Politics and ideology have been central topics in Argentine labor history since the early 1970s; but in more recent years, social and cultural dimensions have burst onto the historical agenda. This book fits easily into that trend. It builds on the dominant assumptions that mark the new historiography of Argentine anarchism: the existence of an anarchist subculture with distinctive and unique contours on the one hand, and its countercultural traits on the other. Dora Barrancos has done a painstaking and imaginative reading of anarchist newspapers and magazines, the main source for her study and others of both the traditional and newer approaches.
The book is organized around two main sections that can be read as two separate, long essays. The first centers on education, and follows the ups and downs of several alternative schools for both children and adults from the first decade of this century to the 1930s. The goal of regenerating human society as a whole was at the core of these efforts, which emphasized empirical knowledge and its utility in daily life, the formation of “free” spirits, and the values of science, nature, physical exercise, and manual work. Students were assumed to be active and critical people, though there was not always consensus on what final goals their school experiences were supposed to achieve. As a result, a debate flourished between those interested in forming militants for social change and those who stressed the task of educating human beings with the ideal of mutual respect.
The second part—previously published in a collection of essays on Argentine urban social history—focuses on a variety of very new topics, such as sexuality, eugenics, sexual hygiene, free love, and criticism of promiscuity. In dealing with feminism, Barrancos subtly uncovers an initial dominant discourse centered on the anarchist women as mere companions of anarchist men in their epic militancy. This was displaced during the 1920s by another discourse, focused on a public and female-verbalized demand for women’s right to control their own bodies, as well as a revision of men’s tutelary role. Both these discourses, the author asserts, were part of a vast attempt to subvert mainstream customs. Unfortunately, her discussion leaves aside the question of whether these changing discourses had a real impact on workers’ daily lives.
The book is worth reading. But while the information Barrancos provides is significant and useful, her analytical framework—the countercultural attributes of a distinctive anarchist subculture—is debatable. Curiously enough, Barrancos refers to the alternative schools as efforts shared by socialists, liberals, and freemasons (pp. 132, 220). Similarly, she remarks that in their attempts to subvert customs, anarchists were not alone (p. 241).
The book tempts the reader to think twice about the distinctive traits of the anarchist subculture and its countercultural messages. This is particularly apparent in the case of education, and two examples provided by Barrancos underline these objections. For one, the alternative schools used official government textbooks; and the most important advocate of these efforts at the beginning of the century, Julio Barcos, ended up, in the 1920s, deeply involved in the extremely successful effort to expand a state-sponsored education system.
Barrancos’ book reveals where we stand in our knowledge of anarchism from a sociocultural perspective. On the one hand, it offers a somewhat misleading analytical framework that overestimates anarchism’s unique attributes. On the other hand, it provides the necessary information to move ahead in trying to understand both the specificity of anarchist contributions and their pertinence to a wider movement for social change. There, the ideological rhetoric might have defined boundaries, but the concrete cultural efforts mixed with each other and even dialogued with the mainstream culture.
