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Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution
Formal anarchist organizations disappeared in Mexico after the 1910 Revolution, but anarchist principles survive in the popular resistance movements against the post-revolutionary governments. In this book, Donald Hodges offers the first comprehensive treatment of the intellectual foundations, history, politics, and strategy of Mexican anarchism since the Revolution. Hodges interviewed leading Mexican anarchists, including Mónico Rodríguez Gómez, and gained access to documents of numerous guerrilla organizations, such as the previously missing "Plan de Cerro Prieto." Using both original and published sources, he shows how the political heirs of Ricardo Flores Magón, Mexico's foremost anarchist, agitated for workers' self-management and agrarian reform under the cover of the Mexican Communist party, how they played an important role in the student rebellion, and how, in the face of a labor movement that has come under government control, anarchism is currently experiencing a rebirth under another name.
267 pages, Hardcover
First published November 30, 1994
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August 31, 2021
This is a comprehensive look at anarchist political actors in Mexico up to the EZLN. The book looks at anarchist heirs to the PLM and Ricardo Flores Magón, guerrilla movements both substantial and miniscule, anarchists and anarchist tendencies in Communist and Marxist groups, and anarchist theorists.
The book is well-researched and informative, especially the first two thirds. During the parts where Hodges is writing about people who called themselves anarchists and people who claimed direct anarchist inspiration, the book is straightforward and fascinating. After the student movements of the 1960s, when the anarchists were less clearly defined, i found the telling and analysis still fascinating and compelling, but a bit slippery. When Hodges argued that people like Che Guevara are "anarcho-marxists" because they practice guerilla warfare or Trotsky is an anarchist because he came to see the tyranny of bureaucracy and Stalinism, it seems like he is trying too hard to categorize people as anarchists in order to argue that anarchism did not disappear. These arguments create confusion about what the principals of anarchist politics are.
The book is well-researched and informative, especially the first two thirds. During the parts where Hodges is writing about people who called themselves anarchists and people who claimed direct anarchist inspiration, the book is straightforward and fascinating. After the student movements of the 1960s, when the anarchists were less clearly defined, i found the telling and analysis still fascinating and compelling, but a bit slippery. When Hodges argued that people like Che Guevara are "anarcho-marxists" because they practice guerilla warfare or Trotsky is an anarchist because he came to see the tyranny of bureaucracy and Stalinism, it seems like he is trying too hard to categorize people as anarchists in order to argue that anarchism did not disappear. These arguments create confusion about what the principals of anarchist politics are.
Displaying 1 of 1 review