This excellent volume explores what is arguably the single most important foundation, in terms of both ideology and praxis, for the development of working-class collective action and political culture in the Iberian Atlantic between the 1870s and World War I. Afterward, communism and various forms of syndicalism increasingly displaced anarchism from the core of the region's labor movements.
The first three chapters deal with the eastern side of the Atlantic. Manuel Morales Muñoz examines the cultural repertoire of Spanish anarchism, addressing its visual iconography, songs, calendar of revolutionary dates, hagiography of martyrs, celebrations, and rituals, as well as the construction of a libertarian morality. Clara Lida addresses the political practices of Spanish anarchism between 1873 and 1881, when state repression drove it underground. Despite the obvious methodological challenge of studying clandestine activities, she manages to uncover the workings of secret networks both domestic and international, the surprising survival of a...
