Alejandro Civantos, holding the book he wrote 'Reading in red...'

From Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation, English translation by Anarchist News

We interviewed Alejandro Civantos Urrutia, a researcher who specializes in anarchist books. We talked with him about his work "Leer en rojo. Auge y caída del libro obrero (1917-1931)" [Reading in Red: The rise and fall of the worker's book (1917-1931)] , published by the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation in 2017; an essential book to understand the importance of anarchist books, and the key role of anarchist culture played when it was at its peak.

Question: Although you analyze in your essay the fifteen years between 1917 and 1931, the anarchist movement's attempts to set up a workers' culture do not start in those years, but decades ago. What would be the precedents of anarchist publications and other activities aimed at building that worker culture?

The idea was to examine anarchist books in their period of greatest apogee and also to chronicle a bit of their dying off and transfiguration already with the Second Republic but, of course, as you say, this was only the end of a long process that went back to the origins of the First International. The oldest collection of books of proletarian origin was published by the Madrid anarchist newspaper "El Condenado" [ The Condemned One"] in 1873: it was called "Biblioteca de los Obreros" [Workers' Library] and was directed by Tomás González Morago, who organized the famous welcoming in Spain for Giuseppe Fanelli, Bakunin's envoy. But it is possible that they go back even further, to the first readers of worker origin, heroic deserters of illiteracy, who, when approaching the publications of their time, intuitively discovered an elementary lesson: that culture is a product of class and that currently it only responded to the interests of the bourgeois class, which served to legitimize it, and to condemn any possible alternative to non-existence. Hence, the most conscious labor movement, which in Spain was indisputably the anarchist, decided there could never be a Social Revolution if they continued to consume the culture of the enemy, and from there came the extraordinary explosion of worker's schools, then rationalist schools, then atheneums and anarchist libraries, amateur social theater companies, an infinity of anarchist presses, social magazines, workers' almanacs, pamphlets, and all examples of counterculture.

You assert in the preface of your book that currently books, newspapers, magazines, etc., play a scant role in the formation of people and that, in contrast, in the first decades of the 20th century a book was much more than a book, it was the door to the future and the stepladder that made it possible to be in the world and understand it. Did books and other publications really manage to fulfill that role? Why do you think that this is no longer the case today, despite great literary production and other artistic expressions?

Because today the book occupies a ridiculously residual role in the formation of people. It is not necessary at all. Capitalism no longer needs it because it has found other formulas to perpetuate itself more comfortably, to make us see it as something attractive and chic, but until the mid 20th Century the book still had that aura, which Juan Carlos Rodríguez spoke of, which made it useful to the system, which served for producing and reproducing class ideology, and naturalizing the social structures of domination. Today this is done in a more subtle and effective way through Instagram, without the need to create a Petrarch or a system of perks and prestige for those who best defend the dominant ideology. What I have investigated is a moment in history in which the proletariat understood the function of “the literary” in the class struggle and tried to dispute that terrain with the bourgeoisie. It did not succeed: it's plain to see. But that is why I say that, for them, books were more than books, they were a revolutionary phase of History, the basis, the foundations of the Revolution. After its failure, the book has not returned to have that character or that ambition to go beyond our own navel to create an idea of ​​collectivity capable of transforming the world. Not, of course, at that level. There have been attempts to recover it, as in the Transition, which is what I am working on now, but they have not been as far-reaching as at the turn of the century where, as I say, books were the mortar with which a new world would be built.

As you state in your book, the anarchist publishing movement of the first three decades of the 20th century set out to make culture accessible to the working class and create the conditions for their intellectual emancipation, as a prior and non-negotiable step for the revolution. For this reason, they opted for the need to create their own culture, a proletarian culture, an alternative cultural model compared to the bourgeois model. And they did it through published material, which ranged from essays, novels, popularization, practical books, union minutes, or epic poetry. How did that working class culture influence the ideas of the working class, in general, in a revolutionary sense? Did only anarchist workers soak up that culture, or also workers from other ideological sectors?

It is not unreasonable to think that the greatest achievements of the Spanish labor movement at that time were the result of its competence as an alternative social class, and the awareness of its power to subvert the system, and I honestly believe that this type of publication contributed much to it. The fact that the worker was self-taught, without borrowing resources from the class enemy, was already in itself revolutionary, but it was even more so that, thanks to this, the workers were able to lead their own struggles, without political vanguards or class compromises that had betrayed them so many times before. The function of the Athenaeums, the anarchist editorials, or the rationalist schools are a good exampled of this, as well as proletarian milestones of the type of the Canadian Strike, or the workers' cooperatives, but these latter would not have occurred without the former. And so powerful was this cultural movement that it immediately overflowed the libertarian world. Some of its most notable heirs are to be found in the extreme bourgeois left, which was newborn in the late 1920s and copied this type of publishing experience, as shown by the avant-garde book boom.

Anarchists believed that reading was one of the most effective remedies to combat ignorance and stimulate the social and cultural emancipation of the working class. However, in Spanish society at the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the population was illiterate (in 1910, for example, almost 60% of the population was illiterate and, in rural areas, more than 82%, as you indicate in your essay). Is it not paradoxical that, as things were, in those years there was a great boom in anarchist publishing houses and publications and a growing demand for books and magazines by the most disadvantaged classes?

No. It is not at all paradoxical. In fact, a good part of the predicament that anarchism came to have in Spain was due to the fact that no other social doctrine gave as much importance to education as they did. Given the negligence and contempt of the authorities, it was the workers themselves who were in charge of becoming literate. Those who did not know how to read learned with the pamphlets of "El eco de Ravachol" [The Echo of Ravachol], "Acracia" [Anarchy], or "Biblioteca Salud y Fuerza" [Health and Strength Library]; those who could read, read it to their peers. And they learned: they believed in culture. It was a totally self-managed experience. There were publications on zoology, botany, arithmetic or history. The first work of Human Geography to be published in our country, the impressive "Man and the Earth" by Elise Reclus, appeared in an anarchist publishing house, Publicaciones de la Escuela Moderna [Modern School Publications], around 1906. They were, or wanted to be, up to date on everything: neo-Malthusianism, vegetarianism, technology, science, thought. It was a cultural mission that still excites us today. What is paradoxical, since you mention it, was not then, but what is now: a totally depersonalized and atomized working-class world, in which, as Jesús Quintero said, even ignorance has prestige. And they end up voting for Vox. Now that is truly incomprehensible.

In addition to its editorial work, the anarchist movement has always defended the importance of free, secular, egalitarian and mixed public education. In this direction, already in the 19th century, a movement of anarchist atheneums arose, which very often functioned as schools for adults. At the same time, there was an explosion of educational centers set up by unions, athenaeums and anarchist groups: rationalist, secular and coeducational schools. Betting on autonomous schooling at the margins of the State. A good example of this is the Modern School founded by Francisco Ferrer Guardia. To what degree did rationalist athenaeums and schools contribute to the creation of that working-class culture necessary for revolutionary ideas to take hold?

On the subject of education, the Second Republic was not barren, as has been said so many times. In an admirable book, "Las Escuelas racionalistas en Cataluña" [Rationalist Schools in Catalonia], Pere Solá has documented more than 40 workers' schools in the Barcelona metropolitan area alone before 1931. In places like Poble Sec, Esplugues, Sants, Poble Nou, Santa Coloma, Guinardó. And he gathered testimonies from those who studied or taught in those schools promoted by workers in the textile industry, the construction industry or metallurgical unions. A similar phenomenon occurred in Andalusia and even the most isolated towns had their own rationalist school. Díaz del Moral tells it in his "Historia de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas" [History of Andalusian Peasant Revolt]. José Sánchez Rosa, a day laborer from Seville, became one of the great figures of world rationalist pedagogy without having any academic degree, through the numerous schools he promoted in lower Andalusia, and above all the workers' school he ran for almost 30 years in Seville, in the then depressed area of ​​Alameda de Hércules. He taught children in the mornings and adults in the afternoons. Most of those schools had their own publishing service. Publications of the Modern School is perhaps the best example. They edited, in addition to Man and the Earth, the popular collection “Los grandes pensadores” [The Great Thinkers] and other outstanding titles. Sánchez Rosa, for his part, promoted, as a complementary project to his school, the Biblioteca del Obrero [Worker's Library], from which successes such as "Aritmética del Obrero" [Worker's Arithmetic] or the "Abogado del Obrero" [Worker's Lawyer]. It was a clamor. The workers educated themselves because the State had abandoned them. As I told you before, this ability to self-organize was essential to create the class consciousness that turned the labor movement into a true counter-power in those years.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the labor movement did not have a unique profile. And the issue of worker culture was one of the most notable sources of friction between Marxists (PSOE and PCE) and anarchists. While the CNT gave the utmost importance to this specifically worker culture, because it understood that the intellectual revolution had to be given priority over the material revolution, Marxist orthodoxy denied the existence of a worker culture. What effects and influences did these different visions have on the labor movement in cultural and political terms?

Well, one of the historical fallacies that anarchism has most happily been saddled with is its spontaneous character, a kind of reflex insurrectionalism. For ordinary mortals, anarchists are a bunch of irredeemable terrorists, incapable of understanding the authentic revolution and its deadlines, when in fact it is the only social movement of that time that developed long-term revolutionary planning. The communists of that time postponed the cultural question: the important thing for them was the conquest of political power as soon as possible. The socialists, for their part, were always seen as the labor aristocracy, because the PSOE was full of typographers and small workshop owners who did not want to end the system but rather to reform or improve it, if that was possible, and for this reason they did not believe that a culture other than that of the establishment could exist: it was only a matter of incorporating the workers into it. Only the anarchists understood that the revolution would only be possible if the proletariat had enough training, not only to carry it out, but also to sustain it over time. Hence their interest in creating their own culture, at the margins of the existing one, which would allow them the intellectual emancipation from the bourgeoisie. Additionally, and this is also another myth that would have to be debunked, anarchists were never sectarians: they read Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as Marx, Blanquí, Fourier or Voltaire. They believed in what I have sometimes called "left-libertarianism," a synthesis of advanced thought that would represent a true alternative to the bourgeois model, and perhaps also, naively, they believed in a certain unity of the left. For this reason, the anarchists were the ones who were best prepared for the Revolution, as was seen in the summer of 1936, but also those who least understood its background of intrigue and betrayal, as was seen in May 1937.

Beyond written publications and educational activities, the anarchist movement also cultivated the arts in its various manifestations: music and songs, theater, painting, sculpture, cinema... What role did these artistic activities play in the objective of expanding a worker culture against the hegemony of the conservative bourgeois culture of the time?

That was a true cultural revolution. I insist that today it is difficult to understand it, when a Benetton advertisement is considered revolutionary or video games are considered culture. Times, forms, modes, creators, means and objectives have changed. In this regard, there is an admirable book by Lily Litvak that takes a tour of all that: "Musa Libertaria" [Anarchist Muse], which is published by the FAL. Everything is there. To highlight a single aspect, I would speak of the systematic struggle to make art that does not become a commodity, a resounding boycott of the economic dependence of art in capitalist society. A determined effort to make art that is truly human and associated with collective life: an act of defiance against the bourgeois marketing of culture. And this is a melon that will have to be cracked open at some point.

At the beginning of May 1924, after Primo de Rivera's military coup, the dictatorship that was established declared the CNT illegal and closed its premises. Logically, Solidaridad Obrera [Worker Solidarity] was suspended, as well as the dissemination of anarchist pamphlets. In addition, printing presses were dismantled and auctioned off, and printers and booksellers were arrested. What repercussions did these repressive measures have on the enormous cultural and educational work of the anarchist movement carried out up until then? How was the panorama of the anarchist publishing and educational world after eight years of persecution by the dictatorship?

In reality, the anarchist movement was very used to working underground or metamorphosing when hard times came. Some publishers never stopped working. It was enough for Biblioteca Generación Conciente [Conscious Generation Library] to change its name to Biblioteca Estudios [Study Library] and move its headquarters from Alcoy to Valencia, but it continued with the same type of publications. Others didn't even need that, like La Novela Ideal [The Ideal Novel]. But they were truly exceptions: Primo de Rivera's repression hit perhaps more viciously than the previous ones because it targeted anarchist cultural manifestations, understanding its “culturally” subversive nature. It was the second great diaspora of Spanish anarchist publishers and printers to South America (the first had occurred with the Montjuich trials). Nevertheless, the most dramatic thing about this downfall, was that contrary to past occasions, they were not able to recover, because right away left-wing republican cultural movements sn atched their bag, so to speak.

In the second part of your essay, you delve into the phenomenon of popular republican books between 1923 and 1936. The first publication of young republican students, El Estudiante [The Student], meant the first step for the configuration of the bourgeois radical left, in opposition to the traditional bourgeoisie. A bourgeois left that proposed to integrate intellectuals into the labor movement and rebuild it after the dictatorship, despite the fact that these young intellectuals had no contact with the workers. Can it be said that these republican publications and editorials intended to fill the gap left, forcibly, by those promoted by the anarchist movement? Did they arise, perhaps, as a counterweight to the notable influence exercised by the publications of that movement until the coup of Primo de Rivera? Or, simply, the magazines and books edited by these young republicans served as a political platform to reach the institutions?

Both "El Estudiante" [The Student] , promoted by radicalized Republican university students, and its later improved version, which was the post-war magazine, published in Madrid between 1927 and 1928, were undoubtedly the first attempt by the Spanish intelligentsia to fight against culture as a class privilege. And, in that sense, they are essential in the process that has come to be known as the "rehumanization" of our literature. Remember that back then they were still on that “pure art” trip, the superior algebra of metaphors and such nonsense. Later they extended the experience with publishers such as "Ediciones Oriente" [Orient Editions] and Historia Nueva [New History]. Their contribution was key to understanding that a literature that did not show -or denounce- social injustices, became an accomplice to them. And there were later forgotten names such as José Díaz Fernández, Joaquín Arderíus, Juan Andrade, José Antonio Balbontín, César Falcón or Rafael Giménez-Siles, without which the crisis of the monarchy and the advent of the Second Republic could not be understood. However, it gives the impression that there was also some rigging in that operation, because the proletariat, through its publications, had managed to create a movement of editorial undermining -which had been forcibly put to an end during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship- that it should be used and/or reoriented towards republicanism, which was a form of government that anarchists really didn't care about. In that sense, as you say, they did want to take advantage of the lessons of the anarchist publishing movement to set up their own movement -what has been called the "avant-garde book" as opposed to the "vanguardist book"-, and with it reach the institutions, presenting itself as the bourgeois left that aspired to politically represent the anarcho-syndicalist workers. It did not go badly for them because the Radical Socialist Republican Party, which was where almost all of them ended up, obtained 56 deputies in the elections to the Constituent Cortes in June 1931 and even had two ministers in the government.

After the Civil War, the exiled men and women of the CNT, in France and other countries of the world, created spaces for sociability where, in addition to fighting for the liberation of Spain from the Franco dictatorship, they carried out notable cultural and social work with the creation of athenaeums, libraries, artistic groups, publishing houses and cultural magazines. An extension in other lands of the dynamics of the athenaeums that had been so relevant in Spain in the configuration of the anarchist movement. How do you assess this effort, so typical of anarchists, in not abandoning, despite the difficulties of adaptation and economics, to different cultures, etc., that cultural and educational activity wherever they may be?

As I was telling you before, anarchists were used to getting up every time they were knocked down. It was not the first time that every exile, every banishment, brought with them the same desire and enthusiasm for building an alternative culture and looking for those spaces of sociability against it. Exile after the Civil War was no exception. Toulouse, for example, was called the "ville rouge" because it welcomed more than 20,000 Spanish exiles, most of them anarchists, who completely transformed the cultural environment of the city with magazines such as "Tiempos Nuevos" [New Times] or "Nuestra Bandera" [Our Flag], publishers such as "Cultura Obrera" [Worker Culture], "Páginas Libres" [Free Pages] or "Ediciones Ideas" [Ideas Editions], theater groups such as Iberia and even an art gallery, that of Antonio Alós, based in the city, and determined to disseminate these counter-hegemonic aesthetic proposals. Most of these initiatives were due to people with a long history in the world of libertarian cultural management, such as Fernando Pintado, who had directed the "Prensa Roja" [Red Press] in Madrid in 1923, and who promoted "Páginas Libres" [Free Pages], or the Montseny family, who seemed to be behind "Ediciones Ideas" [Ideas Editions], which in its collection "Lecturas para la Juventud" [Texts for the Youth] reissued a good part of the old catalog of "La Novela Ideal" [The Ideal Novel], or even recovered for Universo editions the interesting collection "El Mundo al Día" [The World Up to Date", which Federica Montseny had directed during the II Republic. His passion was admirable and was part of that blind trust in culture as a vehicle to transform the world. Other social movements either never had it or soon lost it.

At present, although it no longer has the strength and influence it had in the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement has maintained that tradition of giving maximum importance to initiatives of a cultural nature. Thus, there is no shortage of small publishers, foundations, athenaeums, libraries, magazines and newspapers, etc. In addition, new technologies and social media are tools, which were not available a hundred years ago, that facilitate the spread of this alternative culture. What's your verdict on this editorial and ideological work, in print and on social media, does it continue the path traced by our grandparents to create a popular culture that confronts the one imposed on us by dominant capitalism?

Today, it is more difficult than ever to subvert the model. Capitalism has infiltrated our veins in such a way that it makes us see it as something not only inevitable, but frankly, even convenient. It's awful. There is a level of pathological narcissism, the population has been atomized in a grotesque way, it has become patronized and, consequently, all sense of the collective has been lost, the ethics of Us, and the ability to understand that only the world can be transformed if we transform what matters to all of us and not just to you or me. However, I would tell you that all is not lost, there is resistance, survival and, once again, anarchism is at the forefront of this process. As you mentioned, social media, if they are not full of trolls, are quite the assembly methods; copyleft was another anarchist practice, the same as the mailing lists, file sharing, or piraters, who were sales agents outside the commercial circuits. While we're at it, even audiobooks, so in vogue today, respond to a technique of access to reading that was very typical of anarchism at the beginning of the 20th Century. And this is in the cultural field because, of course, there are also sustainable consumergroups, circular economy practices, self-managed cooperatives, non-formal education centers... Anarchist practices are more present today than we think. History has demonstrated many times, as it is now said, the resilience of the anarchist movement, its ability to, against all odds, continue using culture as a battering ram against this rotten world, trusting in its ability to transform reality in a resounding and definitive way. I would tell you, intervening a bit in the old Motown song, that for anarchism there is no mountain too high or river deep enough.

Read in red. The rise and fall of the worker book (1917-1931) , has been written by the researcher Alejandro Civantos Urrutia . Edited by the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation. You can find it in our bookstore.

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