Without Borders: Reflections on Anarchism in Latin America

Abstract

The complex history of global anarchism is currently undergoing a thorough historical revision. Inspired by the worldwide resurgence of anarchist ideas, methods of struggle, and movements that accompanied the ascendance of neoliberalism and globalized capital, and the collapse of international communism in the 1990s, scholars have recently embarked on a re-examination of classical anarchism (1860s-1920s) from a transnational perspective. This new historiography of anarchism eschews the standard nation-state centered approach and its concomitant interpretation of nationally self-contained anarchist movements. Taking anarchism’s principle of internationalism seriously, it focuses instead on supranational and multidirectional flows of ideas, discourses, resources, and activists, and formal and informal organizational and personal connections and interactions. In doing so, it offers a more nuanced historical narrative of anarchist networks, organization, ideological formation, solidarities, spaces, and temporalities. Much of this current literature however has been based primarily in a European territorial context. Still there is reason to be optimistic about a more comprehensive treatment of the history of anarchism. Renewed interest in anarchism’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles has resulted in several important historical studies that encompass the Global South. Nevertheless, considerable work remains to be done on the dissemination and reception of anarchism in the Global South during the first globalization (1880s-1920s), as Carl Levy recently stressed in an incisive literature review.