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1. The Reader In the Factory

In an influential survey, The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society, Walter B. Rideout takes just two pages to consider the literary production of anarchists, pondering “why the movement should have produced no novels”: perhaps, he speculates, this was due to “absorption in labor struggles and the task of propagandizing, the lack of an amenable publisher … or the Anarchist ‘temperament,’ which expended itself more readily in personal reminiscence, critical analyses, short poems, and long arguments.” In any case, the question is only of interest in that “the nonexistence of such novels emphasizes by contrast the domination of radical fiction at that time by the Socialist writers.”61 Subsequent scholars have allowed this judgment to stand, even as they have sought to overturn almost every other aspect of the midcentury critical establishment. Alan M. Wald, in Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics agrees: “No one … has as yet been successful in making the argument for a substantial achievement in fiction, poetry, or literary criticism on the part of social democrats and anarchists, or other types of radicals in the 1930s or thereafter.”62 Rideout’s book was republished in 1992, and a more recent survey, Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction 1929–1941, mentions—purely in passing—only a single anarchist novel.63

This failure to find any “substantial achievement” by anarchists in the field of literature doesn’t just mean that there are not enough anarchist books to talk about; this is not just a quantitative but a qualitative judgment, one we find repeated even in scholarship focusing on anarchist cultural production. In fact, scholars who give the matter any attention often call attention to the sheer volume of anarchist cultural production (fig. 1): “During the two years 1922 and 1923,” remarks Arif Dirlik, “more than seventy anarchist publications appeared inside and outside China.” Marcello Zane remarks on the bulk of column space given to poetry in Spanish anarchist newspapers (nearly two hundred poems published in twenty-one papers between 1882 and 1910), while Serge Salaün catalogs some 8,500 anarchist poems (by around 3,400 poets) published during the Spanish Civil War alone, and María-Luisa Siguán remarks on the “rather high” print runs (10,000–50,000 copies apiece) of the six hundred popular fiction titles in the Novela Ideal series issued by the anarchist journal La Revista Blanca.64 These observations are almost always followed, however, by variously disparaging or apologetic accounts of the “weak” quality of the product—“more of a brief cry of anguish than an argued essay,” as Peter Zarrow puts it, describing a typical entry in the journal Tianyi Bao (Natural Justice, 1907–1908).65 Anarchist cultural productions are generally described as a matter of “propaganda” rather than literature, “maudlin and bombastic” in tone, “didactic” in intent, permeated by a simplistic “moral dualism” or “angry naïveté”—in short, as Siguán concludes, “quite similar to ‘party literature,’” of historical interest at best.66 Only if it is considered strictly from the standpoint of “a sociological phenomenon” can this “boring and banal manipulation of the literary code” be worthy of our interest, for Maria Eugenia Boaventura; considered in itself, all this literature presents is “a shopworn language, full of clichés”—ironically, a “conservative, moralistic and even authoritarian” discourse.67 All of this underscores what is, for David Weir, the “unfortunate but poignant paradox: that innovative, progressive art is no guarantee of social progress”—and vice versa, as Zane puts it, that revolutionary content is “unable to find really innovative words and structures.”68 In other words: if it’s anarchist (in content), it ain’t literary (in form), and if it’s literature, it can’t possibly be anarchist.

Fig. 1: A sampling of the worldwide anarchist press, ca. 1930 (Foto-Semo; image courtesy of International Institute of Social History).

Sometimes—in the apologetic version of this judgment—the supposed incompatibility of anarchist content and literary form is confined to the domain of writing. Weir, for one, asserts that “the kind of culture that practicing anarchists preferred”—lectures, performances, songs—“was insistently oral in character,” noting, for instance, “Emma Goldman’s interest in modern drama as an important cultural medium for anarchist ideology.” He goes so far as to argue that “the form of the novel itself” militates against anarchism:

The argument is often made that the novel is the cultural form par excellence for the expression of day-to-day experience in the capitalist nation-state, and it very well may be that the ideological influences that have shaped the novel into its traditional realist form make it an inappropriate medium for the cultural expression of anarchism.… The tradition of the nineteenth-­century novel … requires a formal mode of narrative discourse that cannot accommodate the largely oral culture of anarchism.69

It is interesting to contrast this with Goldman’s own assessment, in her introduction to the most widely read collection of her writings, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910):

My great faith in the wonder worker, the spoken word, is no more. I have realized its inadequacy to awaken thought, or even emotion.… Oral propaganda is at best but a means of shaking people from their lethargy: it leaves no lasting impression. The very fact that most people attend meetings only if aroused by newspaper sensations, or because they expect to be amused, is proof that they really have no inner urge to learn. It is altogether different with the written mode of human expression. No one, unless intensely interested in progressive ideas, will bother with serious books.70

Here, Goldman appeals to the traditional association of the spoken word with ephemerality, as opposed to the permanence of the written word, in a way that would not surprise literary scholars who have been trained to suss out the prejudices associated with “the illusion of full and present speech.”71 This illusion, we are told, dates back to the arch-authoritarian Plato, who has Socrates inveigh against the art of writing. Relying on the oral process of dialogue as a means to discover truth, Socrates finds all written texts—presumably including those of his disciple Plato, which claim to present records of his spoken words—to be inadequate simulations of living speech.72 Writing introduces a gap between author and reader, a spatial and temporal void in which the original meaning can be lost, so that when Shelley’s “Traveler from an antique land” shows up to read King Ozymandias’s words—“look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”—they have been reversed, undone, rendered irremediably ironic by the sheer passage of time (“Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away”).73 In the absence of the author, the author-ity of the written word is ruined.

We might expect, as Weir imagines, that Goldman would condemn the written word as lifeless and abstract in comparison with the immediacy of living speech; no one worries about the effects of writing “fire” in a crowded theater. Orality does take on a certain importance in anarchist resistance culture, as we shall see—partly, as Weir suggests, because it “gets round the problem of illiteracy that many anarchists faced (especially in Spain).” But this, too, is used to disqualify anarchism, once again depicted as a politics of “primitive rebels,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase—a vestige of the premodern world, without a future.74

It is true that Goldman was a public speaker, a specialist in incendiary speech; perhaps the better part of her militant life was spent in free speech fights, in physical confrontations with hecklers and police over the right to a public audience for subversion, sex, solidarity, and sedition. And yet her brief, in this introduction to her own essays, is for reading, not for hearing:

In meetings the audience is distracted by a thousand non-­essentials. The speaker, though ever so eloquent, cannot escape the restlessness of the crowd, with the inevitable result that he will fail to strike root. In all probability he will not even do justice to himself.

The relation between the writer and the reader is more intimate. True, books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them. That we can do so demonstrates the importance of written as against oral expression.…

I am not sanguine enough to hope that my readers will be as numerous as those who have heard me. But I prefer to reach the few who really want to learn, rather than the many who come to be amused.75

Goldman was not alone in this conception of the possibilities of writing. A writer for Barcelona’s Tierra Libre, for example, argues that anarchist newspapers are “the strongest, most universal, most effective action for propaganda” precisely because of this “intimate” quality:

The printed word works more and better within the consciousness of the individual; it suggests his own thoughts to him, intimate commentaries that increase the value of the concepts he reads about, and in this periodic conversation between him and the printed page, expanded concepts and new horizons emerge. The suggestion exerted by the press goes so far as to overcome the reader’s indifference or prejudice; then sooner or later, the newspaper becomes his inseparable companion, whom he soon presents to his friends of the workshop, the factory, or the soil, and with whom he identifies like the flesh of his flesh.76

It is important to note the difference, here, between these aspirations and those of, say, Lenin’s conception of vanguard leadership. While Lenin, too, speaks of the desirability of the revolutionary leaders and the led “becom[ing] intimate,” it is only this leadership that occupies the epistemological high ground of “correct revolutionary theory”;77 in effect, it stands out over against the proletariat, surveying it as if from above and outside. The masses cannot see themselves accurately (at best, they can achieve “trade-union consciousness”); they do not possess theoretical truth.78 Like empty vessels waiting to be filled, they must receive this theory from the vanguard. By contrast, the desire to suggest the reader’s own thoughts, to constitute an “intimate commentary,” is a desire not to instruct, to direct, to lead from above, but to form an internal bond. To read, on this account, is, as Daniel Colson puts it, a matter of writers and readers “establishing relations from the interior of that which constitutes them,” of “finding oneself in the other and finding the other within oneself as already there.”79

This appeal to the “intimate,” to a kind of identification and active partnership with the reader, is, according to Caroline Granier, precisely what the variety of novels written by anarchists have in common: they “try to establish a particular relationship with the reader, a relation that is not founded on authority.”80 Goldman’s hope for this non-authoritarian, personal relationship with the reader is great enough to override her fear that her written words, too, will be misunderstood, that they will not penetrate the veil of received ideas and prejudices mediating between the reader and the page. She is all too aware of the “disheartening tendency common among readers … to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality.” Specifically, she anticipates that she will be vilified both by socialists and by communist anarchists for excoriating, in the essay “Minorities versus Majorities,” the alleged passivity and conformity of the “mass,” endorsing instead the heroic individualism of Nietzsche and Stirner. The popular perception of these thinkers as antisocial elitists, which she regards as the work of “shallow interpreters,” obscures the “social possibilities” she takes to be implicit within their individualism. “No doubt,” she laments, despite these efforts to forestall or blunt these misreadings—efforts that were, as she foresaw, not entirely successful81—“I shall be excommunicated as an enemy of the people”; nonetheless, she is determined to stake her wager on the power of writing: “For the rest, my book must speak for itself.”82 As for this book, it will attempt not only to demonstrate that a written anarchist literature exists, but to treat its supposed paradoxes or impossibilities as questions to be investigated.

In his famous study, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor divorces the modern fiction of Maupassant, Hemingway, and Joyce from its folkloric antecedent, the oral tale. Where the folktale was told in the presence of hearers with a shared experience, within a community,

Almost from its beginnings the short story, like the novel, abandoned the devices of a public art in which the storyteller assumed the mass assent of an audience to his wildest improvisations—“and a queer thing happened him late one night.” It began, and continues to function, as a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, critical reader.

To both of these images of reading—“public” or “private,” “mass” or “solitary”—we could contrast another: that of the workers in a cigar factory, say, in Florida, Puerto Rico, or Cuba, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, listening to el lector—or, in some cases, la lectora—reading aloud from a raised platform called la tribuna. The selection—on the previous shift, a novel by Zola in Spanish translation; on this shift, a selection from Elisée Reclus’s scientific tract, the Nueva Geografia Universal; next time, the new edition of the anarchist newspaper La Voz del Esclavo—has been made, after deliberation, by a vote of the workers on the shop floor; they have chipped in perhaps a quarter each to pay for this performance, which is indeed something of a dramatic act (it is no easy thing to project one’s voice with enough amplitude to carry over the noise of three hundred workers in a single room, and it demands a certain stage presence).83 Is this a form of mass entertainment? A project of collective self-­improvement? Propaganda? Popular education? It is all of the above; and it is simultaneously oral and literate, communal and modern.

One of these lectores, Luisa Capetillo (1879–1922), who became an important anarchist labor organizer and propagandist for women’s equality, author of numerous essays and manifestos, also wrote poems and plays. Her three-act drama, La Influencia de las Ideas Modernas (1907), in fact, opens on a scene of reading: a young woman, Angelina, daughter of the patrón, Don Juan, is reading Tolstoy’s The Slavery of Our Times. At the beginning of the second act, Don Juan nervously observes her reading Zola’s Fecundity (“I already read Truth,” she tells him), and a few scenes later, he has been converted by her to Tolstoy’s gospel: “Yes, now I see that you have won me over,” he sighs, giving in to the strikers’ demands. Her friends Ernestina and Marieta are tougher to reach, as their devout mother only lets them read Christian tracts; “Don’t either of you read Malato or Kropotkin or Zola?” Angelina hectors them. “Do not buy finery or jewels, because books are worth more than they are,” she admonishes them, quoting from one of her books; “Adorn your understanding with their precious ideas, because there is no luxury that dazzles like the luxury of science.”84 Even if Capetillo, a dabbler in spiritism, has more optimism about the efficacy of reading than do her more materialist comrades, her fervor for reading, the urgency she lends to practices of self-education, are unmistakably anarchist traits. And if Javier Navarro Navarro is right, this faith was not entirely misplaced: a highly typical “life trajectory” for anarchists did begin with “a fellow worker, a relative, or an acquaintance lend[ing] a book, pamphlet, newspaper or magazine to a child or adolescent.”85 A recent study suggests that more continue to arrive at anarchism via the written word—albeit now often in electronic form—than orally (e.g., via social contacts or song lyrics). A surprisingly typical response: “Emma Goldman set me on fire.”86

Anarchists don’t regard ideas as pale reflections of material life; “the idea,” for Paul Brousse (1844–1912), can and should go “in flesh and blood.”87 Sometimes this is put into practice rather literally by anarchist authors such as Alberto Ghiraldo (1875–1946), José de Maturana (1884–1917) and Florencio Sánchez (1875–1910), who would actually go to read their own works aloud to worker audiences.88 At other times, the embodiment of ideas takes on an inward dimension: Alexander Berkman wrote rapturously of imaginings in which, “in transports of ecstasy, we kissed the image of the Social Revolution,” and Emma Goldman spoke of “my Ideal” as her “one Great Love.”89 Daniel Colson clarifies: “The anarchist Idea … is neither an ideal, nor a utopia, nor an abstraction; neither a program, nor a catalogue of regulations or prohibitions”; rather, “it is a living force … which, under certain circumstances, takes us outside of ourselves.”90 Accordingly, anarchists conceive of reading as an active, embodied practice, as Gustav Landauer describes it:

We think of the total effect that Goethe has had: we sit in peaceful composure of the body, a transfigured beauty and serenity appears on our faces, our muscles relax and our widened eyes gaze out over the land. We think of Ibsen: our foreheads wrinkle, our eyes look sharper and as if in evil doubt, our mouths twitch, our heads sway in uncertainty, and we touch our noses with one finger. But those who have beheld this wild man Tolstoy become his completely: we swing our arms forcefully, throw them up and back, thrust our heads and necks forward; the agitation of our soul has turned into turmoil, into an inability to stand still, a trembling, a rearing up, and a striding forth.91

When reading, then, an anarchist is not (only) engaged in abstract, silent, immobile cognition; reading becomes something concrete, physical, bodily, kinetic. The relation of reader to author is also imagined in terms of a kind of visceral, immediate presence that resists the anomie and isolation O’Connor identifies as the defining features of modern, urban, industrial life.

Anarchist readers, even when they are not really listeners to a lector or lectora, sometimes seem to be trying to create or recreate communal conditions through the practice of reading, in part because they are so often “geographically, economically, and intellectually marginalized,” as Joanne Ellen Passet puts it.92

Geographically, first: they are often prisoners, deportees, immigrants, hobos, refugees, and other people in transit: displaced Andalusian peasants in Barcelona; Catalans in the Brazilian port city of Santos; Puerto Ricans and Germans in New York; Jews and Italians in Buenos Aires or Rosario; Spanish exiles in London or Mexicans in St. Louis; Koreans in China; Chinese in Tokyo or Paris; and so on.

Economically, in the second place: anarchist readers are generally working-class, often in precarious positions; many are (or, having been displaced, were) artisans, practicing trades threatened by the advance of industrial capitalism (e.g., shoemakers, weavers, tanners, cabinetmakers), although many, particularly with the rise of revolutionary syndicalism, are also to be found among the industrial working class (e.g., miners, garment workers, longshoremen, sailors); before the Second World War, a minority are middle-class professionals (e.g., journalists, educators, doctors, artists, engineers) or economically marginalized (tramps, migrant laborers, prostitutes, etc.).93 In the late-twentieth century, with the ethnic assimilation of immigrants, the recuperation of workers’ movements and the emergence of oppositional youth subcultures, young people living in semi-voluntary poverty reinvent drop-out culture. Half the respondents to a recent global survey of anarchists were aged sixteen to twenty-five, and almost two-thirds reported coming from middle-class backgrounds.94

Last, intellectually: many anarchists, particularly in the periods before the First World War, if they are not illiterate, lack a formal education, excluded from the institutions that produce, consecrate, and circulate knowledge (especially before the advent of compulsory public schooling, which arrived especially late in Spain, for instance). Driven by what Lily Litvak describes as an “enormous thirst for knowledge, encompassing all fields of culture and science,” they frequently become autodidacts.95

It is not at all surprising that such “unstable, marginal, and heterogeneous reader[s]” set about constituting counter-­communities.96 What is striking is the extent to which it was “the printed word,” as Kenyon Zimmer observes, that “created an imagined, text-based transnational community of anarchists, and transmitted the movement’s ideology across space while sustaining collective identities across time.”97 This took place partly through the establishment of an ongoing conversation in anarchist periodicals among the readers and writers—who were and are often the same people.

Pick up a typical anarchist zine, circa the last thirty years, the great era of low-budget printing—it might be on a rack at a local infoshop, on a table at a punk show or an anarchist book fair, or handed around at a protest98—and notice the design characteristics, the look and feel of it, the whole gestalt. Chances are, it’s got what Sandra Jeppesen kindly calls “a DIY or cut-and-paste aesthetic.”99 Apart from a relative few professional-looking, mass-printed publications (e.g., the German graswurzelrevolution ca. 2000–present, with a circulation of 3,500–5,000; U.S.-based Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed ca. 1990–present, at 6,000-plus circulation; or the French Le Monde Libertaire, with a print run of 15,000),100 most anarchist periodicals look like this (fig. 2). Sloppy layout, misspellings, smudgy drawings, contempt for bourgeois journalistic standards: the zine typically advertises its own amateurishness as a way of signaling not only its authenticity (this is not capitalist media!) but the identity of sender and receiver, writers and readers—in keeping with the principles of an anarchist economy, in which production and consumption are to be fused together as much as possible.101

Fig. 2: Anarchist aesthetic, ca. 2011 (artist unknown).

Fig. 3a: Anarchist design aesthetic ca. 1908–1914: cover for Die Freie Generation 2.12 (June 1908).

Fig. 3b: Fermín Sagristá, cover for the Almanaque de Tierra y Libertad for 1912.

Fig. 3c: and Ludovico Caminita, illustration for first page of Regeneración 4.192 (June 13, 1914).

Turn the dial of history back to the dawn of the twentieth century, and you will find anarchist newspapers that look immediately very, very different (figs. 3). Look closer, though, and you will find a similar dynamic at work, reducing the distance between the poles. Here is an 1883 issue of La Autonomía, a newspaper published by compañeros in Seville. On page 4, we see contributions of poems written by a peasant and a cork-maker, accompanied by letters apologizing for “these poorly drawn lines,” respectfully requesting that the editors correct any spelling mistakes.102 Pick up an issue of O Baluarte (The Bulwark), organ of the anarchist hatmakers’ union in Rio de Janeiro (1907–1912), and alongside the writings of anarchists as illustrious as Anselmo Lorenzo, you can read stories signed by an “anonymous hatter [chapeleiro anônimo],” just as, in the pages of Nuestra Tribuna (1922–1925), directed by the gifted autodidact Juana Rouco Buela (1889–1969), essays, poetry, and fiction written by ordinary women subscribers scattered across Argentina appeared alongside a virtual Who’s Who of international anarchist women: Louise Michel and Madeleine Vernet from France; Lucy Parsons and Luisa Capetillo from the U.S. and its conquests; Teresa Claramunt and Federica Montseny from Spain; Maria Lacerda de Moura from Brazil; Virgilia d’Andrea from Italy.103 A great deal of anarchist poetry published in the newspapers of the Spanish CNT was signed pseudonymously or anonymously, as if to answer Michel Foucault’s famous question, “What Is An Author?” with a resounding “who cares?”104 In short, decades before terms like “zinester” and “DIY” came into use, anarchist publications were challenging the distinctions between authors and readers, constituting anarchist discourse as an open-ended dialogue (a “periodic conversation,” as the writer for Tierra Libre put it) rather than a monologue.

Fig. 4: A poster for the Mujeres Libres’ cultural campaign: “The book you read must affirm your ideological position, enrich your intelligence, and improve your sensibility.”

Active and critical readership also turned the publication of literary writing in anarchist periodicals into a dissensual, reflexive “conversation.” For instance, in 1913, as Sakai Toshihiko’s translation of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman unfolded in serialized installments on the pages of Kindai shisō (Modern Thought), anarchist readers vigorously debated its politico-literary merits (was Shaw’s satire as effective as Ibsen’s harsh social critique?) as well as its implications for gender relations.105 In the anarchist free-love journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the “tragic ending” of a short story by May Huntley (a.k.a. Lizzie M. Holmes, 1850–1926), “Nature and the Law” (Apr. 6–13, 1901), kicked off a months-long discussion among readers, editors, and contributors, men and women alike, on the ethics of love and romance.106 Following a similarly lengthy and involved dispute over the literary merits of the writer Vargas Vila (April 1924–March 1925) Federica Montseny’s novel La Victoria (billed as a “story of the moral problems faced by a woman of modern ideas”) sparked a heated debate in the pages of La Revista Blanca, with male readers such as Cirilo Viñolas complaining of the seemingly anti-romantic decision taken by the romantic heroine, Clara Delval: was it in keeping with the expectations of the genre? With her character? With femininity? Other anarchist women writers weighed in with reasoned and impassioned “Defense[s] of Clara.”107

Periodicals played a key role in sustaining this global print culture, to be sure, but so did books. Works of popular science by anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Elisée Reclus’s L’Homme et la Terre (1905–1908), and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol’s Problemas Transcendentales: Estudios de Sociología y Ciencia Moderna (1908) helped to establish a sense of the entire universe as seen from an anarchist perspective—a view codified and monumentalized by Sébastien Faure’s four-volume Encyclopédie anarchiste (1934); so did literary works published in book form such as Adrián del Valle’s Fin de la Fiesta: Cuadro Dramático (1898), Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s The Poet in the Desert (1915), Miyajima Sukeo’s The Miner (Kōfu, 1916), and Federica Montseny’s El Hijo de Clara (1927).

Anarchist book culture and the world of libertarian periodicals overlapped considerably and worked to reinforce one another. Frequently, book-length plays and novels would be reviewed, advertised, and serialized in the anarchist newspapers and magazines, then discussed and debated in the same pages. In this sense, as we shall see further, the anarchist universe of reading forms an extension of anarchist pedagogy. During the Spanish Civil War, pamphlets created by the anarchist women’s association, the Agrupación Mujeres Libres, advised women against “buy[ing] just ‘any old books’ … The book you read must affirm your ideological position, enrich your intelligence, and improve your sensibility” (fig. 4); another anarchist propaganda poster illustrated by the artist Cimine urged passersby to “Read anarchist books and become a man.”108 In spite of Cimine’s masculinist tone, both campaigns were invested with the same hope and the same anxiety: if the right books could fortify you for the fight against fascism, then this implied that there were also such things as the wrong books—what Domingos Ribeiro Filho (1875–1942), author of several anarchist novels, called “literary poison.”109 Indeed, as early as the very first period of the development of anarchism, we find Proudhonian militants such as Henri Tolain (1828–1897), writing in La Tribune Ouvrière (1865), fretting about the taste of newly literate workers for romans-feuilletons, serialized novels, featuring lurid crime stories (featuring “at least two corpses per episode”) and—worse!—stories that took the police for their heroes or invited workers to live vicariously in the “elegant and delicate world” of the trysting aristocrats who still populate romance novels.110 Around the same time, the journalist Jules Vallès (1832–1885), writing for Le Figaro (1862), bemoans the “influence” of popular novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Last of the Mohicans, or Ivanhoe, escapist fantasies that set up false ideals of romance or heroism for us to compare ourselves with.111 Well into the second period, Tolain’s arguments are reiterated by anarchists such as Liu Shifu (1884–1915), attacking the popular fiction of the late Qing as “inducive to wantonness,” “cater[ing] to the tastes of the times,” or E. Statio, writing in Le Libertaire under the title “L’Art et le Peuple” (1905):

Melodramas with grand, sentimental, tearjerking tirades, sputterings of artifice, the Eiffel Tower, fountains of light, this is what suits and distracts the people. As long as they laugh or cry, they do not think. [This is] the morphine that anesthetizes minds and numbs intellects. The serial novel, in which characters whose emotional faculties know no expression short of paroxysm go through endless convulsions, is an excellent educator, very conducive to making the People stupid.… [Popular novelists such as] Montépin, Ponson du Terrail, Sardou, Ennery, Richebourg, Déroulède, Sarcey, etc., are true pillars of society.112

Some sixty years later, we still find militants like Charles Hotz (a.k.a. Edouard Rothen, 1874–1937) denouncing, in a pamphlet titled, once again, L’Art et le Peuple (1924), the “merchants of evil literature” who peddle “the worst adventure stories, police stories, crime stories, the exploits of the most unlikely romantic heroes,” while Shin Chae-ho (a.k.a. Tanjae, 1880–1936) attacks “pretty operas and novels” focused on the lives of “the rich privileged class” (1925), and Camillo Berneri (1897–1937) concludes that “the readership of the serial novel is conservative,” preferring dated “clichés” to the complexities of modern life (1928).113 And if contemporary anarchists reserve their scorn for mass-market movies and TV,114 it is still possible to find Peter Lamborn Wilson attacking popular novelists such as Stephen King for their “saliromaniac” fiction, a symptom, if not a cause, of “decadence” (1991).115

Nor is the mistrust of anarchists reserved for mass literature and the “low” culture manufactured by capitalism. Stuart Christie writes of growing up alienated from the “imperialist culture of the victor” represented, for him, by Shakespeare.116 This sentiment is often echoed by East Asian anarchists, for whom a fixed body of literary “classics” is often associated with the dead hand of tradition and hierarchy; thus, Shin Chae-ho names “literature” and “the fine arts,” along with “religion,” “customs,” and “public morals,” as one of the means by which “servile cultural thoughts” are perpetuated among the people.117 This classical literary culture formed the foundation for the French educational system parodied by Vallès in his quasi-­autobiographical “Jacques Vingtras” trilogy—a system designed to teach respect for and rote imitation of the official canon of “Great Writers.”118 The class composition of these canons also renders them suspect in the eyes of anarchists: thus, in his entry on “Literature” for the Encyclopédie anarchiste, Rothen regards the rise of a body of erudite writing by and for the ruling classes, increasingly detached from the wellsprings of popular creativity, as a real loss for culture.119 Many anarchists cottoned to Tolstoy’s argument, in What Is Art?, that literature should be “accessible to all.”120

At the same time, anarchists often see the corpus of “high” literature as part of a wider cultural patrimony that properly belongs to the people, and therefore as something to which access must be demanded and obtained. Indeed, we can find among anarchists a surprising reverence for “great” works. Gustav Landauer authors an entire book’s worth of lectures on Shakespeare, while Bernard Lazare praises Dante and Rabelais as models for modern practitioners of l’art social.121 “On the advice of Longinus,” Paul Goodman remarked, “I ‘write it for Homer, for Demosthenes,’ and other pleasant company who somehow are more alive to me than most of my contemporaries.”122 Unlike the ephemeral clamor produced by a bomb, Pierre Quillard observes, a great poem can constitute a “permanent” disruption of the mediocre order: “the terrible irony flies across the centuries, and it will strike all the governors, the pharisees, the money-changers, today, tomorrow, and forever.” Thus, “just as infallibly as the braver anarchist comrades, Shakespeare and Aeschylus pave the way to the collapse of the old world.”123 A 1937 editorial in the Spanish antifascist journal Documentos Históricos voices a very similar sentiment, this time in reaction to the famous Nazi quip, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver”: “When we hear culture spoken badly of, we have to reach, not for the revolver—because we think that the pistol has a very limited physical field of action in relation to the infinite domain of the spirit—but for our force of persuasion, to convince the vacillating that doing cultural labor and working for a dignified and humanist culture means performing a revolutionary task for the cause of the working class.”124 Neither was this attitude confined to intellectuals from privileged backgrounds such as Quillard, a product of the élite Lycée Fontanes and habitué of the Symbolist circles, or the correspondent for Documentos Históricos (about whom we shall hear more later); Emma Goldman, for instance, treasured literature in Russian, English, and especially German, which she regarded as languages of high culture, rather than the demotic Yiddish of her upbringing, which she associated with religious strictures and parochialism, and spent a surprising amount of time on the stump speaking on topics such as “Russian Literature—The Voice of Revolt” and “Walt Whitman, the Liberator of Sex.”125

What we can see at work, in the global anarchist movements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, is the formation of something like an anarchist canon of non-anarchist writers. This is not to be confused with what is often referred to as “literary anarchism”—i.e., the broad swathe of avant-garde writers, from Apollinaire to Artaud, influenced by and expressing sympathies for anarchism.126 With a few exceptions, these names almost never appear in the anarchist press during the period of their ascendancy (a couple of decades on either side of 1910, that year Virginia Woolf arbitrarily selects as the one in which “everything changed”)—except as occasional objects of derision. However, a survey of the worldwide anarchist press during the same period would find the names of a number of non-anarchist literary figures repeated disproportionately: especially Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Émile Zola, but also Leonid Andreyev, Anatole France, Maxim Gorky, Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, William Morris, Ada Negri, Friedrich Nietzsche, Romain Rolland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, August Strindberg, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. What do these writers have in common? Obviously, all but one are male, though this is not unlike other canonical selections then or since.127 Some are classified as Naturalists (Hauptmann, Zola; and more problematically, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Rolland), or as representatives of some brand of Realism (Andreyev, France, Gorky, Negri, Tolstoy); others are in the line of Romanticism (Heine, Hugo, Morris, Poe, Shelley, Whitman) or Aestheticism (Nietzsche, Wilde)—tendencies commonly seen as diametrically opposite to one another. Indeed, this embrace of opposites signals something important about anarchist tastes in literature, as we shall see. We might further observe that each of these writers is valued by anarchist critics for qualities usually associated with writers in the opposite camp: e.g., Zola for his ability to stir passion, Wilde for the concrete protest of his Song of Reading Gaol. In any case, the works of all of these writers have been, to some extent, adopted, appropriated, or, to borrow Sandra Jeppesen’s terms, “consecrated” as anarchist, despite their refusal of anarchist commitments, by repeated inclusion in anarchist “spaces.”128

A similar process of “consecration” takes place in Asia, where translations of many of the same Euro-American writers take the same place, but where there are also efforts to develop a native corpus of classics untainted by the authoritarian aura. We can see such a project under way in the curriculum developed by anarchist educator Sun Lianggong (1894–1962) for a course at the National Labor University in Shanghai (1927–1932) in “Labor Literature”—“a kind of proletarian-populist literature,” as Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik describe it, “with a major aim of reflecting and revealing social realities, especially the authors’ grievances and criticism of social ills.”129 In other words, it constituted something like what Japanese anarchist critic Akiyama Kiyoshi called anakizumu bungaku (a “literature of anarchism” or “literature of opposition”) as distinct from anakisuto no bungaku (“literature written by anarchists”).130

In addition, then, to works consecrated by inclusion in anarchist spaces, written by

a) committed writers from the middle classes (Octave Mirbeau, Bernard Lazare, Florencio Sánchez, Avelino Fóscolo, etc.) and

b) non-committed writers adopted or appropriated by anarchists (Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Henrik Ibsen, etc.), we find circulating in the same media

c) works written by working-class anarchist militants without literary training or credentials (e.g, Luisa Capetillo or Gigi Damiani, but especially anonymous works, often signed in ways that signal this identity—e.g., “anonymous hatter”).

We might further distinguish between anarchist works directed partially or primarily at non-militants and those written by and for militants—a truly self-directed literature. Of the works produced for non-militant audiences, there is often a palpable difference between those intended for working-class readers (urban and rural manual workers) and those intended for a middle-class readership (urban intellectual workers). This difference is sometimes manifested in terms of genre: thus, the forms of the dialogue story and the serial novel may have more often been directed toward manual workers, while the novel written for publication in book form, as Flávio Luizetto notes, was often meant “to attract followers to the anarchist cause among public servants, journalists, lawyers, writers, teachers and students—people who form part of what are called, for lack of a more precise term, the urban middle classes.”131 It is possible that these genres were at times also gendered: in a study of the anticlerical journal A Lanterna, Walter da Silva Oliveira suggests that “there was, in the period studied [1909–1916], a strong link between short stories and novels [published in its pages] and an audience of female readers,” whom the editors considered to be those most harmed by religious discourse.132

Michel Ragon reminds us, too, that there are differences between, on the one hand, an “anarchist literature” written in a spirit of commitment by credentialed intellectuals, and on the other hand, “proletarian literature” without a clearly signaled sectarian identity as anarchist, destined for working-class readers without further qualification, written by workers without any credentials (e.g., Henri Poulaille [1896–1980] or Albert Soulilou [1905–1967]):

The worker-writers are often possessed of a libertarian spirit; some are even anarchist militants. But anarchist literature per se merits its own study. If its themes are frequently evoked in the course of these pages, it nonetheless expresses a particular vision of the world that is not always of a proletarian spirit. It is more philosophical than descriptive, more rebellious than constructive. It counts in its ranks more essayists than novelists, more journalists than poets.133

Works of pure “proletarian literature,” too, are to be found in the anarchist world, from Japan (where puroretaria bungaku was one of the more lasting legacies of an anarchist movement largely crushed in the 1920s) to France (where Poulaille becomes one of its first champions).

To all of these complications in the authorship and readership of anarchist literature, we must add another: at several points in the history of anarchism, conditions are hostile enough to incur serious censorship and reprisal against anarchist writers and publications. In these situations—e.g., in Spain following the infamous political trials at Montjuich (1897), or under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930)—it became impossible to openly publish and distribute works directly advocating anarchism. One of the ways in which anarchists adapted to this was to further “culturalize” their media, to camouflage politics under the guise of social science and aesthetics. Thus, as David Ortiz notes, anarchist journals benefited from “avoiding use of the words ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarchist,’” taking on oblique, politically “blank” titles such as Revista Blanca (1898–1905, 1923–1936) Ciencia Social (1895–1896), or Natura (1903–1905), presenting anarchist texts under the lofty, academically consecrated rubrics of “sociology,” “history,” “letters,” “art,” “science,” and so on. Taking another direction, the wildly popular “Novela Libre” and “Novela Ideal” book series issued by Revista Blanca disseminated anarchist ideas in the form of novelas rosas, i.e., paperback romances. Other popular novel series authored by anarchists adopted different genre identities, all while gesturing discreetly, in the words of an advertisement for the anarcho-syndicalist “Novela del Pueblo” series, toward “criticism … of some aspect of modern society” and certain “hints and anticipations of a better human society.”134

The use of established genres of “culture”—both high and low, erudite and popular—as protective coloration for the continuation of political propaganda under repressive conditions poses some possibilities and some problems. On the one hand, softening the sectarian political content, presented as either edification or entertainment, might reach audiences otherwise beyond the range of anarchist ideological messages (say, middle-class intellectual workers interested in cultural trends, or depoliticized manual workers seeking distraction and relaxation). On the other hand, stripping away the symbols that distinguish anarchism, that establish it as a political identity, might allow readers to walk away unchanged—or worse, to appropriate the text for some other ideological purpose. The contents of La Revista Blanca might leave no room for such misunderstanding, but what about the paperback melodramas? The relative openness to interpretation that makes for the “literary” might work against the anarchists’ radical agenda. If a text is always, as Umberto Eco has it, “a lazy machine that appeals to the reader to do some of its work,” literary texts might be said to elicit even more activity on the reader’s part, an imagining, projecting, fantasizing activity that could erase or overwrite the anarchist content of anarchist literature, producing a depoliticized text—or worse, a politically co-opted text.135

This danger, the ineliminable possibility that what you’ve written or painted or sung can take on a life of its own or be turned against itself, is the condition of all art. Nonetheless, it is a special risk for anarchists just because the Idea is almost universally perceived as so terrifically threatening that it is all but literally unthinkable. “Someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could,” Malatesta wrote, “might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds.… That man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.”136 Thus with anarchists’ proposals to remove the bonds of Capital, State, and Church. Readers can resist, and the popular audience for anarchist messages resists “ferociously.” And anarchists are all too familiar with popular distortions of the Idea—the notion that anarchy means “chaos,” that anyone who is destructive or disregarding of others is an anarchist, and so on. In effect, these symbolic uses of “anarchy” are co-optations of anarchist themes for capitalist uses, promoting the kind of hedonistic individualism that moves product (and providing the police and the priests with a handy folk-devil). An anarchist writer can expect to be misread in many directions at once.

At the same time, there is also the danger of making anarchism into—again, in the words of Malatesta (apropos of his Russian colleagues’ attempt to formalize anarchist beliefs and methods into a “Platform”)—“a government and a church”:137 that is, anarchist militants could attempt to so tightly control meanings as to choke off any alternative readings, reintroducing authoritarianism into the heart of anti-authoritarian thought and practice. Here, I think of Roland Barthes’s speculation that a certain authoritarian element would always inhere in “the very fact” of speaking: “All speech is on the side of the Law,” he gloomily surmised, suggesting that to teach as an ­anti-authoritarian, the best one could do would be to somehow soften one’s speech, “‘presenting’ a discourse without imposing it.”138 This might indeed be taken as a model of anarchist pedagogy: the teacher presents but does not impose. “Teaching,” Ricardo Mella insists, “neither can nor must be propaganda.”139 And yet it is not the model of pedagogy most widely adopted by actual anarchists; that would be Francisco Ferrer y Guardia’s (1859–1909) Escuela Moderna, which dispensed with most of the disciplinary apparatus of conventional schools but retained for the teacher a considerable role as an active propagator of values:

This does not mean that we will leave the child, at the very outset of its education, to form its own ideas.… The very constitution of the mind, at the commencement of its development, demands that at this stage the child shall be receptive. The teacher must implant the germs of ideas.140

To merely leave the pupil to think alone, for Ferrer, is to surrender to capitalist ideology, popular prejudices, Church hegemony, and a thousand other authoritarian influences already in place. Accordingly, many anarchists have accepted the notion of anarchist culture as a form of propaganda, in the root sense of seed-sowing (“implant[ing] the germs of ideas”): Peter Lamborn Wilson suggests that fiction should function as “propaganda for life,” while Derrick Jensen (b. 1960) flatly declares that “all writing is propaganda.”141

How can an anarchist text make propaganda without treating its readers as a passive mass to be led? How can it overcome the resistance of its readers without thereby exercising a tyrannical power over them? Here we might turn Socrates’s problem around: rather than seeing the text as a helpless victim of mischievous readers, unable to defend or “speak for” itself, we could see it as a little dictator, a voice that can’t and won’t “shut up.” If texts are inherently incapable of listening to their readers’ responses, how can they ever be anything but monologues, forms of “speech” more unilateral than any participant in ordinary dialogue could ever claim? On the other hand, how can anarchist readers defend themselves against the author’s authority without simply squeezing the life out of the texts they read, “reading into them” the pre-formed contents of their prejudices, closing off possible interpretations?

For a long time, the Revista Blanca bore on its cover a peculiar message, written in a cursive font: “Lector: cuanto veas en ésta revista contrario a tus opiniones en ella misma puedes refutarlo [Reader, if you see anything in this journal contrary to your own opinions, you may refute it].” If this sounds like a kind of haughty challenge in English, it does not appear to have the same connotative force in Spanish; Antonio Elorza parses this as a kind of editorial policy, a way of signaling “total acceptance of the principle of dissent regarding their positions.”142 And as we have seen, the solicitation of dissent was evidently successful, as La Revista Blanca regularly drew vigorous, contestatory correspondence from readers.

Inviting reply, questioning, participation, and engagement, anarchist periodicals turn readers into writers, recipients into senders, consumers into producers. Thus, readers of Rosa Graul’s utopian novel, Hilda’s Home: A Story of Woman’s Emancipation, first published by installments in Lucifer in 1897, turned the pages of the journal into a months-long forum on “Where to Practicalize Hilda’s Home”: i.e., what would be the best site on which to found a real colony on the principles proposed by the novel.143 Rather than distinguishing the fictional from the factual, the distant, cognitive sphere of utopian dreaming from the immediate, embodied realm of “practical” action, these readers freely appropriated Graul’s story for their own purposes. This, too, demonstrates a convergence of the roles of writer and reader within anarchist literary discourse, as both claim and exercise the right to create.

Fig. 5: From the Brazilian anarchist journal A Guerra Social 1.2 (July 16, 1911): the “Libertarian Ideal” is restrained by the clergy, the bourgeoisie, etc.: “All strive to stifle him, but he is developing, preparing … the day will come when, breaking all bonds, he will triumph, driving away all tyrants.”

This constitution of the reader as active agent is mirrored by an emphasis on what the Mujeres Libres called capacitación (at once “training,” “preparation,” and, more literally, “empowerment”) as distinct from captación (“capture” or successful proselytization).144 In this spirit of capacitación, Errico Malatesta recommended that propagandists working among depoliticized people “[make] an effort not to appear to be expounding and forcing on them a well-known and universally accepted truth,” favoring a problem-posing method that would “stimulate them to think, to take the initiative and gain confidence in themselves.” Such propaganda would aim, in fact, not so much at teaching “unconscious” masses what to believe as at “making people who are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their real power and capabilities.”145 This is, indeed, one of the themes we will see running throughout anarchist culture—in imaginations and performances of rebellion (Part III), as well as in lyrical (Part II) and visual (Part IV) images of powerful bodies breaking their bonds (fig. 5). Resistance culture, for anarchists, meant nothing less than the cultivation of resistant bodies and souls.

Another way in which anarchists conceived of readers’ empowerment entailed learning “the habit of reading twice, or at least with a double intent” recommended by Voltairine de Cleyre: i.e., an empathetic or recollective reading that allows the reader “to feel what the writer felt” and a skeptical reading that places the text at a distance from the reader.146 This weaving back and forth between what one might identify as a Romantic hermeneutics of recollection (aimed at reconstructing a perspective that is historically or culturally distant from one’s own) and a hermeneutics of suspicion with roots in the Enlightenment tradition (looking at the text as an instrument of power, as called into being by certain “interests” that might be distinct from or antagonistic to one’s own), we can both resist the force of “Dominant Ideas” transmitted by texts and, at the same time, allow texts to educate us out of the dogmas, prejudices, and fixed ideas we’ve already absorbed.147 Gustav Landauer, Rudolf Rocker, B. Rivkin, Ethel Mannin, Herbert Read, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, and a host of other anarchist literary critics offer demonstrations of these resistant, ethically engaged modes of reading. Casting their critical gaze not only “on the page” but “behind the work,” as de Cleyre put it, they gauge not only its adequacy as a representation of life, but its value for living; not only how it reflects the way of life it emerges from, but what modes of living it demonstrates and proposes.148

Nor was criticism reserved for critics. Rather, according to Ramón Flecha, anarchist educational practices aimed “to make every worker an intellectual.”149 This was pursued by establishing dialogues among working-class adult readers, not only through the mediation of print, important as that was, but face to face. Among the institutions created for this purpose were the círculos culturales and centros de estudios in Argentina, the universités populaires in France and Brazil, and in Spain, the storefront ateneos (workers’ atheneums) and tertulias.150

Tertulias, literally “gatherings,” began as an entirely informal practice of socializing among friends in cafés, but acquired a more formal dimension in the 1880s, as certain regular gatherings started to give themselves names like “Avant [Forward],” “Los Afines [The Like-Minded],” or “Ni Rey, Ni Patria [Neither King Nor Country].”151 Emerging during the period of propaganda by the deed, these more formalized tertulias at first functioned as places where grupitos (“little groups,” later known as grupos de afinidad or “affinity groups”) formed for the purposes of action rather than education, planning violent strikes against the régime; by staging prolonged, focused conversations about anarchist texts and ideas, the tertulia could produce a collective with strong ideological agreement, capable of acting in a concerted, harmonious fashion.152 However, that very ability to sustain continuous, open conversation among equals turned out to be valuable beyond the waning of the attentat as a tactic; it proved ideally suited for an egalitarian mode of education, the tertulia literaria.

Pepita Carpeña, a member of the Mujeres Libres during the Spanish Civil War, recollects the tertulias literarias promoted by the group:

We all would read the same book, and then you cannot imagine the change of views that takes place in a general meeting … maybe what you haven’t perceived before, you realize when you say it to someone else, and the other person realizes what you have perceived. It was a great education. It taught me a lot; this is all the education I have, I have no more. I left school at age 11 and that was it.153

This kind of open-ended, critical dialogue is well-situated to evoke what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon called “collective reason”: allowing each individual ego, each one a little “absolute” unto itself, both to express itself and to modify itself with the aid of all the other absolutes, in order to produce a new thought that is neither the average nor the sum of all the participants.154

Another form of collective reason is perhaps at work in another common anarchist practice: the practice of rereading through rewriting. This goes for songwriting, too—anarchist poets and songwriters, as we shall see in Part II, freely rewrite hymns and anthems to suit their own purposes—and even for images, which anarchist artists subject to caricature, deformation, and détournement (Part IV). But it is perhaps most notable in the field of writing. B. Traven rewrites tales from the Brothers Grimm (“Macario”) and the folk legend of the men who went hunting for Death (Treasure of the Sierra Madre); in his strange, unclassifiable book Die Sechs (1928; translated as The Six, 1938), Rudolf Rocker rewrites the stories of Faust, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Don Quixote; Federico Urales serializes his own versions of Don Quixote (El Último Don Quijote, 1925) and Don Juan (Mi Don Juan, 1935–1936); Bernard Lazare also rewrites the story of Don Juan (“La Confession de Don Juan”), as well as that of Shakespeare’s Prospero (“La Fuite de Prospero”), Bluebeard (“Barbe-Bleu”), Moses (“L’Illusion”), Samson and Delilah (“Dalila”), Ahasuerus (“L’Attente Éternelle”)…

At this point, I seem to hear the voice of Karl Marx thundering against “the tradition of all the dead generations [that] weighs heavy on the brains of the living”: after all, wasn’t the reproduction of antique Roman forms and symbols a sign of the French Revolution’s inability to bring forth the “poetry of the future”? Could all these obsessive-seeming rewritings, on the part of the anarchists, constitute evidence of a slavish lack of originality—or, on the contrary, of a juvenile impulse to tear everything down by cheap parody? Either way, anarchists would seem to be disqualified once again from entry into the study of literature, that consecrated space inhabited only by an élite of “isolate[d] individual[s],” “strong misreader[s]” who anxiously disguise their Oedipal obligations to their “precursors,” as Harold Bloom tells us, giving their creations what Walter Benjamin might call the “unique aura,” the appearance of special value.155 But originality per se is a propertarian concern, whereas spontaneity—the surprises that emerge when old signs are encountered in new contexts, which is a feature of their repetition156—is an anarchist concern, and while many anarchist works parody conventional or traditional texts in a spirit of hostile criticism, this is by no means always the case (Don Quixote, for instance, is a figure sincerely beloved by anarchists, who recognize this knight as one of our own).157 Rather, anarchist revision, the delight in turning consumption into production and readers into writers, “repeats the meaning and revives the spirit of past makings, so they are not a dead weight,” as Paul Goodman says—having written his own Don Juan: Or, the Continuum of the Libido (1942)—“by using them again in a making that is occurring now.”158

This is the spirit in which anarchists read.

61 Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in America, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (NY: Hill & Wang, 1956), 90–91.

62 Alan M. Wald, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (London: Verso, 1994), 19.

63 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 89, 96.

64 Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 154; Marcello Zane, “Vivir entre las nubes,” Belphégor 6.2 (June 2007); Salaün cited in Joseph Steinbeiß, “‘Meine Verse sollen Bomben sein…’,” grazwurzelrevolution 265 (Jan. 2002); María-Luisa Siguán, “‘La Novela Ideal’,” Anuario de filologia 4 (1978): 419. Likewise, Gonzalo Santonja notes the volume and vigor of the Novela Proletaria series, which sustained print runs of 30,000 copies apiece (17).

65 Gonzalo Santonja, La Novela proletaria (1932–1933) (Madrid:Ayuso, 1979), 17; Peter G. Zarrow, “He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 47.4 (Nov. 1988): 807.

66 Brigitte Magnien, “La novela del pueblo: analyses d’une collection de nouvelles publiée sous la dictature de Primo de Rivera,” in L’Infra-littérature en Espagne au XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Victor Carrillo (Grenoble: PUG, 1977), 250, 256; Serge Salaün, Romancero libertario (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1971), 35–36; Zarrow, “He Zhen,” 802; Siguán, “La novela Ideal,” 419.

67 Maria Eugenia Boaventura, “A Ficção Anarquista Classe Média,” Remate de Males 1.4 (Jan. 1983): 80–81, 92. Ana Lozano de la Pola calls this rhetorical maneuver, after Patricia V. Greene, “the ethico-aesthetic paradox”: how can a truly radical content be conveyed by a conservative form? The presupposition, Lozano de la Pola notes, is that we can neatly distinguish, in advance, between “radical genres” and “conservative genres,” as if all the ideological consequences were already spelled out at that level, regardless of how particular authors set those inherited materials to work, regardless of how particular readers encounter it, in what contexts, etc. See Ana Lozano de la Pola “Re-visitando a Federica Montseny. Una lectura de La Victoria y sus lecturas,” Arbor: ciencia, pensamiento, y cultura 182.719 (May–June 2006): 399–400.

68 Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 1; Zane, “Vivir entre las nubes.”

69 Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 87–88.

70 Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 47–48.

71 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 140.

72 Plato, Phaedrus, in Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: C. Scribner, 1911), 581.

73 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias, ” The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1.

74 Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 88; Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels; see also Karl Mannheim’s equation of anarchism with “chiliasm” (Ideology and Utopia, 196). For a bracing critique of these and similar historiographic strategies, see Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

75 Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 48–49.

76 Qtd. in Lily Litvak, La Mirada Roja: Estética y arte del anarquismo español (1880–1913) (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1988), 55–56, trans. mine.

77 V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Detroit: Marxian Educational Society, 1921), 17.

78 V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Robert Service (London: Penguin Books: 1988), 98.

79 Colson, Petit lexique, 71 and Trois essais, 42–43, trans. mine, italics mine.

80 Caroline Granier, “Nous sommes des briseurs de formules”: Les écrivains anarchistes en France à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle (Diss., Université Paris-VIII, 2003), 1.2.3.

81 See Laura Greenwood, “Goldman’s Nietzschean Anarchism: A Greimasian Reading of ‘Minorities Versus Majorities,’” Theory in Action 4.4 (October 2011): 90–105.

82 Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 50–51.

83 Araceli Tinajero, El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 124; Abelardo Gutiérrez Díaz qtd. in Louis A. Pérez, Essays on Cuban History: Historiography and Research (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995), 76–77. By no means were such customs confined to a Caribbean context; they also appeared, for instance, in Spain (where the out-loud readers were called “recitadores”), as well as in Argentina (Javier Navarro Navarro, A la revolución por la cultura: prácticas culturales y sociabilidad libertarias en el País Valenciano (1931–1939) [Valencia: Univ. de Valencia, 2004], 154–155; Eva Golluscio de Montoya, Teatro y folletines libertarios rioplatenses (1895–1910) [Ottawa: Girol Books, 1996], 37).

84 Luisa Capetillo, “La Influencia de las Ideas Modernas,” in Absolute Equality, ed. and trans. Laura Walker (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2009), 26, 16, 12, 13. Interestingly, Angelina seems to find the house servants hardest to subvert: at Angelina’s cry of “Long live the revolution!” the butler, Ramón, can at first manage only a “Long live… a…ahem…” (27). Even he, though, cannot long resist her anarchist arguments.

85 Navarro Navarro, A la revolución por la cultura, 147–148.

86 Stefanie Knoll and Aragorn Eloff, “2010 Anarchist Survey Report” (August 2010).

87 Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1, 151.

88 Golluscio de Montoya, Teatro y folletines libertarios rioplatenses, 37.

89 Berkman and Goldman qtd. in Don Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism and Pedestrian Liberalism,” Political Theory 35.3 (2007): 329; however, for a significant feminist critique of Herzog, see also Lori Marso, “The Perversions of Bored Liberals: Response to Herzog,” Political Theory 36.1 (2008): 123–128.

90 Colson, Petit lexique, 152, trans. mine.

91 Landauer, “Lew Nikolajewitsch Tolstoi,” in Der werdende Mensch, trans. Siegfried Bernhauser and Birgit Wörishofer, 199.

92 Joanne Ellen Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 121.

93 Alain Pessin, La Rêverie anarchiste, 1848–1914 (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1982), 43–49; see also Jean Maitron, “Un ‘anar’, qu’est-ce que c’est?,” Le mouvement social 83 (April–June 1973): 23–45.

94 Knoll and Eloff, “2010 Anarchist Survey Report.”

95 David Ortiz, “Redefining Public Education: Contestation, the Press, and Education in Regency Spain, 1885–1902,” Journal of Social History 35.1 (Fall 2011): 75; Lily Litvak, “La buena nueva,” Revista de Occidente 304 (September 2006): 8.

96 Hugo R. Mancuso, “Horizonte epistemológico del relato social moderno,” AdVersuS: Revista de Semiótica 2.4 (December 2005).

97 Kenyon Zimmer, “The Whole World is Our Country”: Immigration and Anarchism in the United States, 1885–1940 (Diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010), 12.

98 Or, as Anna Poletti writes, “left in public places: on trains, in cafés and pubs, and slipped between the pages of slick magazines in newsagents” (“Self-Publishing in the Global and Local,” Biography 28.1 [2005]:185).

99 Sandra Jeppesen, Guerrilla Texts and Textual Self-Production (Diss., York University, 2006), 135.

100 Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 37 (Summer 1993); John D. H. Downing, ed., Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2011), 38, 44.

101 Paul Goodman and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 153.

102 Lily Litvak, El cuento anarquista (1880–1911): Antología (Madrid: Taurus, 1982), 17.

103 chapeleiro anônimo, “Um sonho,” in Contos Anarquistas: Antologia da prosa libertária no Brasil (1901–1935), eds. Arnoni Prado, Antonio and Francisco Foot Hardman (São Paulo: Editorial Brasiliense, 1985), 107–110; Elsa Calzetta, “Juana Rouco Buela, una mujer anarquista,” in Nuestra Tribuna: Hojita del sentir anárquico femenino (1922–1925) (Bahia Blanca, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional del Sur, 2005), 21, 25.

104 Salaün, “Introducción,” Romancero libertario, 23–25.

105 Mutsuko Motoyama, Shaw and Japanese Drama (Diss., University of Washington, 1975), 136, 181.

106 These included Moses Harman, “Love Dies—Why Should Love Die?” Lucifer 864 (May 11, 1901); Helen Webster, “Why Should Love Die?” Lucifer 867 (June 1, 1901); Mabel M’Coy Irwin, “Why Does Love Die?—A Suggestion,” Lucifer 873 (July 13, 1901); Elsie Cole Wilcox, “Some Reasons Why Love Should Die,” Lucifer 876 (Aug. 3, 1901); and Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Death of Love,” Lucifer 883 (Sept. 21, 1901). See Ernesto A. Longa, Anarchist Periodicals in English Published in the United States (1833–1995) (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 160.

107 For the Vargas Vila controversy, see Federica Montseny, “Comentando a un hombre,” La Revista Blanca 2.22 (Apr. 15, 1924); Montseny, “La Obra de los mediocres,” La Revista Blanca 2.30 (Aug. 15, 1924); Montseny, “Alrededor de Vargas Vila,” La Revista Blanca 2.35 (Nov. 1, 1924); J. Serret, “Vargas Vila (I),” La Revista Blanca 2.40 (Jan. 15, 1925); Serret, “Vargas Vila (II),” La Revista Blanca 2.41 (Feb. 1, 1925); Montseny, “Sobre Vargas Vila,” La Revista Blanca 2.42 (Feb. 15, 1925); Ignacio Cornejo, “Sobre Vargas Vila y sus obras,” La Revista Blanca 2.43 (Mar. 1, 1925); Montseny, “Las mujeres y Vargas Vila,” La Revista Blanca 57 (Sept. 1, 1925); Julia Acosta and Matilde Mota, “Las Mujeres y Vargas Vila,” La Revista Blanca 2.56 (Sept. 15, 1925). For the “Clara” controversy, see Montseny, “En defensa de Clara (I),” La Revista Blanca 2.46 (Apr. 15, 1925); Montseny, “En defensa de Clara (II),” La Revista Blanca 2.47 (May 1, 1925); Montseny, “En defensa de Clara (III),” La Revista Blanca 2.48 (May 15, 1925); Isabel Hortensia Pereyra, “En Defensa de Clara: Mi Humilde Opinion,” La Revista Blanca 3.51 (Jul. 1, 1925); and Antonia Maymón, “En Defensa de Clara,” La Revista Blanca 3.53 (Aug. 1, 1925).

108 Mujeres Libres qtd. in Laura Ruiz Eugenio and Gregori Siles Molina “Aportaciones de Mujeres Libres (1936–1939) desde la educación para la inclusión de las mujeres obreras y campesinas,” in El largo camino hacia una educación inclusiva, Vol. 2, eds. María Reyes Berruezo Albéniz and Susana Conejero López (Pamplona, Spain: Universidad Pública de Navarra, 2009): 343; Cimine, Lee libros anarquistas y serás un hombre (1936–1938).

109 Domingos Ribeiro Filho, “O veneno literário,” Renascença: arte e pensamento 1.3 (Apr. 1923): 8. Interestingly, Ribeiro Filho’s anxiety is focused on female readers—he is writing in the pages of Maria Lacerda de Moura’s journal—who are especially imperiled by reading novels that “extol the beauties of the shop window and the sentiments of the seraglio.” The identification of consumerism at once with lasciviousness and femininity is not alien to this line of anarchist argument.

110 Georges Duveau, La vie ouvrière en France, sous le second empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 471. It must be said that Tolain also fulminates a good deal against the moral “depravity” supposedly taught by these novels.

111 Jules Vallès, “Les Victimes du Livre,” Les Réfractaires (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881), 160, 162–163, 171–172.

112 Liu Shifu qtd. in P. Chan, Liu Shifu, 64, trans. Chan’s; Statio qtd. in Vittorio Frigerio, “La Vérité par la fiction,” Belphégor 9.1 (February 2010).

113 Charles Hotz, L’Art et le Peuple (Paris: Groupe de propagande par la brochure, 1924), 22; Shin Chae-ho qtd. in Song Chae-So, “The Changes of Tanjae’s Thought Seen in ‘The Dream Sky’ and ‘The War of the Dragons,’” Korea Journal 20.12 (December 1980): 20; Camillo Berneri, “La novela de folletón,” Almanaque de la Novela Ideal (Barcelona: Publicaciones de “La Revista Blanca,” 1928), 83–84.

114 See, for instance, Paul Goodman’s 1963 essay “Television: The Continuing Disaster,” in Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 99–103; or George Bradford’s (a.k.a. David Watson’s) 1984 piece, “Media: Capital’s Global Village,” in Reinventing Anarchy, Again, 258–271.

115 Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Amoral Responsibility,” Science Fiction EYE 8 (Winter 1991): 55.

116 Stuart Christie, My Granny Made Me an Anarchist: The Cultural and Political Formation of a West Scotland “Baby Boomer” (Hastings, UK: Christie Books, 2002), 85.

117 Shin Chae-ho, “Declaration of the Korean Revolution,” trans. Dongyoun Hwang, in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1, 375.

118 Ali Nematollahy, “Jules Vallès and the Anarchist Novel,” Nineteenth-­Century French Studies 35.3–4 (Spring–Summer 2007): 575.

119 Edouard Rothen, “Littérature,” in L’Encyclopédie anarchiste, 1295.

120 Peter Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1915), 298–299.

121 Gustav Landauer, Shakespeare: Dargestellt in Vorträgen (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1920); Bernard Lazare, L’Écrivain et l’Art Social (Béarn: Bibliothèque de l’Art Social, 1896), 13–14.

122 Paul Goodman, “The Present Plight of a Man of Letters,” in Criticism and Culture: Papers of the Midwest Modern Language Association 2, ed. Sherman Paul (Iowa City: Midwest Modern Language Association, 1972), 6.

123 Pierre Quillard, L’Anarchie par la littérature (Paris: Édicions du Fourneau, 1993), 11, 13–14.

124 Félix Martí-Ibañez, “La Cultura en el nuevo orden revolucionario,” Documentos Históricos 1.1 (October 1937): 12.

125 Candace Falk, “Forging Her Place: An Introduction,” Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Vol. 1: Made for America, 1890–1901 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 46.

126 Clara E. Lida, for instance, distinguishes between what she calls “anarquismo literario” (with the emphasis on the “literary”) and “literatura anarquista” (with the emphasis on the “anarchist”). See Lida, “Literatura anarquista y anarquismo literario,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 19.2 (1970): 360–381.

127 If Vittorio Frigerio is right to say that this “appropriation and use of texts and writers from outside the movement” constituted a kind of “diver[sion] of the symbolic capital of official literature and science for its own purposes” (“La Vérité par la fiction”), then the sexist values inherent in the evaluations forming such a list might reflect that formation of symbolic capital—already massively skewed towards male writers—as much as the (by no means inconsiderable) residual sexism in the anarchist movement and its media apparatuses. It also presents a striking contrast to the gender balance among ordinary militants who wrote for anarchist publications: here, women’s participation is notable. Indeed, Lida asserts that “the presence of women who contributed to the anarchist press was much higher than that of other socialist movements of the time” (“Discurso e imaginario en la literatura anarquista,” Filología 29.1–2 [1996]: 123).

128 Some of these writers made more or less equivocal gestures toward anarchism; Wilde went so far as to declare his political preference for anarchism in response to Jules Huret’s famous survey. However, none were integrated into any anarchist organization or movement per se.

129 Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik, Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 87.

130 Stephen Filler, Chaos From Order: Anarchy and Anarchism in Modern Japanese Fiction, 1900–1930 (Diss., Ohio State University, 2004), 4, 216–217.

131 Marcella Bencivenni, Italian American Radical Culture in New York City: The Politics and Arts of the Sovversivi, 1890–1940 (Diss., City University of New York, 2003), 121; Flávio Luizetto, “O recurso da ficção: um capítulo da história do anarquismo no Brasil,” in Libertários no Brasil: Memória, Lutas, Cultura, ed. Antônio Arnoni Prado (São Paulo: Editora Brasilense, 1986), 131; Boaventura, “A Ficção Anarquista,” 79–92. Boaventura further notes that the subjects shifted depending on the audience: the novels of Brazilian anarchists such as Fábio Luz and Domingos Ribeiro Filho concerned “the life of the Brazilian middle class at the turn of the century,” with the intention of “denounc[ing] the frivolity and corruption of that world, suggesting alternative ways of life,” whereas short stories and serial novels in anarchist journals more often featured working-class protagonists, locating the sources of oppression in the workplace (84).

132 Walter da Silva Oliveira, Narrativas à luz d’A “Lanterna”: Anticlericalismo, anarquismo e representações (Diss., Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2008), 13–14, 83.

133 Michel Ragon, Histoire de la littérature prolétarienne en France (Paris: A. Michel, 1974), 145.

134 Qtd. in J. Rafael Macan, “Prologo,” Narraciones anarco-sindicalistas de los años veinte (Barcelona: Icaria, 1978), 22–23, trans. mine.

135 Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 49.

136 Errico Malatesta, Anarchy, trans. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 2001), 15–16.

137 Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution, ed. and trans. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 98.

138 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Hill (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 191–192; A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 476.

139 Ricardo Mella, Ideario (Gijón, Spain: Impr. “La Victoria,” 1926), 242.

140 Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School, trans. Joseph MacCabe (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 28.

141 Wilson, “Amoral Responsibility,” 56–57; Jensen, interview in Margaret Killjoy, Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 22. While many anarchists read Jensen (who does not self-identify as anarchist), they have criticized his recent attacks on transgendered people. Wilson, too, is highly controversial among anarchists for his defense of pedophilia.

142 Antonio Elorza, La utopía anarquista bajo la segunda república (Madrid: Editorial Ayuso, 1973), 370.

143 Carol Farley Kessler, Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 112.

144 Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005); see also Mujeres Libres, “Salvemos a las mujeres de la dictadura de la mediocridad. Labor cultural y constructiva para ganar la guerra y hacer la Revolución,” in Mujeres Libres: España 1936–1939, ed. Mary Nash (Barcelona: Tusquets Editor, 1977), 93–95.

145 Errico Malatesta, Life and Ideas, ed. Richard Vernon (London: Freedom Press, 1965), 179.

146 Voltairine de Cleyre, Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, ed. Alexander Berkman (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914), 379.

147 Ibid., 79.

148 See, for example, de Cleyre’s “Literature the Mirror of Man” in Selected Works, 359–380; Gustav Landauer’s Ein Weg deutschen Geistes (München: Forum-Verlag, 1916) and “Fragment über Georg Kaiser” in Der werdende Mensch, 349–355; Rudolf Rocker, Artistas y Rebeldes: escritos literarios y sociales (Buenos Aires: Argonauta, 1922); B. Rivkin, Di Grunt Tendentsin fun Yiddishe Literatur (New York: Ikuf, 1947); Ethel Mannin, Bread and Roses: An Utopian Survey and Blue-Print (London: Macdonald, 1944); Herbert Read, Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); George Woodcock, The Writer and Politics (London: Porcupine Press, 1948); Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry (New York: Random House, 1972).

149 Flecha qtd. in Ruiz Eugenio and Siles Molina, “Aportaciones de Mujeres Libres,” 344.

150 Juan Suriano, Anarquistas: Cultura y política libertaria en Buenos Aires, 1890–1910 (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2001), 39.

151 George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)132–133; Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 163; Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936 (San Francisco: AK Press, 1998), 105.

152 Parallel forms developed among anarchists elsewhere. In France, for instance, “groupes” gave themselves names like “Les Enfants de la Nature [The Children of Nature],” “Les Gonzes Poilus du Point-du-Jour [The Hairy Guys of Point-du-Jour],” “Les Indomptables [The Uncontrollables],” “Les Niveleurs [The Levellers],” “Les Insoumises [Disobedient Women],” or “Les Revoltées [Women In Revolt]” (Félix Dubois, Le péril anarchiste: l’organisation secrète du parti anarchiste [Paris: E. Flammarion, 1894], 43; David Berry, History of the French Anarchist Movement, 314).

153 Carpeña qtd. in Ruiz Eugenio and Siles Molina, “Aportaciones de Mujeres Libres,” 343.

154 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings of P.-J. Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 121–122.

155 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 21; Benjamin, Illuminations, 231. For comparison, see Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s 314 (February 2007): 59–71.

156 See the entries for “Éternel retour” and “Répétition” in Daniel Colson’s Petit lexique, 99–108 and 279–281.

157 See, for instance, Peter Kropotkin’s citation of Turguenev’s unfavorable comparison of the hung-up intellectual Hamlet, who knows a hawk from a handsaw, to Don Quixote, “the man of action” who knows that windmills are giants—and more importantly, that “the witches, the giants,” i.e., “the forces hostile to mankind” that must be fought against, are “the oppressors” (Ideals and Realities, 110–112).

158 Goodman, Speaking and Language, 160; Taylor Stoehr, “Introduction,” in Paul Goodman, The Facts of Life: Stories, 1940–1949, ed. Taylor Stoehr (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979), 9.