MAX NETTLAU

A CONTRIBUTION TO AN ANARCHIST BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LATIN AMERICA

EDITORIAL LA PROTESTA

BUENOS AIRES

1926

MAX NETTLAU - A BIOGRAPHY

            Max Nettlau was born in Neuwaldweg, near Vienna on 30 April 1865 and died on 23 July 1944. His father was descended form old Prussian stock, and had never renounced his nationality, although he lived in Austria. He saw to it that young Max received a very liberal education: after secondary schooling in Vienna, Max read philosophy in a variety of German towns. He secured his doctorate at the age of 23, with a thesis on Celtic languages.

            Enthused from an early age by the struggles of the Russian revolutionaries, Max joined the socialist movement and his anarchist beliefs took shape: but for them, he might have gone over to the Marxist school of thought like other German libertarians.

            He became a Bakunin enthusiast, and in 1880 he came up with the idea of writing a life of Bakunin. At the time, there were only a few fragmentary or subjective works on the life of the great revolutionary. The undertaking which Nettlau set himself was one of the most far-ranging, and by virtue of its very magnitude, it established his vocation as an historian. He threw himself zealously into methodical sleuthing after any document, titbit and testimony relating to his hero. Such researches drew him into an increasingly profound acquaintance with libertarian doctrines before and after the days of Bakunin. He quickly established himself as an expert in the field, as was demonstrated by his first articles, published in 1890 in the magazine Freiheit (Freedom), run by Johann Most (the first of these articles was a study of Joseph Déjacque, a fore-runner of anarcho-syndicalism, the second on essay "On the history of Anarchy"). In 1895, at the prompting of Elisée Reclus, he compiled a 294-page Bibliography of Anarchy, a complete inventory of anarchist literature to have seen the light of day in various countries up to that point, including periodicals and reviews.

            In material terms, having inherited a small fortune from his father, Nettlau was able to lead an independent existence, albeit a very modest one. Most of his resources he expended on the acquisition of archives and the foreign travels required by his research in libraries, and on his contacts with the leading militants of the movement. From his correspondence, we learn that he did the humblest household tasks for himself "...my life is lived at a basic level, my contacts with the outside world reduced to errands to the butcher's and baker's, and the arrival of the postman bringing me my spiritual sustenance in the shape of newspapers and letters.

            With a real gift for languages, he became a plyglot with a command of virtually every European language he needed for his researches.

            Although no activist, he was not slow to offer his opinion: "I have never been an active participant in the movement, other than through articles in which I have spelled out my views. My life has been given over completely to the movement's history and all of my own views can be found in my writings." However, this did not preclude him from following his historian's vocation with unshalable impartiality and integrity: he put forward only verified facts and conclusions, enlightened and enhanced by the merest details whose significance he was adept at discovering. And he never regarded any of his output as a finished product. He was forever completing and enriching them in the light of fresh documentation. Only a portion of his mass of manuscripts saw publication during his life-time, as there were few publishers willing to take the risks, and many remain unpublished to this day. The ardour of Netlau's work was utterly disinterested and it never faded, in spite all the vicissitudes and disappointments he suffered.

            His heart boasted qualities every bit as remarkable as his intellectual gifts. Hampered, one after another, by the advent of fascism in 1920, of Nazism in 1933, by the defeat of the Spanish republic in 1939 and by a second world war, he referred to this, in a letter from 1935, as "an uninterrupted series of maladies caused by the ghastly moral poisoning of mankind since 1914."  His anguish was at all times tempered by fervent belief in the future coming of anarchism. He used to say: "We carry the 19th century in our bowels. No one can steal the past form us, nor our dreams of the future."  Ascetic and philosophical, his appearance might have created on impression of insensitivity. But his abhorrence of injustice and violence was such that he never re-read tales of war and butchery: "Putting up with that once is enough for me." Treacherous displays of animosity disgusted him. Without ever abandoning his own views, he defended them with tact and respected opinions prompted by good intentions and expressed with sincerity. "Someone who belabours a man's honour proves only that he himself has no sense of honour and no notion of what human dignity is."

            The deep-seatedness of his beliefs, allied to a touching delicacy of feeling, meant that this loner, a man without family, felt at one, intellectually and sentimentally, with the great figures from the anarchist past. With tenderness and amusement, he used to recount anecdotes from the lives of Bakunin or Reclus, as if they were close relatives.

            Of all his libertarian contemporaries, it was with the Spanish libertarians that he felt the greatest affinity. Every year he would visit with his Spanish comrades, whom he loved and admired: "Those who, as I do, come from the waste-land countries of Europe, feel in Spain as if they are in a verdant young forest, in the bosom of a people that has not yet forgotten freedom and human dignity." (letter written in the spring of 1932)

            In him, the Spanish comrades had one of their staunchest champions right to the bitter end. Nettlau issued appeals to his friends all over Europe and the Americas to publicise the heroic past of the Spanish workers' movement, the causes and rivalries of the civil war, and the urgent need for assistance to the fighters for the Republic. He clung to hope right up to the last, and the horrific months leading up to the fall of Barcelona and Madrid were the bitterest of his life.

Having gone in 1938 to pursue his work at the International Institute for Social History, he was obliged by events to stay in Amsterdam. As much of his documentation was still in Vienna, Madame A. Adam van Scheltema-kleefstra, the Institute's librarian, flew to Austria and, with the help of the Dutch Embassy, managed to retrieve them for Nettlau. she it was (we are told by Rocker in a letter of 1945) who attended to the details of the old man's life and his death (of an inoperable tumour) on 23 July 1943.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Ⅰ    PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

Ⅱ    ANARCHIST PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA PRIOR TO 1890

Ⅲ   ANARCHIST PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA IN THE YEARS FROM 1890 TO     

     1904. PART ONE: PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS -

     THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC (1890 - 1904)

     URUGUAY (1890 - 1905)

     CHILE (1890 - 1905)

     CUBA (1890 - 1905)

     UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1890 -1905)

     BRAZIL (1892 - 1904)

Ⅳ  ANARCHIST PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA IN THE YEARS 1890 - 1904.         

     PART TWO: BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS, ORIGINAL WRITINGS AND        

     TRANSLATIONS:

     TRANSLATIONS AND REPRINTS OF SPANISH AND ITALIAN TEXTS IN BOOK  

     AND PAMPHLET FORM UP TO 1904:

     LOCAL PROPAGANDA PUBLICATIONS, PARTICULARLY PAMPHLETS, UP TO  

     1914 -

     ARGENTINA

     URUGUAY

     CHILE

     MEXICO

     BRAZIL

Ⅴ   ANARCHIST PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA IN THE YEARS FROM 1905 TO

     1914.

      PART ONE: PERIODICALS -

      ARGENTINA

      URUGUAY (1905-1914)

      URUGUAY (1906-1914)

      PARAGUAY (1906-1914)

      CHILE (1905-1914)

      PERU (1905-1914)

      THE CANAL ZONE AND THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA

      COSTA RICA

      CUBA (1905-1914)

      PUERTO RICO

      MEXICO

      BRAZIL

      LATIN AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS IN THE YEARS 1905 TO 1914. PART TWO:  

      BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS (ORIGINAL AND IN TRANSLATION):

      ORIGINAL PUBLICATIONS -

      THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC (1905-1914)

      URUGUAY

      PARAGUAY

      PERU

      COSTA RICA AND TROPICAL AMERICA GENERALLY

      CUBA

      MEXICO

      BRAZIL

      UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

      TRANSLATIONS AND REPRINTS OF EUROPEAN PUBLICATIONS IN SPANISH   

      AND ITALIAN (1905-1914)

      CONCLUSIONS

MAX NETTLAU - A Contribution towards an Anarchist Bibliography of Latin America up to 1914

Ⅰ

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

What follows cannot be anything other than one of the most modest of contributions of a few materials towards a bibliography of the anarchist literature disseminated across the vast territory stretching from Argentina to Mexico and from Cuba, through Brazil to Chile, and which originated, apparently at any rate in a different way at a different time in each country, a luxuriant growth here but a very weak one there, and but rarely collated and collected and, inevitably, virtually inaccessible and of a scale difficult to grasp for anyone who, like myself, has never ventured beyond a for-off Europe. It would indeed be rash of me to grapple with this subject, had I not been receiving and retaining a portion of these publications for some time past, and I remember that my interest was piqued whenever I spotted the first issue of El Perseguido of Buenos Aires, which appeared on 18 May 1890. Even then I tried to track backwards, but the comrades of the time were by then unable to procure for me the older Buenos Aires periodicals, but in the case of Montevideo, I received or subsequently came across periodicals dating back to 1878 and 1884. From 1890 onwards, I myself received some periodicals and I am obliged to comrades for all of the interval: I know that Doctor John Creaghe, whose acquaintance I made in London, told them of my interest and Malatesta too facilitated such links for me at that time, in 1890. All of that material has been properly preserved, but circumstances have not allowed me to review all of it in the writing of this essay, to extract bibliographical data, information about authors and the history of the periodicals, as well as information regarding the origins and affiliations of movements and concerning organizations, etc. Those sources have been added to enormously by publications sent by way of exchanges with some European anarchist periodicals, large quantities of which have been preserved. But it would require a year's work just to scrutinise all that and properly to arrange the many notes that would be made of it, and one should have to consult a lot of historical, political and economic literature on every one of those countries, etc. That is well beyond my present capacity for work and is a task that would better be left to a collective effort on the part of comrades from each country and from each large city or propaganda centre in every one of the countries concerned.

            The subject matter would be not only the origins but also the affiliations of the initiatives in one country that impacted upon other regions. Insofar as the focus of our research is anarchy, those origins were very meagre, very individual, attributable to especially active comrades or scattered groups the memory of which was preserved, forgotten or became legendary to varying extent. Sometimes, anarchist ideas were the first to be diffused in a locality, if the instigator who founded the first group came from Buenos Aires, or Mintevideo, or had turned anarchist back in Spain, Portugal, sometimes Italy and France. On other occasions, there was prior socialist propaganda, itself preceded by workers'  efforts to combine, the primitive trade unionism of an age barley acquainted with the vaguest and least advanced of socialisms. No doubt too, intense political strife, civil wars and elections clustered workers around political bosses. On still other occasions, some intellectuals embraced one or other of the European socialist arrangements and set about propagating them or amending them of their own bat: in this regard, Francisco Bilbao, of Chile, a follower of Lamennais, is much mentioned: he wrote, for instance, Lamennais como representante del dualismo de la civilización moderna (Paris, 1856, 72 pages in 12), and later there were, and still are, positivists, extremely active in Chile and in Brazil, as well as in Mexico (Revista positiva). And in the mexico of the decade 1860-70, there was the little know Proudhonist, doctor Rhodakanaty.

            Who can go back and trace all of these tiny foyers of social thought and the earliest rudiments of labour organizations and the awakening of struggle, those first strikes, local rebellions and other phenomena - who, indeed the unhindered course of the strivings of so many who planted the ideas they brought in from the great cities and from Europe, traveling from country to country, intent upon propaganda or simply driven hither and thither by the vagaries of everyday life or by poverty and persecution? The headway made into those vast territories by socialism, by anarchy - minimal, if not non-existent as yet in many places, and sometimes boasting militants of the highest calibre in others, in Argentina, Mexico or Chile -  is the sum of all that. Local tradition, sometimes no doubt printed accounts, whether rare or commonplace, have preserved a little of that history: systematic inquiry in the shape of a survey to be conducted by the local comrades in many localities would unearth much: but much has been lost beyond recovery or lingers as only a vague recollection. And only if that sort of local research into anarchist origins were followed up by painstaking local bibliographies for the whole period - only then might Latin America's anarchist history and bibliography be pieced together. We are, so far as I can tell, only at the beginning of such an undertaking and that fact prompts me to offer what I have been able to put together thus far. 

The matter is complicated even further by the incontrovertible fact that what literature may be enumerated accounts for only a fraction of the literature that contributed to anarchist propaganda in Latin America. In bygone days and wheresoever the periodicals published in a few great cities had yet to penetrate, the idea was spread thanks to whatever the earliest propagandist had in their heads, abetted by whatever pamphlets, books or periodicals from Spain, Italy, etc. they brought along with them or happened to come by. Later this European literature, including translations of the main writings published in French, etc., was more widely diffused, being circulated by the groups or the administrations of the periodicals. Likewise, Spanish books published by bourgeois publishers, but sometimes offering translations from the finest anarchist writings in French or in other tongues - such editions, produced in Spain, circulated through the independent bookshops of the groups and made those ideas widely known. One further detail: Le Révolté, La Révolte, and Les Temps Nouveaux, published form Geneva and Paris, were the anarchist periodicals that exchanged most widely with none too kindred publications, (ideologically speaking), but the purpose of such exchanges was to disseminate the idea, and the fact that such exchanges proceeded with the furthest flung places indicates that everywhere there were individuals keen to acquaint themselves with a periodical that was know to be of like mind with Elisée Reclus (a very well-know figure in Latin America at the time) and Peter Kropotkin.

Along all of these by-ways there was a dissemination of anarchist literature and anarchist ideas that is not susceptible to statistical analysis but which cannot be denied. To which must be added the many French books, of theory and ideas, novels, poetry and on art that especially from 1890 onwards were often influenced by anarchy and which reached Latin America in the original or in translations. Similarly, Spanish workers in the United States made or, frequently, deepened their acquaintance with anarchist ideas there, and from there those ideas spread through the cities of southern Florida and through Cuba, into the tobacco industry especially - and elsewhere they spread from California into Mexico. And willing or forced emigration brought experienced anarchists into those countries form Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and Russia, etc.

Thus, of necessity, a lot of European anarchist literature and, specifically, a natural selection of the best works, circulated along the lines indicated and elude direct observation. Many translations were printed or re-printed locally: I shall be listing many such titles, and the serial publication of periodicals means that an almost complete cataloguing of them is feasible. But inevitably, for much of the time, such an abundance of useful writings readily to hand must have dissuaded local comrades from themselves writing books and pamphlets, which might have proved doubly useful in those early stages. Hence, as I see it the profusion of periodicals, which afford an insight into life in the light of the local situation, facilitating debate, controversy, diatribe, vulgarisation, etc. By this process, local writers gradually emerged, and original local literature has long since surfaced in Argentina and is emerging elsewhere as in Mexico, but remains feeble in other countries. However, since what I shall term international literature in Spanish, Italian, French, etc., exists, this poverty of local publications is not indicative of under-development of the movement, but it is obviously impossible for a distant observer to gauge the true state of affairs. For example, I know of no anarchist periodical form Venezuela, and no pamphlets, etc., and I have not bothered to establish wether there are groups: nevertheless, the books, pamphlets and periodicals in existence elsewhere may well be familiar in that country also to who knows how many scattered sympathisers, possibly, as yet, prevented by local circumstances from showing themselves openly.

A further word regarding bibliographies in general. Whereas hundreds may find it a humdrum genre, the dry cataloguing, the pedantic and painstaking assiduousness in the listing of titles is nonetheless a genre not without its uses. Indeed. It is out of such reconstruction that classic literature sprouts and this affords understanding, or at least helps one to understand how this pretty well definitive good literature was arrived at. The aristocratic approach is to ignore the great mass and pay heed only to the odd excellence, and that outlook is not ours, for it sees and respects only the grand leaders. It is the labour of the humble, of the workers, that creates the fertile soil where it is feasible for a few fairly great talents to blossom into those rare men of true genius. To get properly acquainted with these, we therefore need to turn back to the humble, and this is what, in literature, bibliography does, tracing the context for everybody's endeavours in an area, and thereby providing the tools for an examination of the true implications of the salient output of the more eminent. Just as the architect would not be able to produce his house without the obscure but capable in-put of many trades, every one of which achieves a degree of efficiency that has to be acknowledged, so the outstanding author ought to be studied in a context of familiarity with the stetting from which he springs. If the setting has really produced very little, then the work of note gains in value, etc. In any event, in order to base our considerations upon as solid a foundation as possible, bibliography too is an indispensable tool, and, once compiled, it may prove of service in numerous undertakings.

ANARCHIST PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA PRIOR T0 1890

In 1890, with its great world-wide demonstrations to mark the first May Day, there was everywhere evident an awakening of the workers' movement that promptly found itself supported by the hitherto dormant masses who recovered a sense of their international dimensions, somewhat overlooked ever since the disappearance of the old International, and it blossomed with fresh expectations. How such expectations were disappointed we shall not be discussing here, but since the great days of the International and the Commune of 1871, that May Day of 1890 was the first great day of any note and all of the movements recovered their vigour and made considerable headway. In buenos Aires, the first anarchist periodical of any real duration, El Perseguido, appeared, lasting from 18 May 1890 to 31 January 1897. Its appearance was only possible thanks to pioneering propaganda which must have been solid if it triggered this blossoming from 1890 onwards, but which had not been vigorous enough to produce the same results earlier. Let me, therefore, summarise what sparse traces I have managed to unearth from the period leading up to 1890.

For centuries past, the term anarchist has been current wheresoever public political activity has been practicable, discounting those periods when absolutism, having trampled over ancient local freedoms, imposed a general silence. The malcontent, the rebel was ever maligned by the moderate and the holder of power as a factor for disorder, a friend of anarchy: hence the term anarchist. Occasionally it happened that some orator or writer borrowed this term of abuse, embraced it, and proudly exulted in the unbounded freedom, that storm that was always to be preferred over the stagnation of the established power. Fine words have been quoted from José F. Rivas of New Granada (cf. La Revista Internacional Anarquista of 15 December 1924, p. 29), words uttered or written on some occasion and in a time - a century or more previously? - that I have not been able to fix.

No doubt the political liberation of the whole of Hispanophone America and its countless civil wars witnessed, alongside the great bourgeois parties, advanced men and factions, popular rebels of social inclinations, philosophers and poets who yearned for the most perfect expressions of freedom and solidarity, and maybe among these there would have been a few real spokesmen for the anarchist ideal, who should not be confused with the countless rhetoricians and eulogists of that formal, Platonic liberty that is congruent with order and property. Thus, before acceptance could be secured in New Granada for that constitution which, a few years on, would prompt Elisée Reclus to write (on 3 October 1856) that New Granada "without knowing it, was the freest nation in the world" (cf. Correspondence Paris, I, 1911, p. 139), there had to be considerable radical and anti-clerical agitation, and lively discussion of all political issues and a few social issues also. I do not know whether this period has been scrutinised closely: all that I have seen is a few slighting remarks uttered by the reactionaries in pamphlets like: Anarquia y rojismo en Nueva Granada by M. Ancizar (Santiago, Chile, 1853) and Observaciones sobre la anarquia y rojismo en Nueva Granada (anonymous, ibid, 1853).

In such struggles against dictators, against the clergy, etc., there was scope for elaborating upon the reasonable and generous conditions of freedom, and though a reading of the works of Proudhon, in French, or (in the years 1870-1880) in translations by Pi y Margal and others, a few isolated minds will also have acquired a grasp of social freedom, but, save for one in Mexico, I have not been able to trace them.

I very much regret my unfamiliarity with the historical work of Doctor Angel Jiménez, which the author of the above-mentioned article form the Parisian review used in his researches. Thus, I do not have a clear picture of Barolomé Victory y Suárez, a Spaniard, from whose presses issued --- according to that source - a translation of Cabet, the Icarian communist, a worker's periodical called El Artesano and later the Revista Masónica Americana. He is supposed to have had dealings with the International in Barcelona (it having been established there since 1869).

No doubt news from Buenos Aires must have reached Spain at this time, for there was "a memoir from the Buenos Aires Typographical Society, written by its president, Juan M. P. Médez" and which mentioned the International in Barcelona - that document, mentioned in the source named, is undoubtedly the same one form which I discovered a lengthy extract in La Emancipación (Madrid) No. 130, 11 February 1872, entitled: El Socialismo en las Repébicas americanas. This was indeed socialism, somewhat general, and generic, neither anarchist nor - as far as I can recall at any rate - political or authoritarian, and such sentiments were probably those of the section of the International-- founded in Buenos Aires 1872.--

The International spread out from the autumn of 1864, either through the adherence of workers societies as affiliated sections or organizations by means of notification of the secretaries for the various languages and the endorsement of applications by the Central or General Council, or through reports from isolated members whom the Council appointed as correspondents and whose task it was to found sections. The efforts of these correspondents were either successful or unsuccessful, prospered or were very soon abandoned, With regard to the Americas, outside of the United States, I can but cite what Fribourg and Charles Limousin wrote in their report on the London Conference of September 1865, That "steps have been taken to establish correspondence...with Rio de Janeiro,...with the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique." (Le Siècle Paris, 14 October 1867). According to the General Council's report to Lausanne Congress (September 1867) a branch which and existed in Guadeloupe in 1866 had not paid, or had ceased paying its dues in 1866-1867. At the Congress in The Hague (September 1872), the General Council reported that the organisation was firmly established in the United States, "und dass Verzweigungen bestehen in Buenos Ayres, Australien und Neuseeland." (Cf. the German translation of the official report, Braunschweig, 4pp. in 4.). The vague term, Verzweigungen suggests that there were neither recognised sections nor formally affiliated organisations: in the case of Buenos Aires, this probably would have ment that there was a section there, but that it had not submitted the application for admission required under the Statutes as essential. The likelihood is that the section stayed that way and that no harm was seen in it. F.A. Sorge, of the General Council in New York, in a summery of news received between December 1872 and February 1873, stated: "Von Buenos Aires kam Nachricht, dass die Internationale dort Fuss gafasst habe und eine Sektion gegründet sei, die bereits 250 Mitglieder zaehle".. (cf. Briefe... an F. A. Sorge Stuttgart, 1906, p. 92). Was Sorge referring to the section or to the federation? Because there are more exact sources.

A letter from the general secretary of the Buenos Aires sections (Buenos Aires, 23 March 1873) to a correspondent of the General Council in France, (Larroque, of Bordeaux), a letter designed to build close relations with the International in Europe, - states: the French section was the first formed, followed by the Italian and Spanish sections: each section has its own central committee and matters of general interest are handled by a federal council made up of six members (two per section.." That letter was addressed to José Tonassi of La Belgerie des Alpes, for transmission to M. (onsieur) Aubert. Might this Aubert have been the "Jules Auberne" who was one of those arrested on 14 March 1875 and discharged on 20 April? (cf. Rev. Int. An. 15 December 1924, p. 30).

Victory y Suárez - according to the last -named source - also told how in 1872 a "French section" had been organised: in its programme it stated "..that it is incumbent upon members to reject any form of government that is not the embodiment of the workers", a phrase that rather indicates that the authors of that programme were no anarchists, but that they believed in government by a workers' party, a view very much in currency at the time: in short, a worker deputy instead of a bourgeois deputy. Aubert wrote to Larroque, a friend of Lafargue's, that another of Lafargue's friends, Wilmart, from Bordeaux, a member of the marxist majority at the Congress in The Hague, had gone to Buenos Aires, having set sail from Lisbon on 19 October 1872. So that section, by which I mean the French members, was certainly not anarchist: whether it was drawn especially from among refugees form the Commune or from emigrés form south-east France, form Bordeaux and the Gironde, I cannot tell. According to Angel Jiménez, after September 1872 it issued seven or eight numbers of a periodical called El Trabajador, and May 1875 saw the publication, in French, of the republican and internationalist Le Révolutionnaire, written by S. Pourcille. In Córdoba, a section was founded in 1874.

Finally, the same source mentions, without going into details, that, in 1876, the small number of Internationalists remaining had allegedly embraced Bakunin's ideas and set up a "centre of labour propaganda" which published an exposition of its thinking in 1879 in a pamphlet entitled Una Idea. I am not familiar either with this pamphlet or with any of the detail of these developments, bit there is every likelihood that the persecution endured by the International in Spain and restoration of the monarchy there in 1874 will have driven Spanish anarchist emigrés and refugees to South America and to Mexico, thereby giving a boost to propaganda and throwing down a significant challenge to authoritarian socialist elements. In the later months of 1875, the Bulletin of the Jura (Switzerland) received, for the first time, as it recorded at the time, a copy of El Socialista of Mexico, in which was inserted an appeal from a section founded in Montevideo, addressed to the workers of that city, urging them to join the International. Then, from Switzerland where the Federal Council of the (anti-authoritarian) International was based at the time, correspondence was struck up with Mexico and Montevideo (cf. James Guillaume L'Internationale Paris, III, 1909, p.306). The Montevideo section sent a letter to the International's Berne Congress of October 1876: (op.cit., IV, 1910 pp. 103, 122-123). The 22 April 1877 edition of the Bulletin carried a letter from the committee of the "Société internationale des Ouvriers" in Montevideo, relating that the conctruction workers and ship's carpenters had established associations, etc. (op.cit. IV, p.193). In Montevideo a Federación was formed and this was inducted into the International at the Verviers congress of September 1877 (op.cit.p. 258).

Whether the embracing of anarchist ideas by the Buenos Aires Internationalists, definite by around 1876, was due to local factors, to the arrival of Spanish Internationalists or to some influence originating with that Montevideo section, is a problem which there is no evidence to help me resolve. It may be said that, had there been dealings with Montevideo at the time, this would have been known in Switzerland, which was not the case. In Buenos Aires there was a French socialist, one Baux, but he was critical of anarchy: it was he who wrote to Elisée Reclus, who replied with the splendid letter published in Le Travailleur (Geneva) under the title L'Evolution légale et l'anarchie. Lettre au compagnon Baux in January-February of 1878. The address book of the Bulletin, which I was able to consult, records, after January 1877: Don Pedro Bernard, Calle Conveción 101, Montevideo - the only man in South America receiving the Jura Bulletin, which stopped coming out on 25 May 1878. 5 May 1878 saw the appearance of El Internacional in Montevideo: a second issue appeared on 12 May: those are the only two of which I have knowledge. I do not have them to hand, but they struck me as anarchist whenever I laid eyes on them.

From comrade Valadés in Mexico, I learned on 26 April 1924 that, so far as he had been able to establish, Carlos Sanz of Barcelona, had gone to Mexico and been active there beginning in the early months of 1873 - further details will follow - and he was a comrade of Rafael Farga Pellicer: he was extremely active and by that time had already been to Uruguay and Argentina. Thus, in 1872 he could have been one of the first people to disseminate the ideas in those countries, but perhaps his stay was too short although he did live for a long time in Mexico and was very active.

El Descamisado (Buenos Aires) was anarchist from 6 January 1879 on, but it struck me as rather primitive in its grasp of anarchist ideas.

According to that article which I have cited several times, the International's section in Buenos Aires had been reconstituted on 18 September 1879 and October saw the appearance of La Vanguardia, written by Eduardo Camaño.

In addition, I have jotted down, probably from Le Révolté of Geneva, a note regarding La revolución social (Montevideo 1882) and Federación de Trabajadores (beginning on 5 September 1885: the last issue of which I have any knowledge, No 13, dates from 21 November). In Buenos Aures there was La Lucha Obrera, with one programme edition and 29 issues, between 2 March and 28 September 1884. It was from this periodical that the pamphlets La Mujer (14pp., no author, no place indicated: 1884) and Que es la solidaridad? (1884) were lifted.

Around this time, the Francophone anarchist elements were strengthened by the arrival of Emile Piette and other Belgians who had lang been active in the Belgian International and latterly in the L'Etincelle group in Verviers, They must have carried out anarchist communist propaganda, as distinct from the anarchist collectivist variety of the Internationalists from Spain. It would be interesting to establish how both schools conducted themselves in Argentina, in that in Spain in the years that followed - these were the days of La Justicia Humana in Barcelona (1886) and Tierra y Libertad in Gracia (1888-89), the earliest anarchist communist mouthpieces in Spain - they clashed bitterly. It is my belief that there were fewer clashes (in Argentina), thanks to the tact of Errico Malatesta who spent the years 1885 to 1889 in Argentina and who had been equally conversant with both schools of opinion for some time. I have never managed to see La Questione sociale or La Cuestión Social which he published in Buenos Aires in 1885 in Italian and in Spanish, respectively.

Between 1885 and 1890, in Buenos Aires, there were also the following periodicals: El Socialista (Italian): No 6 is dated 28 August and No 8 4 September 1887. Venti Settembre (Italian), a one-off dated 20 September 1889. 11 de Noviembre, a one-off, 11 November 1889, Montevideo and Buenos Aires. And in Montevideo:

Il Socialista (Italian) from 18 August 1889 on.

La Voz Del Trabajador (anarchist communist) from 1 December 1889 to 16 February 1890. 10 issues.

Anarchist literature may well have been published elsewhere in Latin America during those years, but I have no knowledge of it: it only remains for me to indicate pre-1890 publications in Mexico and on the island of Cuba.

**********

Of all of the larger countries of Latin America, Mexico is the one that experienced most revolutions and uprisings during the XIX century and this has persisted following the interval of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship: they still embody a social character to a great extent, representing as they do the peasants' rebellion against feudalism, as well as the rebellion of the workers who extract the country's natural wealth, against the capitalists, and especially the foreign capitalist who claim it for themselves. A sizable Indian population, denied ready access to land, to natural resources and the instruments of labour, tolerates only grudgingly the farcical government, agrarian and industrial exploitation and the parasitism of a very wealthy clergy. Hence, alongside the civil wars prompted by the various political factions' lust for power, there has been, more frequently than elsewhere, a plainly social and also libertarian revolt, leading to seizure of the land and a repudiating and eschewing of the State, and subscribing to the free region or commune as the ideal. Hence too, and above all in the early stages, the cavalier neglect of written, theoretical and literary propaganda, since action and real fighting - rifle, horse, plains and mountains, are more readily accessible to the rebel there than in countries with meek, fatalistic populations.

It is the the credit of comrade Valadés that he has scurtinised Mexico's libertarian origins very attentively: until such time as he presents his findings to us in book form, we can learn something form his article De la historia del anarquismo en México. La insurrección de Chalco (Mayo de 1869) in the Suplemento to La Protesta, No 119, 1 May 1924: and from the first of Julio Diaz's articles Desde México. El movimiento obrero y la propaganda anarquista in La Protesta 3-8 November 1925: I also can call upon the letter that Valadés wrote me on 26 April 1924. Here I will lift from it only a few names of the earliest comrades from the years 1860-1870, people like the students Zalacosta, Juan Villareal and Hermenegildo Villavicencio (1865), the philosophy teacher Platino Rhodakanaty, a Proudhonist who was in Mexico from 1862 or 1863, or the rebel in Chalco (Mexico State) on 1 May 1869, Julio Chávez, captured on 17 August and shot on 1 September 1869. It appears that these men, together from 1865 inspired the formation of the Circulo de obreros mexicanos (5 March 1870) and, in defiance of a minority of moderates, that of a further centre called La Social (20 May 1871). Bolstered by the influx of refugees form the Paris Commune, but after a time swamped utterly by legalitarians, they formed a minority at the First Congress of the Workers' Societies of Mexico (5 March 1876) and, under the protracted reign of President Diaz, the broad mass of the workers retreated into a bland mutualism. La Social was reorganised by the libertarians (7 May 1876). The high point of its agitation was the 14 December 1879 demonstration by 5,000 workers in Mexico City, where, according to a local journalist cited by Valadés, upwards of a hundred red flags were brandished behind a huge black placard on which was written, in red lettering: "La Social, affiliated to the Jura's great International League."

From the early months of 1873 on, Carlos Sanz, who had arrived in Mexico form Barcelona, was very active in the libertarian ranks: it is said that at a gathering on 20 March in memory of the Commune he read out a letter form "Farga Pellicer and Bakunin": there is no other evidence connecting him with Bakunin, but that is not to dismiss the allegation that I can but repeat with circumspection, According to Valadé's researches, the persecutions of 1880 prompted Rhodakanaty to go to ground, whilst Zalacosta spent several years in prison after 1881 and it is believed that Sanz left the county and my have attended the international revolutionary congress held in London in July 1881. However, the records of the congress, passed to me by G. Brocher, as well as Brocher's own recollections, (He was the organiser of the London congress), make no reference to a Carlos Sanz, who should not, of course be confused with Nathan Ganz, who was then residing in Boston, Massachussetts, where he published the English-language magazine The Anarchist and who carried a mandate form the legalitarian Mexican organisation quite at odds with Carlos Sanz's La Social: the former organisation published El Socialista (which appeared from 9 July 1871 on, a paper whose two editions from 1881, which I have seen for myself, contained only a wishy-washy or insipid socialism). At the London congress, Nathan Ganz made exaggerated and unreliable claims for revolutionary socialism in Mexico. At that very point, 1881, most militants had been scattered or rendered hors de combat, perhaps as a result of the consolidation of the Porfirio Diaz regime, which thereafter and for the next twenty years kept Mexico in sad and silent subjugation, leading to build-up of revolutionary passions that finally erupted to unleash the feats of the Magon brothers, Práxedes Guerrero and so many others.

The publications of unmistakably anarchist persuasions were:

La Comuna of which 30 issues were published, starting form 28 June 1874.

La Internacional 11 issues between 14 July and 15 September 1876, a periodical which stated - and here I am quoting Valadés - "our programme is social anarchy, the abolition of all governments and the social revolution," "the eleven issues of this periodical (4 pages, in half triple) are very much in line with the international anarchist movement".

Reports in Le Révolte and in Freiheit concerning the London congress of 1881 list the titles of periodicals named by N. Ganz, but their comments do not inspire confidence. Rhodakanaty translated Proudhon's celebrated book (1851) as Idea general de la Revolución en el siglo XIX (Biblioteca Socialista: Mexico)

The list will be expanded once Valadés history of the movement is published. But it seems to me that few publications will be found for the twenty five years after 1881, aside form one pamphlet in 1903. I cannot say wether anarchist periodicals, books and pamphlets from elsewhere in Spanish speaking countries then made their way into Mexico.

**********

As regards the island of Cubaa even while it was still under Spanish rule. The tobacco industry led to worker organisation and in their frequent dealings with Spain they might easily have become acquainted with anarchist ideas, One periodical, El Obrero, of Havana, was, in the years after 1880, a rather corporative organ, but El Productor (Havana) was explicitly anarchist.

Borrowing its title form the famous Barcelona periodical which published as a daily form 1 February 1887 onwards, Havana's El Productor, a weekly, must have started in July 1887, for its issue No 13 is dated 29 september. The first series comprised 167 or more issues: the second, reached issue No 78 on 10 August 1890.

Acracia was published in Santo Clara: issue No 5 is dated 1 November 1889.

**********

It should not be a pointless exercise at this point to give a mention to the main publications in the Romance languages published in the United States up to 1890: in the French tongue, there were some notable ones. Joseph Dejacques's publications, for instance.

La Question Révolutionnaire (New York, Frank F. Barclay, printer and publisher, 64pp. in 32o).

Les Lazaréennes, Fables et Chansons. Poésies sociales (New Orleans, 1857, 199pp in 8o).

De I'Etre-humain male et femelle. Lettre P. J. Proudhon (ibid., 1857, 11 pages, in great 8o).

Béranger au Pilori (New Orleans: a pamphlet thus for untraced).

Le Libertaire. Journal du mouvement social (New York, 27 issues form 9 June 1858 to 4 February 1861, 4 pages, in folio).

Philosophie de I'Insourmission ou Pardon á Cain by Félix Pignal (New York, 1854, IV, 74 pages in 12o.)

By Claude Pelletier: Dictionnaire socialiste.. by Edaulc Reitellep (New York, 1874-1876: 450, 540, 656pp. small 8o. Might there have been a fourth volume?).

Les Soirées Socialistes de New York - Atercratie (1873) and other writings.

The Bulletin de I'Union républicaine de langue francaise (New York: issue No 39 is dated 16 March 1874 and issue No 70 31 October 1876) contains excerpts from Pelletier as well as articles and notes permeated by the spirit of the anti-authoritarian International, whilst not quite anarchist: even less anarchist are periodicals like L'Internationale (San Francisco, 1872) and La Commune (New Orleans, 1872-1873). But small periodicals were published from 1889 on in Pennsylvania, in the coal-mining areas. The first to appear was Le Réveil des Masses in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, 12 issues of which appeared after January 1888: the next issue, of Le Réveil des Masses, organe communiste-anarchiste, II, No 1, June 1890, was published out of New York. In addition there was Le Réveil des Mineurs (Hastings, PA. from 1 November 1890), which was still coming out in 1893: then there was L'Ami des Ouvriers (ibid., from 1 August 1894, which was still extant in 1896): and three issues, if not more, of La Crise Sociale (New York, 10 January to 25 February 1891).

In Italian, the only thing I know is L'Anarchico (New York: issue No 2 dates form 1 February 1888 and No 6 from 30 June): in Spanish there were no publications in the Untied States prior to 1890, but I cannot guarantee the conclusiveness of my research, and right now there is no way that I can complete it.

French periodicals published by the anti-authoritarians of the International reached America only in isolated instances: But from 1879 onwards, Le Révolte and its successors, and, later on, also Le Père Peinard (Paris, 1889-1894) were much more widely distributed and broke down the feeling of isolation that must have weighed heavily upon the first groups in those wide expanses.

ANARCHIST PUBLICATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA IN THE YEARS FORM 1890 TO 1904. - PART ONE: PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS.

In the years after 1890, libertarian publications hitherto localised above all in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Mexico and Havana, gradually recovered, but some of them returned more numerous and more stable, with a vigour no unrelated to the great flourishing of libertarian movements in Europe between 1890 and 1894: many of these publications now appeared in provincial cities and in other South American countries, and also focussed on particular trades, as well as making inroads into the realms of literary and artistic aspirations. This significant period, not yet concluded, ought to be sub-divided in a bibliography, but how would one go about that given that the movements in many countries are not co-ordinated, with each on having a history of its own? and those very histories regularly mark a gradual ascent, punctuated by periods of persecution from without, which may put paid to publications or force them underground for a time, but which never arrest the development of the movement which revives it publications after the storm has passed.

A knowledgeable specialist would see temporal sub-division for each country - and we are dealing here with roughly a dozen countries - but the data available for each country will vary. I have no such specialist knowledge and am merely looking for a practical guide. For the defining dates of this next period, I have chosen the years 1890 - when the movement gained in strength everywhere and when El Perseguido emerged as the first periodical of durability - and 1904, when, in early April, after nearly seven years appearing as a weekly, La Protesta went daily, having continued to publish on that basis ever since, This highlights the fact that the Argentinian movement, scarcely noticeable 25 years before in the days of the poor El Descamisado in 1879, had attained proportions making it feasible to launch a daily newspaper, a success tat has almost always eluded anarchist, certainly over such a extensive period.

Proudhon's newspapers were the first of the daily publications. During the Paris Commune, La Liberté in Brussels published daily: for some years prior to 1886 and indeed for a while thereafter, Chicago's Arbeiterzeitung, edited by August Spies and banned from 11 November 1889, was a militant anarchist daily newspaper: form 1 February 1887, Barcelona's El Productor published on a daily basis for a few weeks to begin with, and the Journal du Peuple in Paris (6 February to December 1890) was a daily edited by anarchists, but was only one of many publications especially created for the purposes of Dreyfusard propaganda at the time: I cannot call to mind any others, and the launching of the daily La Protesta and its maintenance over a 22 year period is, in consequence, a feat both rare and noteworthy, particularly for a movement so young.

Thus, I have chosen 1890 and 1904 as the parameters of this sub-division and I begin with those Argentinian periodicals which have come to my attention. I am not able to review them all just at this moment, so it is not feasible for me to characterise them, dwell upon their groups, contributors and affiliations, (insofar as a new periodical is often a replacement for one recently deceased - or else is a brand new venture entirely), their nuances, or their relative worth (for just as books my be good or bad, so there are periodicals that are of genuine worth, and occasionally some that are truly inferior), etc. I have seen, and often read, periodicals which I shall list, but that was a long time ago, and although I still retain a lot of impressions, these lack freshness, are incomplete and it is not worth burdening these listings with them. Militants with a lively recollection of each periodical are the ones who would be well advised - if they seek to be of service to History - to jot down a few words describing the complexion of each periodical as well as those details worth being placed on record regarding them - and critically-minded researchers, leafing through such collections, will shed light upon the ideas, criticisms, social descriptions and other living matter lying dormant in these old periodicals. So I shall confine myself almost exclusively to listing that do no discriminate between nuances (pro-organisation or individualistic, for example) and which recognise only three classifications:

a) General propaganda periodicals

b) Trades periodicals which, in the case of Argentina especially, are also largely general propaganda publications.

c) Literary magazines and specialist publications such as anti-militarist ones, etc.

THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC (1890-1904)

BUENOS AIRES. - El Perseguido, anarchist-communist organ, 18 May 1890 to 31 March 1896 and 6 December 1896.

La Miseria, 16 and 30 November 1890, 2 issues: § [1]

[1] § - This sign I use to indicate that I cannot vouch for a periodical's not having had more issues published than I indicate here: a periodical often ceases publication without prior notice, or reappears after an interval.

La Voz de Ravachol, 11 November 1895, 1 issue: §

La Voz de la Mujer, 8 January 1896: issue No 10 dated to 10 March 1897: §

La Revolución Social, 8 January 1896: issue No 19, 8 April 1897: §

Caserio, 14 February 1896, 18 April, 2 issues: §

Ni Dois, Ni Amo, 6 March 1896: §

La Expansión Individual, February 1896: §

Ciencia Social, review, April 1897: monthly: issue No III 13 is from October 1899: §

La España Inquisitorial, 9 May 1897.

La Autonomia, 3 June 1897: La Autonomia Individual (No 2) 1 August: §

La Protesta Humana, 13 June 1897, weekly up until issue No 256 (26 March 1904), daily after April 1904 as La Protesta. Details regarding its periods of publication will be given in full elsewhere. 1 May 1908 witnessed the appearance of the Suplemento de La Protesta magazine: 11 issues. The current Suplemento semanal has been appearing since 9 January 1922: a Resumen sumario (January to December 1925) 8pp. in oblong folio, lists the contents of issues 1 to 205: issue No 255, which marked the end of five years in existence, contains a guide to issues 205 to 255 inclusive.

Germinal, 14 November 1897: issue No 24 is form 25 December 1898: §

El Rebelde, No 7 is from 5 February 1899, and No 94 from 23 November 1902: §

El Ideal Anarquista, 1 May 1899.

El Escalpelo, 27 August, 10 October 1899, 2 Issues: §

Los Tiempos Nuevos, No 2 is from 16 September 1900.

El Alba del Siglo XX, 31 December 1900.

La Comuna Libre, supplenent to La Protesta Humana and L'Avvenire 18 March 1901.

1870-XX de Septiembre- 1901, 20 September 1901.

La Nueva Era, 4 August 1901: 3 issues.

Vida Nueva, 15 November 1903: no 5 is from 9 January 1904: §

In Italian

Lavoriamo, No 2, 1 January 1893.

La Riscossa, 14 October 1893: No 4 is from 15 April 1894: §

La Questione sociale, review, monthly, 1894 to 1896: No 22 is from 23 August 1896: 24 issues or more: §

Venti Settembre, long-lived weekly, 10 November 1895: 216 issues: second series published in Montevideo, from No 1 2 (218) of 17 January 1903 to issue No 221 or 222: No 223 (1 May 1903) is from Buenos Aires: there is a No 246A, and a 246B is the last of which I have knowledge: §

La Conquista di Roma, 20 September 1898 (In Italian and Spanish).

La Nuova Civiltà, 27 January 1901: 27 issues or more: §

Bahia Blanca- 1887-1903 -- 1 de Mayo, 1 May 1903, in Italian and Spanish.

La Favilla, Third one-off edition, 1887-1903, 11 November 1903.

In French

La Liberté, 23 January to 17 April 1893. 13 issues.

La Liberté, 18 March to 9 September 1894: 26 issues.

Le Cyclone, 12 November 1895: probably 5 issues: §

***************

LUJAN. - El Oprimido, No 2, 20 September 1894: II, 2 (1 August 1895) and ensuing issues up to No 41 or beyond: it was published out of Buenos Aires from 23 August 1896, No 22.

La Inquisición en España, supplement to El Oprimido, 17 January, 23 1897 (it appeared in Buenos Aires).

ROSARIO. - La Verdad, No 1, undated: No 21, March 1896: §

La Libre Iniciativa, 18 August 1895: No 7, 7 June 1896: §

LA PLATA. - La Anarquia, 27 January 1895 (or was it 27 November?): 26 issues or more: §

BARRACAS. - El Revolucianario, 15 August 1895: 2 issues: §

CHIVILCOY. - La Fuerza del Razónu, 23 July 1896: §

ROSARIO. - La Federación Obrera, No 2 is from 24 October 1896: §

In Italian

ROSARIO. - 11 Novembre 1889 [1887]-1889, supplement to El Paria, with which I am not familiar.

ROSARIO. - La Libera Parola, 29 April 1900: §

B. BUENOS AIRES. - El Obrero Panadero, 16 September 1894: at least 22 issues: series II, at least 8 issues: §: long-lived publication, followed by El Obrero Panadero of 1899: No 1-12 is from 1 September 1899: 31 issues or more: §: another periodical of the same name started in 1911.

La Unión Gremial, No 18 is from 5 March 1896: §

El Obrero Albañil, No 36 is from 7 October 1900: 32 issues or more: §

La Organización Obrera, August 1901: 5 issues: under the title of La Organización, No 6 and subsequent issues: later became La Organización Obrera: the organ of the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina, continues to appear sometimes: in 1912 as an underground periodical. There are Suplementos extraordinarios: the one for 1 May 1921 runs to 96pp. in great 8o: that for 1 May 1922 (two editions) to 128 pages: this periodical deserves a special description which I cannot offer.

El Gremio, (cabbies' union), No 3 is from 1 October 1903.

El Látigo del Carrero, from 1903, since No 17 (1905) is marked year III: this periodical appeared over many years (No 98, form 1913, was the latest one I saw): §

El Gráfico, March 1904: 20 issues of more: §

La Aurora del Marino, from 1904, in that issue 2-11 is from August 1905: 18 issues (1906) or more: §

El Sombrerero, issue No 4 is from August 1904: 30 issues or more: §: This periodical brought out the one-off edition 7 de Septiembre, 1902-1905.

El Orbero Sastre, from 1904, since issue 3-9 is from February 1906.

El Compañero (kitchen hands and helpers) form 1904, since issue 3-9 is form 15 December 1906: No 11 is form 15 January 1907: §

El Pintor, one of the oldest periodicals, in that IV-1, of 1 October 1912 is labelled: year XVIII: §

El Carpintero y Aserrador, from 1904, in that No 32, form June 1922, is labelled year XVIII: No 56 is from May 1925: it still comes out: El Carpintero of 1901 I have not seen.

This list is far from exhaustive and I cannot indicate that regularity of publication of these periodicals, some of which came out often, and others at lengthy intervals.

****************

C. I cannot be exact right now as to the extent to which the anarchist idea is manifest in publications like El Sol - its No 99 is from 16 October 1900: I am conversant with it up to No 174: §:

Martin Fierro - -No 1-9 is from 28 April 1904, and No 444 from January 1905.

¡Hierro! (semanario libre) - No 1-2 is from 14 October 1904.

There is nothing to equal the sight of our ideas making headway into literary publications and the like, but of course, these are flanked by other ideas and such penetration is liable to vary and is often temporary. Bibliography cannot pay heed to all such nuances: it has to have the help of description of the make-up of many of these magazines, and of the calibre of the men who inspired them, like - in the case of the periodical in question - Alberto Ghiraldo. There is a lot about him, for instance, in

Ideas y Figuras No 107 of 31 March 1914.

La Cooperativa General, trial issue: September 1900: Buenos Aires: §

El Trabajo, organ of the Casa del Pueblo, 26 June, 12 July 1902, 2 issues or more: §