriators” and “counterfeiters.” The “collected funds” could not be used for personal use; they belonged to the people or were funds to be donated for cultural or organisational activities. These were the rules of their jurisprudence, which extended to ideological or relational problems between comrades, for which “honour tribunals” were established, if necessary. Anarcho-syndicalists, expropriators, anti-Franco guerrillas, anarcho-individualists, combatants alongside the Maquis or the partisans, regicides, “free women” in Spain, “Wobblies,” “foristas” [of the Argentine FORA – Federación Obrera Regional Argentina], “ceneteros” [of the Spanish CNT – Confederación Nacional del Trabajo], organisers of strikes against the United Fruit Company, and dozens of other variants, all of them tried, as far as possible, to live and die by their law.
Their “law”: To what extent did anarchists not experience a spiritual tension between the effort to “improve” the soul and the unfathomable spiritual turbulence that spills over into violent impulses? The tension was likely unavoidable. Their actions were often bloody and senseless; other times sacrificial and dignified. They were beings of extremes. Just as the history of modern capitalism and industrial society is inseparable from the rise of syndicalism, so anarchism is also incomprehensible without its antipode, hierarchy. The anarchist and the monarch always measured each other, like geological layers that do not merge even though they recognize and study each other, like deer that eventually clash on fighting fields. But this same tension fuels the tendency to isolate oneself centripetally within one’s own ideas and cultural practices, as well as conjuring up complex osmotic relationships between the “anarchist soul” and the “bourgeois soul,” links that must be analysed through the metamorphic processes that their mutual struggle produces on the disputed border.
During the time when anarchism exerted a clear influence on labour union action, on popular sensibilities in specific domains of the West, and on parts of “enlightened” public opinion, it operated as a political and anthropological force that mobilised a fertile disorder and harassed the forces of tradition and statism. Along with other political ideas and actors, it collaborated in the disorganisation of the political and spiritual heritage of the ancien régime. At the same time, anarchism spread a model of free personality, a demanding ideal whose historic achievement consisted of exerting pressure on, – a departure or deviation from -, modern beliefs and institutions, but also on the desires for greater individual autonomy and broader freedom that were already germinating in the social imagination of the 20th century. In short, its insistence that the state hindered free association as much as it hindered the creative capacities of human beings transformed it into a sort of antipodal symbol of the hierarchical imagination. But its zigzagging circulation in the world of ideas and the different fate that befell its seditious efforts cannot be explained solely by the radical political angle it occupied in modernity. Anarchism also proved to be the peculiar emergence of a new type of social relationship that vast parts of the Western population already yearned for and practiced: the taste for elective affinity. On the other hand, as a demographic minority sustained by ethical practices (the irreducibility of conscience, the non-negotiability of beliefs, the construction of countervailing institutions, the deployment of affinity groups, and specific self-education rituals), anarchist lives themselves, always fluctuating between a dark hue and a lyrical aura, constituted a moral model that intermittently attracted the refractory energies of successive waves of young people. Understanding the force of this attraction is not simple, and the psychological explanation, namely, that young people need a temporary stay in hell or else to maintain their sense of unreality intact until they finally “settle down,” is of little use. Undoubtedly, the adjective “revolutionary” fits anarchism like a glove, but among the facets that this idea allowed, that of “existential subversion” stands out. Anarchism constituted a radical subjective response that mobilised the social unrest of its time. Throughout the 19th century, social anger regarding hunger and autocracy made possible the development of oppositional political and union movements. Hunger corresponded to the demand for labour and human dignity, and socialism, unionism, and populism were its spokespersons. Autocracy corresponded to the demand for greater civil rights, and liberalism, socialism, and feminism became political responses. Anarchism participated, as a loose element, in this spectrum. However, the question of the “false life”, characteristic of the vital distortions of the bourgeois era, also became a widespread source of social unrest. The concern with relational insincerity, boredom, “vital alienation”, and emotional self-restraint are themes that ran throughout modernity, from romanticism to the existentialist rebellions of the 1960s. Anarchists’ insistence on the question of a false life and their own faceted lives as moral exemplars may explain why refractory sensibilities adapted more readily to anarchism, or to its lateral or parallel variants, rather than other movements of ideas; and it is also the reason for its strange current survival, once its formerly powerful labour unions and revolutionary participation became little more than historical records for the academic world, which is still interested in this type of political heresy. This survival is not equivalent to the constant growth of weeds in a well-tended garden, but rather to a somatic rash on a body that has been repeatedly persuaded to bow its neck or vent its anguish in spaces previously delimited for that purpose. As long as this anguish persists, anarchism can re-emerge as the return of what has been poorly repressed. The red devil and the wandering Jew have been emblems etched in anarchist history. So have the phoenix and the revived Lazarus.
Christian Ferrer, “Átomos sueltos: Vidas refractarias”, Cabezas de tormenta: Ensayos sobre lo ingobernable. Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza ed., 2004.
Free Atoms: Refractory Lives
Christian Ferrer
What will remain of the word “anarchists” in a future dictionary? A footnote, the conceptual definition of a sect of conspirators, the cardiogram that recorded the historical ups and downs of an extreme idea, the silhouette of an extinct animal? It is inevitable that, even in the best of cases, the aberrant features will be highlighted and the archetype that has long identified the anarchist in the political imagination of modern liberalism will end up being faceted: a monster. This spectral shadow ends up being curiously reassuring, as the police, and also—not to mince words—quite a few political philosophers and historians, tend to emphasise the facts of the record in order to leave the motivations behind the acts out of the picture. These are the classic attributes: the bomb, the call to sedition, the blasphemous gesture, the art of the barricade, regicide, the stale air of the catacomb, the undisciplined attitude, the clandestine life; and exaggeration. But this identity-kit is scarcely distinct. Although all the data gathered seems to lead to the antechamber of political hell, the plain truth is that the biographies of anarchists can perfectly well be recounted as the lives of saints. There is of course the violence, and the account of their uprisings is not inaccurate, nor is the “demonic” feature of the events in which they played a leading role negligible. But only contingently were anarchists storm birds; in general, the motive for their activities was constructive, and their lives resembled more those of evangelists and dissidents than those of “cursed poets” or tormented nihilists.
Did they exist? Everything indicates that they did, that they were the wonder of their time and, for a while, the obsession of the secret police of modern states. But their surprising historical appearance has been so improbable that it tempts the historian to ask the counterfactual question: what would have happened if anarchists had not existed? Would another equivalent political group have appeared in their place? Would the question of hierarchy and autocratic power have remained untheorised and unchallenged? Or would they have been presented in milder forms, by liberal thinkers and fugitives from Marxist doctrine? Would the history of dissent be different from how we remember it? Would all the political tension of modernity have been condensed into the struggle between liberalism and socialism; between nationalism and imperialism? Would the libertarian essays of Tolstoy, Orwell, Camus, and Chomsky have been deprived of an important antecedent or an imaginary interlocutor? Would Michel Foucault’s theoretical project have taken shape in the way we know it? Would the question of power in Foucault be discussed in the uncomfortable and vehement way it has been over the last three decades? Furthermore, would certain freedoms, or rather, a certain degree of appetite for radical freedoms, achieved or yet to be achieved, have been set in motion? It is because anarchists did indeed exist that these questions can be asked, and even stated with a certain calm, without the feeling of retrospective political dread that assails those who realise that political life in the 19th and 20th centuries could have been harsher and bleaker. They were splinters, metal spikes, storm clouds, a free and wandering crowd in the psychic hive of bourgeois order; undoubtedly. But in addition, and not only occasionally, anarchists laid the foundations for a libertarian counter-hegemony, that is, they postulated and practised desirable forms of political existence. At the beginning of the 21st century, the West still feeds on the living, or metamorphosed, remains of the innovations scattered by the political imagination of the 19th century, one of the most prolific in human history. We feed on nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, trade unionism, feminism, avant-gardism, Marxism, socialism, federalism, and other minor political crumbs. And yet the radial influence that anarchism had on intellectuals and other social groups, including individualists of all kinds, liberals, anti-clericalists, on the fringes of Marxism, on aesthetic elitism, bohemianism, on the aesthetic manifestos of avant-garde sects, on the radicalised flowering of the left in the 1960s, and on rock and punk, on libertarian tendencies in the human rights movement and on the dissident movement in Soviet countries, and on anti-militarist pacifism, on the demand for the pleasurable use of one’s own body, on the animal liberation movement, and on radical environmentalism today, has been little explored. It could be said that anarchism constituted an important part of the plankton that, to this day, is consumed by the cetaceans of social movements, including some that have yet to fully mature.
The cultural history of anarchism is a field that can still be fruitfully explored. What was its specific mode of existence? What were its ethical inventions? What were the relationships between its practices that shaped existence and the political imagination of its time? These questions must be preceded by certain demographic assumptions; firstly, their scarcity, their small numbers. There were never too many anarchists (except for the anomaly of Spain between 1890 and 1939), and the fact that it was a movement of evangelising ideas never altered this condition of scarcity. By 1910, the police estimated that there were between 5,000 and 6,000 adherents to anarchist ideas in Argentina. That number of organised anarchists was extremely high. In most of the world, only a handful of supporters and sympathisers – most of them immigrants or travellers – were active intermittently, maintaining some correspondence with centres of ideas, getting involved in strikes or publishing a journal. Anarchists, a demographic minority, have always lived on the brink of extinction. However, a second condition both intensified their scarcity and determined the widespread extension of libertarian ideas in their time: the history of anarchists is the history of a successful migratory experience. Almost anywhere in the world, even in the smallest town, there is at least one anarchist. Pointillist implantation: a black rash across the 360º of the Atlas. The reasons behind the triumphant spread of “the idea” – as they called their doctrine – can be traced back to a supposed historical necessity that explains its presence, but it can also be seen as a kind of political miracle, which was always accompanied by the enormous individual effort devoted by each anarchist to the survival of their cause. They were stokers on a ghost train. In any case, their numbers, their “critical mass”, were not an obstacle to the spread of such a demanding political ideology. If anything favoured this spread, it was the absence of an ideological “central switchboard” to inform and discipline the scattered militants about the direction of their action and the content of their proposals. On the contrary, what stands out in anarchist history is the plasticity of theory and praxis, and consequently, the remarkable variety of its flora and fauna. The degree of freedom they enjoyed in relation to the modes of subjectivation that corresponded to them stems from this condition.
This demographic limitation explains why every anarchist’s life became precious, and why life itself, understood as a “moral example”, turned out to be as valuable as the ideas, books, and manifestos they published. In each life, through specific ethical practices, the promised freedom was realised. Each anarchist existence, then, became proof, living testimony, of a freedom to come. They saw themselves as present-day splinters, fragments, of a world whose future was repeatedly blocked by more powerful forces. Hence, the biographies of anarchists are presented to us as the lives of saints, as demanding and sacrificial existences, and they sacrificed everything for the sake of their ideal: friendships, family, social advancement, tranquillity, provision for old age. To this day, there are old anarchists who have refused to apply for state pensions. These deprivations were accepted, if not joyfully, at least convincingly, for anarchism had been promised to them as a demanding experience, though not an impossible one. For them, freedom was a lived experience, the result of the necessary coherence between means and ends, and not an effect of rhetoric, a promise of a “post-state” era. So, for all practical purposes, anarchism was not a way of thinking about a society of domination, but a way of existing against domination. The anarchist idea of freedom contained not only an ideal, but also an objective that required different ethical practices, that is, transmission belts between the present reality of the individual and the realisation of the promised future. Precisely because anarchism did not conceive of the person according to the liberal model of the “subject of rights”, it was imperative for each anarchist to model themselves according to a specific ethic and not in relation to an abstract, comprehensive, and generalisable jurisprudence.
The practices of anarchism sought to disrupt the old psychological, political, and cultural regime of domination, not only because that mode of governing men was coercive, exploitative, and unequal, but also because it forced human beings to become mere shadows of themselves, people incapable of self-dignity. The anthropology underlying the works of anarchist patristics proposed man as a “promise”, as unlimited self-creating energy, even more so in an era they defined as “revolutionary in spirit”, whose citizens were no longer subjects of a monarch to the same extent that they were no longer creatures of a heavenly father. Rationalist self-education, a fertile impulse of the will, an attachment to human camaraderie, the fight against fear and submission as the physiological and psychological bases of domination, anti-clerical imagination and taking the side of the oppressed: these were the pieces that anarchists sought to assemble in each individual. Anarchism has always been an “ideal of salvation” for the human soul, and that is why it was necessary to subvert the historical topography where it had established its existence. In the extreme, social sanctity was aspired to: an anarchist society was not possible until the last inhabitant of the earth had become an anarchist. This does not mean seeking the perfection of souls but purging the idea of revolution of the temptation of the “coup d’état” and distancing it from the dangers that the founding fathers foresaw in the drift of authoritarian ideas propagated by Marxism or “authoritarian socialism”, as they defined it. That is why they insisted that the revolution should be “social” rather than “political”, a revolution which requires a prior cultural maceration of libertarian customs. And even before a social revolution, it was emphasised that it was a personal revolution, that is, the construction of one’s own character or “will” in antagonistic relation to hierarchical powers. The detachment of society from hierarchy began with an awareness of existing misery and the abuses of autocratic governments, but also with strategies for purifying the personality. Joining anarchist groups always involved a conversion, a self-discovery of the “rebellious self”. The goal of such a conversion, and the consequent stripping away of the social vices of domination, was to achieve self-dignity. In the anarchist press of the early 20th century, advice aimed at forging personality is repeated, including becoming aware of the state of the world, not allowing oneself to be trampled on by the powerful and their “henchmen”, acting with reciprocity towards one’s comrades, serving as an example for abused people, abandoning bourgeois vices, in particular alcohol, brothels, gambling for money, and participating collectively in carnival. But self-dignity requires not only avoiding these social evils but also being able to exercise self-control, that is, an appropriation of oneself in order to make room for a free will liberated from bourgeois cultural education. However, this libertarian self-education could not be achieved within sectarian experiences or on the virgin edges of historical experience, as the Fourierists had attempted in their phalansteries and the utopians in their closed communities. The anarchist saw her/himself as a “daughter/son of the people”, the title of one of their best-known hymns. They were a loose atom in the midst of the elemental chain that bound everyone, and whose orbital link with popular culture was paradoxical. Anarchists were very close to popular practices and at the same time stood on the ideological frontier of those practices. Always popular, though not populist; that is, they were never complacent with working-class customs, much less “classist”; they were rather the wild inflorescence of popular practices in formation, or the urban continuity of tribal and peasant traditions of resistance. This paradoxical condition will determine the relationship between libertarian beliefs and practices of subjectivation.
For anarchists, concern for their political condition and concern for the relationship between belief and action (means and ends) became all the more pressing because too often they found themselves isolated in enemy, alienated, or unfamiliar territory. It is important to bear in mind the “number factor” mentioned above. So remembering “who you were” through specific rituals and practices became essential. For example, correspondence (all anarchists responded to mail sooner or later) helped them to connect with each other, and reading books “of ideas” helped them to strengthen themselves in the face of adversity and ideological loneliness, especially during the early period of the dissemination of anarchist ideas, that is, between 1870 and 1900, when three phases of maturation took place, which we can call “carbonarial or conspiratorial”, “messianic or evangelical”, and “individualistic and organisational”. At this stage, anarchism became known as a revolutionary ideology in both the broad and specific sense that old Jacobinism had spread throughout Europe between 1789 and 1871, the emblematic dates of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. But at the same time, anarchism spread as an ideal of the “free man”, as an ethical model to follow. The roots of this model can be traced back to the pedagogical ideals of the Enlightenment, to the styles of intellectual education of the modern freethinker, to the associative practices of the Carbonari conspirators, to the total dedication of vocational revolutionaries such as Auguste Blanqui, to the “romantic” sensibility of the generation of the years 1830 to 1848, and to the activism of famous émigrés fighting for the liberation of unredeemed peoples, the most famous example of which was the cause of the freedom of Poland. All these immediate antecedents converged in the formation of the personality of the anarcho-individualists and the anarchists who defined themselves as “revolutionaries”, the two sub-species of the anarchist genre at the end of the 19th century. The preparation of anarchist subjectivity, of the ethical core of the will, was aimed at sustaining a “revolutionary morality” that served to harden oneself in the face of persecution and not to falter in the face of the meagre results of the propaganda of ideas. It would so ready the individual, that even a single anarchist would feel capable of founding publications or establishing labour unions, libraries and cultural centres. This was also the sentiment and approach of the twelve apostles of Christ. Being a revolutionary meant “having morals”, not only to become an “exemplary case” respected even by one’s political enemies, but also to strengthen the spirit and maintain the faith, just as Christians did in the face of temptation or martyrdom. Even more, to “have morals” in order to become “counterweights” to specific historical circumstances, as happened with defendants who in court were able to “turn around” the arguments of the prosecution or, at the other extreme, with European explorers who were capable of conquering entire regions for their nation on their own. They too had “iron morals”. But no one can sink steel foundations into their soul unless they have faith in the advent of a new world. The anarchists believed. That is a gift that is not granted to everyone. But they were not religious in the usual sense of the word: the mystery of political faith was balanced by a solid rationalist (even, at times, scientistic) education and a taste for Voltairean scepticism. They were centaurs: half reason, half messianic impulse.
But if we momentarily set aside the immediate hatred of the oppressor and the happy images of a world without chains (that is, without a state, without prisons, without armed forces, without police, without a Pope, without bosses, without surplus value, without courts, without noble privileges, without butcheries, etc.), we can then see the cultural achievements of anarchism, and especially the cultural contours of its ethical practices of self-education, which served, first, to help forge revolutionary character, and then to constantly test the relationship between one’s own life and one’s ideals. A first series of “obligations of conscience” distinguished them from other political “partisanship” and operated as a kind of guiding principle in the face of coercive pressure from bourgeois institutions. Anarchists did not accept compulsory military service; they deserted. They did not accept marriage under the regulation of the Church or the State; they freely joined their partners in a practice known as “free love”, which was scandalous for its time. As far as possible, they did not send their children to religious or state schools, but to free or “rationalist” schools. They did not baptise their children following the calendar of saints; they tended to use meaningful names. They did not accept promotions in the workplace or salary hierarchies; they worked alongside their colleagues and on the same pay scale. They also sought to be good workers, to set an example both to the idle, rentier bourgeoisie and to other workers who would one day build a world different from the ruins of the present one. Anarchists should not vote in elections, but should try to reach consensus on the decisions to be taken by their groups or unions. They should refuse to testify in court if this would prejudice someone accused for reasons of state. They should not accept the holidays dictated by the state (an agreement by the FORA, the Argentine anarchist trade union confederation, recommended that its members inform their employers that the only labour holiday they would respect would be 1st of May, the Day of the Worker, which did not exist in the calendar of holidays at that time, and that in the case of state or religious holidays, they would demand to work). Nor should alms or tips be given, as the right thing to do is to ensure a decent wage. Anarchists had to offer hospitality to persecuted comrades. In some extreme cases, many anarchists refused to play cards or gamble money in order not to promote the struggle of “all against all”. Nor were “fifteenth” – la quinceañera– birthdays celebrated. If possible, their newspapers should be sold at cost (some early 20th-century Argentine publications read on their front pages: “Price: from each according to their means”). Eventually, they should practise civil disobedience. Finally, they should be equipped and prepared culturally and politically to stand in the front line alongside the peoples who rebelled. And there were many anarchists who renounced individual graves in their wills, preferring the communal ossuary. Others donated their bodies “to science.”
This ethical decalogue promoted a model of conduct that necessarily required inner strength. A series of introspective practices contributed to self-affirmation, ranging from reading books of ideas, social and historical novels that told stories of heroes and popular revolts, to the first trials by fire of social struggle with which the new adherent to the ideas became intimate, whether they be strikes, pickets, the smuggling of newspapers or weapons, followed by the inevitable periods spent in prison, an amniotic fluid well known to militants, and at the same time a breeding ground for anarchists. All the anarchists’ practices of “self-care” were aimed at developing a powerful subjectivity (a “will”) in the face of state power. We encounter the opposite problem to that of the ancient Stoics: it was not a question of promoting self-restraint in order to be able to govern others, but of containing within oneself a series of well-established principles in order not to be governed. Those who governed themselves and refused to be governed were presented as “rebellious men”, refractory but at the same time enlightened and rational: unyielding debaters. The education of the will was developed mainly in a political, psychological and emotional niche that turned out to be the most striking organisational invention of all those promoted by anarchism: the affinity group, which, until the sudden explosion of trade unions organised around libertarian principles and around 1900, constituted the usual way for anarchists to meet and interact, and they continue to be so to this day. The origins of these groups can be found in their antecedents, the revolutionary club of the French Revolution era and the conspiratorial sects in times of autocratic and repressive governments. But in a subterranean way, the affinity group responded and mirrored the growing importance that friendship as a social practice of equals was beginning to acquire in modern metropolises. It was as if friendship had become a liberated territory, an “outside the state” where the revolutionary political triangle of liberty, equality and fraternity had been transformed into a model of intersubjective reciprocity, even within practices typical of bourgeois sensibilities. The characteristic feature of the anarchist affinity group lay not only in its reciprocal horizontality and the common ideological affiliation of its members, but also in the mutual trust that cemented the contact between its members, and in its empathetic plasticity, because the members related to each other, above all, socially and emotionally. It operated as a counterweight and alternative to the bourgeois family and the labour order, and also constituted a space for learning knowledge or trades. Sometimes, those who joined an affinity group changed their name, choosing a unique nickname, which was not so much an alias or a “nom de guerre”, as the nominal proof of the inner transformation achieved.
Taking ideas seriously meant making them a part of one’s existence, as inalienable as the activity of any other bodily organ. The “idea” settled between the kidney and the lung, or between the stomach and the arterial network: the graft took root until it became flesh. At crucial historical moments or in certain extreme situations, this intimate metamorphosis led some anarchists to produce spectacular acts. The examples of attacks on crowned heads are the most widespread, but not necessarily the most representative. Consider two cases of “sharpening ethical tension” that Luce Fabbri mentions in Historia de un hombre livre [History of a Free Man]. When anarchists were called up as recruits or to perform military service, they often deserted and crossed borders to avoid it. But the decision was not always taken in time. Thus, the inevitable moment of being called up could put a man in a state of intense inner turmoil. Thus, Luce Fabbri recalls the case of the Italian bricklayer Augusto Massetti, who in October 1911 used the rifle he had just been issued to shoot the colonel who was haranguing the new recruits preparing to leave for Libya. The case became a celebrated anti-militarist cause in those years of Italy’s expansionist push toward Africa. The other case concerns the schoolteacher Aldo Bernardi, who threw his rifle to the floor of the barracks from which he was to leave for the front and improvised an anarchist speech right there. He was saved from execution because his relatives were able to pass him off as a madman, although he would die shortly after the war, like so many millions of others, from the Spanish flu.
Conversion practices would begin right after the aspiring anarchist had approached and undergone an initial maceration process within the affinity group. The degree of depth of these practices depended on the context, the stage of historical development of the anarchist movement, and the ideological radicalism of the group to which the new member belonged, but also on the new member’s “free will”. It was common to renounce family wealth, titles of nobility (a tradition that started during the French Revolution), and “bourgeois” customs. However, these renunciations did not correspond to the model of the “proletarianisation” of youth that would become common and mandatory during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, it was about purging oneself of a “false life” or one endowed with privileges and trappings that became meaningless in the new, self-aware stage of life. Occasionally, the person would abandon their old name and choose to “rebaptise” themselves with a pseudonym. Thus, a well-known Colombian anarchist came to be called Biófilo Panclasta (lover of life, destroyer of everything), and names such as Perseguido, Germinal, or Libertario became more and more common. Many also chose an alias when publishing in the anarchist press, as a way of emphasising that opinions, but also the literary works of famous authors, did not belong to the individual but to all of humanity. In other words, the right to intellectual property was challenged; a right, moreover, that anarchists traditionally tend to ignore completely. The practice of renaming oneself is linked to the history of the French Revolution, in whose early stages the years began counting from zero and the months took on the names of natural cycles. The longing for the beginning of a new world was thus backdated, or brought forward. Auguste Blanqui numbered the copies of one of his many newspapers, Ni Dieu ni Maître, according to the Jacobin calendar, and in Argentina, the newspaper La Montaña, founded by Leopoldo Lugones, José Ingenieros and Macedonio Fernández, was dated according to the years that had passed since the Paris Commune. In these cases, it was emphasised that time, although irreversible, could be stopped and diverted in favour of the cause. Likewise, trade unions used to distribute revolutionary almanacs and calendars among their members, in which the saints’ days and state holidays were replaced by events in the history of the labour movement and the birth dates of revolutionaries or benefactors of humanity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, anarchists, particularly in Spain but also in the Río de la Plata region, took to naming their children with relevant and meaningful names that would identify them as the premature offspring of a new order. There were many historical tributes (Spartacus, Volterina, Giordano Bruno, Prometheus), doctrinal affirmations (Acracio, Libertad, Libertario, Alba de Revolución, Ideal, Progreso, Liberata, Liberto), oppressive birthmarks (Oprimido, Siberiano), internal tributes to the anarchist movement (Bakunin, Reclús), natural references (Amanecer, Universo, Aurora, Sol Libertario), and also Eleuterio (free man in Greek), Poema, Amor, Esperanza, Floreal and many others that nourished their own onomastics. This same movement denounced the current situation and challenged the calendar of saints, or paid homage to the fallen and announced the future. The names of many Argentine anarchist newspapers of that era exposed a series of speculative games with their own identity and with the fears of bourgeois society. Some took on names immediately associated with power and affirmation, such as El Oprimido [The Oppressed], El Rebelde [The Rebel], La Protesta [The Protest], La Antorcha [The Torch], Agitadores [Agitators], El Combate [The Combat], Demoliamo [Let’s Demolish], Il Pugnale [The Dagger], Cyclone, Escalpelo [Scalpel], Hierro [Iron], El Látigo del Obrero [The Worker’s Whip], El Martillo [The Hammer], Los Parias [The Outcasts], El Perseguido [The Persecuted], La Rivolta [The Revolt], or La Voz del Esclavo [The Voice of the Slave]. Other titles, which also conveyed positivity, acquired auroral resonances or self-definitions of an enlightened nature, including El Alba del Siglo XX [Dawn of the 20th Century], L’Avvenire [The Future], Ciencia Social [Social Science], Derecho a la Vida [Right to Life], Expansión Individual [Individual Flourishing/Expansion], La Fuerza de la Razón [The Force of Reason], Libre Examen [Free Reflection/Free Examination], La Libera Parola [The Free Word], La Libre Iniciativa [Free Initiative], La Luz [The Light], and Los Tiempos Nuevos [New Times].
The introduction to anarchist ideas was often carried out by “teachers”, who were transmitters of social memory, the history of the anarchist movement, and ideas. Teaching was not necessarily linked to reading books, even though they were highly valued in the anarchist tradition, but rather to the personalised knowledge of someone already experienced in libertarian doctrine. However, those who acted as “teachers” were not required to be “scholars”, but rather a mixture of “initiated” individuals and evangelists. It was common for those with experience to lead “commented readings” in unions and cultural centres for groups of people with no formal education or who were new to anarchism. But despite the fact that cinema, at least in Argentina, and a certain sensitive commonplace of progressivism, have spread the image of the benevolent and ethical “old anarchist”, in truth the task of teaching could fall to very young people who were only five or ten years older than the new militant. It was undoubtedly a relationship between adults and young people, but not in the sense that ages have today. This type of initiation was in force until the 1960s, when youth rebellions and a “youth” centred ideology broke this model of transmission. Since then, entry into anarchism has occurred through contagion, through “gang” activism. Soon after “the teaching”, the new militant underwent initiation tests of another kind, such as trips to publicise ideas in places untouched by libertarian ideas or where very few anarchists resided. Sometimes these pilgrimages were made to support a particular strike or struggle, and the best speakers and organisers were usually the most sought after. These days in no man’s land exposed them to police harassment, but also to the incomprehension of their families, who perceived this activism as a risk to the family’s finances and harmony. The exercises in public speaking, which first took place at cultural centres or trade union meetings, and later at public events, provided training for the traveller. On the one hand, nothing prepared the man of “ideas” for the usual stays in prison. But everyone could rely on the solidarity that would emanate from the other side of the walls. And on the other hand, those who mistreated prisoners, tortured detainees or repressed workers’ gatherings knew that they could be the target of tribal revenge. In any case, in almost all cases of anarchist “vigilantes”, they acted in the utmost solitude.
Every day, experiences were lived together, to be then shared in usually weekly events, events which both socially united the anarchist community and prepared them intellectually and spiritually. A series of rituals of fraternisation and exaltation, which were also shared by other socialist institutions, bound anarchists to their organisation and to their fellow comrades. Active participation in conferences and soirées, attendance at recitals and popular theatre (probably the roots of independent theatre in Argentina), going to fraternisation picnics and comrade lunches, collaboration with strike pickets or solidarity campaigns in favour of prisoners, and taking part in marches and rallies. In all these cases, revolutionary songs and anthems were usually sung. It is also worth noting the participation with active audiences in “reuniones de controversia” [organised debates]. These consisted of public speaking tournaments in which two contenders, one an anarchist and the other a follower of a different philosophy, debated on an agreed-upon topic, such as the existence or non-existence of God, or the importance of Darwin’s theories. In this latter case, the strong belief of anarchists, typical of the time, in the transformative power of public speech is evident. The aim of these rituals and participations was to inspire and shape noble feelings, and to uproot the “evils of subjectivity” that divide human beings. Personal libraries closed the circle. All anarchists, even those who were illiterate, patiently armed themselves with a library of “ideas”. Books contained salvation through knowledge, and the importance of self-education among anarchists is still an unexplored topic. Sometimes, the only luggage anarchists carried with them in their migrations was their basic library. There must have been few political movements less anti-intellectual than the libertarian one, which took care to emphasise the importance of linking manual and intellectual work in a single unbreakable thread. The treasured books included the history of modern revolutions, anarchist classics, biographies of fallen militants, memoirs of well-known anarchists, testimonies of imprisonment and persecution, compendiums of “modern” science, and the inevitable social novels. Of all these, the autobiographies of militants, whose equivalents are too often the saints’ calendars and martyrologies, constitute a fundamental source of information for analysing the anarchist ethical life. Also, of course, there were the minutes of union meetings, what was published in their press, particularly if one analyses the details and the marginalia, and doctrinal works in general. One should not however ignore the analyses of the works of the heretics of the time or of the critics of anarchism. Some proved to be excellent exegetes, negatively, of their modern heresy. There remains one source that historians interested in anarchism have not always been able to access: police archives.
At the beginning of the 20th century, two discourses aimed at caring for the child’s mind and the body in general began to spread among anarchists: that of the modern school and that of eugenics. Rationalist or “modern” schools spread widely in Spain, and there were also some similar, short-lived experiments in Argentina. They spread as alternative institutions and doctrines to the ecclesiastical authority over the pedagogical training of children and to the circulation of state rhetoric in school curricula. There, they instilled scientific knowledge, freedom as an ideal, the comprehensive development of students, and the coexistence of manual and intellectual knowledge. In these schools, punishments and admonitions were eliminated, as well as pre-established hierarchies between teachers and students. The anthropological assumption that guided them presented children as naturally freethinkers, and religious ideas, state patronage, and patriotism as distorting forces of the child’s mind. Educating children for a different world, the one awaited for in the not-too-distant future, also entailed building that world through new generations protected from the clutches of the old society. It is worth noting that, albeit in an incipient manner, anarchists also proposed plans for ideal cities for social life, which should not be confused with the tradition of perfect utopias, but rather with the improvement of working-class living. At the same time, eugenics discourse, while not entirely unrelated to the sanitary and hygienic concerns of the time, was presented as a cultural fringe barely acceptable to bourgeois mentality. In anarchism, eugenics discourse encompassed various concerns: the spread of vegetarianism, nudism, anti-smoking, criticism of alcohol consumption (a book published in Portuguese was titled “Alcoholism or Revolution”), responsible or “conscious” procreation (of neo-Malthusian origins) that preached the need to restrict births in order to avoid working-class misery, the promotion of condom use in working-class neighbourhoods, the advertising of other contraceptive methods in the anarcho-eugenicist press, and general worker health care. All of this intersected with discourses on free love, the importance of elective affinities, and free will. In May 1937, Federica Montseny, anarchist health minister during the Spanish Revolution, authorised public hospitals to treat women who wished to terminate a pregnancy. This was a historic measure that transcended government concern over the practice of clandestine abortion and was part of the more general anarchist attempt to subvert morality, allowing in turn for the public dissemination of a radical knowledge and discourse on sexuality. Eugenics intersects at this point with the critique of “hypocritical” bourgeois marriage and the postulate of the right to one’s own body. The anarchist discourse on sexuality is complex for within it we find scientifically inspired analysis of sexuality, a social concern rooted in medicine and hygiene, and relational ideals nourished by romanticism, which does not exclude a dose of voluptuous discursive eroticization, in which the so-called “Armandists,” followers of the individualist doctrines of E. Armand, excelled. The Armandists, or readers of the Brazilian María Lacerda de Moura, propagandised the right to pleasure as a “natural” right of human beings. Eugenics discourse and the defence of comprehensive and rationalist education had an objective that went beyond even a concern for a healthy life and concern for the child’s mind, as their guiding ideal was a critique of the “false life,” the alienated life characteristic of the bourgeoisie. Thus, eugenics and rationalism sought to reverse the dose of vital alienation introjected by the “false” society, as well as to promote less insincere and healthier existential practices. How many of these practices were actually carried out? Some were carried out extensively; others, scarcely. Some were the hunting ground of those who experimented with different ways of being, of living. Others were sustained within alternative community experiments, and many were assumed only by anarcho-individualists or bohemians. Most of these customs and models of behaviour were neither obligatory nor enforced. Anarchism was never an orthodox sect, nor did it have a “black book” in which a precept could be consulted. The acceptance of practices was free, and they spread like currents of opinion, spreading contagiously or inspiring enthusiasm, but not as a creed. Over the course of a lifetime, adherents of anarchist ideas could go through various stages and degrees of approximation to the ideal of vegetarianism or free love. As anarchism recruited more and more members among the industrial proletariat, the possibility of experimentation on the fringes of bourgeois life diminished, but it never ceased to circulate in the anarchist press and in the lectures of specialists given in unions, athenaeums, and libraries. It could be said that the greatness of this existential panoply can be measured by the degree of its rejection at the time, as well as by the lesser emphasis placed on these issues by other political doctrines.
Both in their public actions, in the discussion of and conversation around certain scabrous or taboo topics, and in the written propaganda of their ideas, anarchists never took refuge in a rhetoric of convenience or in “Machiavellian” or opportunistic strategies, even when the consequences of such actions and opinions were costly, or even lethal to their immediate political survival. In short, they never lied about who they were or what they wanted. The machinations, hypocrisies, disguises, and “operations” that liberals and communists would resort to with such fervour during the Cold War were completely alien to them. Political sincerity was one of their “obligations of identity”, a condition derived from their intransigence regarding ideas (which did not necessarily make them doctrinaire) and from the fact that the rationality of their actions was based on a firm alignment between conduct and stated beliefs. This explains why they tended to identify themselves, without the slightest doubt, as “anarchists” when they were brought before the courts. It also helps to understand the center of gravity of their political drama: absolute responsibility for their own convictions diminished their “effectiveness” (if defined from a “technical” point of view and according to the dominant values ??of the 19th and 20th centuries) and audibility, although it granted them the rare prestige of having an “excess of reason”. Telling the truth is always costly, but in their case, it was perceived as essential: combating government arbitrariness, denouncing the mistreatment of employers and “Cossacks,” recording and bearing witness to the persecution of unions and popular protests. These “excessive truths” received commensurate blows. Political assassinations of anarchist union organisers were common in 1920s Spain and, in general, throughout Latin America. They were deported from Argentina (the 1902 Residency Law); they were expelled from Brazil as “undesirables”; or they received long sentences served in spectral and inhospitable prisons (in Tierra del Fuego, in the Amazon rainforest, near the Guianas); confinement in Siberia or on Italian islets; in Spanish and Portuguese colonial possessions in Africa; or in French Papua New Guinea. And they were also forced into military service, as “asocial” elements, in harsh “disciplinary campaigns” (in Italy, at the time of the war in Libya). Added to this were the cyclical bans on activities and the destruction of printing presses, archives, and newspaper offices. Of course, prisons turned out to be hermetically sealed suitcases, but with a false bottom: they were transformed into spaces for raising awareness among other “social” prisoners. And the prohibitions were nothing more than nuisances, occupational hazards. Not only because they themselves granted themselves the right to publish their “samizdats,” but also because in the field of clandestine activity, the anarchists were experts. Apart from that, no anarchist ever had it easy. It could be said that they lived under conditional freedom. Political sincerity extended to other areas of activity, particularly in relation to the notable scrupulousness maintained regarding monetary matters. The accounting records of the anarchist labour unions were perfect. Many historians of the Spanish Civil War have been able to reconstruct monetary movements from the records of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo – CNT/National Confederation of Labour. The condition of illegality did not exempt militants from this “financial honesty,” even in the “extreme cases,” much debated among them, of “expropriators” and “counterfeiters.” The “collected funds” could not be used for personal use; they belonged to the people or were funds to be donated for cultural or organisational activities. These were the rules of their jurisprudence, which extended to ideological or relational problems between comrades, for which “honour tribunals” were established, if necessary. Anarcho-syndicalists, expropriators, anti-Franco guerrillas, anarcho-individualists, combatants alongside the Maquis or the partisans, regicides, “free women” in Spain, “Wobblies,” “foristas” [of the Argentine FORA – Federación Obrera Regional Argentina], “ceneteros” [of the Spanish CNT – Confederación Nacional del Trabajo], organisers of strikes against the United Fruit Company, and dozens of other variants, all of them tried, as far as possible, to live and die by their law.
Their “law”: To what extent did anarchists not experience a spiritual tension between the effort to “improve” the soul and the unfathomable spiritual turbulence that spills over into violent impulses? The tension was likely unavoidable. Their actions were often bloody and senseless; other times sacrificial and dignified. They were beings of extremes. Just as the history of modern capitalism and industrial society is inseparable from the rise of syndicalism, so anarchism is also incomprehensible without its antipode, hierarchy. The anarchist and the monarch always measured each other, like geological layers that do not merge even though they recognize and study each other, like deer that eventually clash on fighting fields. But this same tension fuels the tendency to isolate oneself centripetally within one’s own ideas and cultural practices, as well as conjuring up complex osmotic relationships between the “anarchist soul” and the “bourgeois soul,” links that must be analysed through the metamorphic processes that their mutual struggle produces on the disputed border.
During the time when anarchism exerted a clear influence on labour union action, on popular sensibilities in specific domains of the West, and on parts of “enlightened” public opinion, it operated as a political and anthropological force that mobilised a fertile disorder and harassed the forces of tradition and statism. Along with other political ideas and actors, it collaborated in the disorganisation of the political and spiritual heritage of the ancien régime. At the same time, anarchism spread a model of free personality, a demanding ideal whose historic achievement consisted of exerting pressure on, – a departure or deviation from -, modern beliefs and institutions, but also on the desires for greater individual autonomy and broader freedom that were already germinating in the social imagination of the 20th century. In short, its insistence that the state hindered free association as much as it hindered the creative capacities of human beings transformed it into a sort of antipodal symbol of the hierarchical imagination. But its zigzagging circulation in the world of ideas and the different fate that befell its seditious efforts cannot be explained solely by the radical political angle it occupied in modernity. Anarchism also proved to be the peculiar emergence of a new type of social relationship that vast parts of the Western population already yearned for and practiced: the taste for elective affinity. On the other hand, as a demographic minority sustained by ethical practices (the irreducibility of conscience, the non-negotiability of beliefs, the construction of countervailing institutions, the deployment of affinity groups, and specific self-education rituals), anarchist lives themselves, always fluctuating between a dark hue and a lyrical aura, constituted a moral model that intermittently attracted the refractory energies of successive waves of young people. Understanding the force of this attraction is not simple, and the psychological explanation, namely, that young people need a temporary stay in hell or else to maintain their sense of unreality intact until they finally “settle down,” is of little use. Undoubtedly, the adjective “revolutionary” fits anarchism like a glove, but among the facets that this idea allowed, that of “existential subversion” stands out. Anarchism constituted a radical subjective response that mobilised the social unrest of its time. Throughout the 19th century, social anger regarding hunger and autocracy made possible the development of oppositional political and union movements. Hunger corresponded to the demand for labour and human dignity, and socialism, unionism, and populism were its spokespersons. Autocracy corresponded to the demand for greater civil rights, and liberalism, socialism, and feminism became political responses. Anarchism participated, as a loose element, in this spectrum. However, the question of the “false life”, characteristic of the vital distortions of the bourgeois era, also became a widespread source of social unrest. The concern with relational insincerity, boredom, “vital alienation”, and emotional self-restraint are themes that ran throughout modernity, from romanticism to the existentialist rebellions of the 1960s. Anarchists’ insistence on the question of a false life and their own faceted lives as moral exemplars may explain why refractory sensibilities adapted more readily to anarchism, or to its lateral or parallel variants, rather than other movements of ideas; and it is also the reason for its strange current survival, once its formerly powerful labour unions and revolutionary participation became little more than historical records for the academic world, which is still interested in this type of political heresy. This survival is not equivalent to the constant growth of weeds in a well-tended garden, but rather to a somatic rash on a body that has been repeatedly persuaded to bow its neck or vent its anguish in spaces previously delimited for that purpose. As long as this anguish persists, anarchism can re-emerge as the return of what has been poorly repressed. The red devil and the wandering Jew have been emblems etched in anarchist history. So have the phoenix and the revived Lazarus.
Christian Ferrer, “Átomos sueltos: Vidas refractarias”, Cabezas de tormenta: Ensayos sobre lo ingobernable. Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza ed., 2004.