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,