The years after 1900 have been called the “golden age” of Argentine anarchism, yet few scholars have studied the period. This well researched study, originally a doctoral thesis at Tel Aviv University, covers the years from the founding of La Protesta (Latin America’s most important anarchist newspaper) in 1897 to the key 1905 Fifth Congress of the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina which adopted an anarchist position. It details the rise of anarchism within the working class and unions; focuses on debates between anarchists and on those between anarchists and other working-class groups; and covers the bourgeois response to anarchism’s rise. Based on research in Argentina, England, and Amsterdam, the work relies primarily on the anarchist press, proceedings of congresses, pamphlets, and socialist and establishment sources. It includes voluminous information about individuals, meetings, strikes, and other actions as well as a variety of original documentary material.
The author is sympathetic to the subject and makes several important contributions. He clearly shows the subtleties within anarchist thinking and explains the controversies between factions (individualists, terrorists, organizationalists, anarcho-communists, among others) that vied for supremacy within the anarchist camp. He argues that anarchists proved highly flexible both in the desire to include as many workers as possible within organizations and in their ability to work with those holding other views. Several issues, however, remained largely untouched. Why did anarchism or any of its variants appeal to given groups of workers? Can ethnic factors explain its appeal? Are the reasons for its acceptance rooted in relations to the mode of production or did the anarchist political style and/or tactics attract followers? How did the anarchist lifestyle and its cultural expressions influence recruitment? Some of these problems may not be fully explainable given the available materials, but Professor Oved might have shared his views about them. Lastly, the book lacks a concluding chapter which summarizes the many, varied, and rich insights appearing throughout.
In all, this work is a major contribution to the study of Argentine anarchism in its local, continental, and world context. This reviewer hopes that the author plans a companion volume covering the succeeding years.
