Global Anarchism Today and a Century Ago
By: Dr. Kirwin R. Shaffer, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies
“The end of history.” Those famous words written by Francis Fukuyama in 1992 expressed the supposed fate of the world with the end of the Cold War. Soviet-style state communism had been defeated, grand ideological conflicts were now a thing of the past, and everyone could get on with working, shopping, and consuming. The future sure was bright.
So, what happened? Political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that what had emerged in the post-Cold War world was not peace and prosperity but a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam. Such responses to explaining the state of the world gained prominence in the United States after September 11, 2001. But what most people failed to recall was that Osama bin Laden–while professing a puritanical Islamist agenda–was little more than a murderous, religious-fascist millionaire, and his “big money” had relied on the very global capitalist economy that Huntington and his followers would have one believe bin Laden now wanted to destroy.
Another story–related to the research that I do–actually occurred two years before September 11. In November 1999, the first World Trade Organization meeting was scheduled in Seattle, Washington. Big government and corporate capitalism intended on setting the rules to regulate global production and commerce with no democratic oversight, input, or transparency. Then the anarchists showed up and shut down the WTO. Suddenly the world saw that, in fact, the real post-Cold War story was not one of the West versus Islam but one of strong state-supported capitalist globalization versus decentralized, democratic, anti-capitalist globalization. “The Battle of Seattle” was the first globally televised confrontation of the people versus the rich overlords who stood to make the most from “the end of history.”
The surge of anarchist groups around the world beginning in the 1990s mirrors the same phenomenon a century earlier. Radical leftists worked to create egalitarian societies of free individuals liberated from authoritarian institutions, such as financial and industrial capitalism, governments (even supposedly “democratic” ones), and organized religion. While these institutions’ defenders claimed that they were necessary to organize individuals into honest, productive, God-fearing citizens, anarchists rejected such claims, saying these institutions actually destroyed humanity’s “natural” tendencies toward free cooperation and human progress by making people less free, as well as dependent upon and subservient to self-interested, power-mad “leaders.”
In Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century, anarchist organizations emerged in most countries to differing degrees. The strongest anarchist movements were in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba. Anarchists worked with labor unions to coordinate demonstrations and strikes for higher wages, better working conditions, and shorter hours, and to protest workers being lured into the Catholic Church or electoral politics where they would only be deceived, controlled, and exploited in the interests of those ruling their countries.
But anarchists were more than just labor radicals; they were cultural radicals as well. Wherever they existed, anarchists set up alternative venues for their followers and potential followers. They published hundreds of novels and short stories, and they staged plays for audiences as a form of entertainment and education in an era when movie theatres were only being born and radio had yet to reach a broad audience.
Distrusting both public and religious schools—the former they saw as instilling a debilitating nationalistic chauvinism in children, the latter they saw as anti-science and full of backward hocus-pocus—anarchists created night schools for workers and alternative day schools for their children to learn about the world from an anarchist perspective.
Finally, some anarchists promoted alternative lifestyles like nudism and free unions of men and women living together without the “official” approval of the state or the church. Some pursued alternative dietary and health practices; others opened vegetarian restaurants and offered holistic and alternative medical treatments for ailments and to promote good health. Anarchists designed all of these alternatives to prepare men, women, and children of all races, ethnicities, and classes for a coming “new dawn” when the unholy trinity of church, state, and capital would be overthrown and a new egalitarian society, free from authoritarianism, would reign.
These were not so much national movements; rather, anarchists saw themselves as “global citizens” and internationalists. They believed that their local and national struggles to free humanity were part of a global struggle of liberation. As a result, while anarchists built local and national organizations, they also linked themselves to international movements. Their newspapers were financed from around the globe and distributed with equal breadth, their novels were translated and read internationally, and their plays were adopted and adapted into different settings. Finally, these men and women from Latin America created regional networks of radicals where anarchists migrated from place to place, raising money for and consciousness of global anarchist causes.
My own research has focused on anarchists in the Caribbean. In Puerto Rico, Panama, Cuba, and Southern Florida, anarchists engaged in the very labor and cultural radicalism outlined above. They also formed a regional Caribbean network with Havana, Cuba, as the hub where newspapers, money, and migrating radicals passed through to other parts of the Caribbean. But the Caribbean was unique in the history of anarchism in the Americas. In the early twentieth century, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama had just been “liberated” from Spanish or Colombian control, only to come under the imperial control of an expanding United States. Thus, when anarchists in these countries worked to create their vision of new, free societies, they did so in the climate of newly liberated societies, but against the dollar and dagger of U.S. imperialism.
While twenty-first-century anarchists send money and information along digitized communication networks and jet to conferences or demonstrations at record speeds, their predecessors could be found in Latin America in the early 1900s doing the same–just a bit more slowly. Anarchists in the Caribbean forged a network to battle North American-led capitalist globalization that finds its legacy in today’s struggles. In fact, the Caribbean Basin in the early twentieth century was the site of the first confrontation in the century-long struggle between international anarchists and representatives of U.S. foreign policy.