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THE ANARCHIST BOOKS ARE NOT TOOLS

MEETING OF ANARCHIST LIBRARIES ON SATURDAY 11/13/21.

Books are not useful, they are not services, they do not serve any functions, and they are certainly not hammers or wrenches to open or close ideas. While it doesn’t take much to find literature aimed at enforcing regimes or dismantling them, there is an idea that seems to be firmly rooted among some anarchists: „Books are tools,“ they say, and in in fact, there is no shortage of dozens of covers and titles that make this clear that “books in themselves have no value, but when ideas materialize,” they repeat, linking to these premises the widespread idea that “we the “The idea cannot be separated from the action.”

But what are we talking about when we think of “anarchist books”? And what does it mean to unite idea and action? Because obviously we cannot reduce Ursula K. Le Guin, Mikhail Bakunin, the international magazine Kalinov Most or a pamphlet with a drawn A found on a demonstration, even if we want to group them all under the label “anarchist literature”. Along this line we can think about the intentionality of each format, that is, both its physical format and the characteristics of language, because binding a book like Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” is not the same as quickly printing leaflets before a demonstration, that are intended for a specific time and place.

But in order to finally think about anarchist literature, we must first free ourselves from the idea that it should be closely linked to the „action“, otherwise we would erase its specificity, that is, its depth, its path, its peculiarities and its strengths.

We have therefore set ourselves the double task of clarifying the claim that, in our opinion, anarchist books cannot be tools, and then of thinking about what they are or could be.

To begin with the first point, we find in this claim a utilitarian logic of letters in relation to the militant logic, which we begin with a brief tour from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Revolution to the political-military parties of the 1970s can locate. This means that literature, like painting, cinema or theater, must be “at the service of the revolution” (or in most cases the party).

In this sense, a famous poster from Spain in 1936 proclaimed: „Anarchist books are weapons against fascism“, although this was actually part of the propaganda of the CNT sector, which decided to make a pact with republicans and socialists to create an „anti-fascist front“ which ended with the militarization of the autonomous workers‘ militias and anti-anarchist repressions. What we want to claim, at least in this case, is that the utilitarian vision of the “anarchist books” is driven by the logic of war, but not social war, but the logic of formal armies, formal war and the necessities that dictate this supposedly brings with it.

One of the justifications we find in these cases is an appeal to urgency and the palpable danger lurking from the enemy on the other side of the border. In this context, wouldn’t it be logical that anarchist books should be subordinated to propaganda work and recruitment? Even if this question seems inappropriate given our present moment, it can help us reflect on these extreme moments. In contrast to this approach, we can see a clear difference between what was anarchist literature and propaganda during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1937) and during the Civil War (1937-1939). At the time of the revolution we can see expressions that were not reduced to propagandistic logics, but that tried from their own spheres to think, share and propagate revolutionary freedom, a clear example of this aspect was the “Sindicato de la Industria del Espectáculo Films” (SIE FILMS), who produced around 30 films between 36 and 37, the content of which was not limited to documentary narratives, but most of the works were in the field of fiction, that is, it was not just about making art for to think about the revolution, but about the revolution finding its own artistic expression.

If we trace the debate back to the last decades, it is alarming, or at least striking, that the discourses that try to reduce literary expression to a tool, that is, to put it at the service of the “ideal” or a larger goal, whatever Whatever it may be, this conclusion has its justification in the hierarchization of “action,” which, if previously embodied in the needs of the revolutionary party, is now reinforced in the overvaluation of destructive action or the anarchic offensive.

We believe that this claim is extremely coherent and an almost innate reaction to our everyday life, which is characterized by the civic pacification of social democracy, the unison repeated demonstrations/processions and the “critical” debates proposed by various publishers and writers are little more than dialectical paraphernalia conjured up to position the sales of their next book or to justify CONICET 9 ’s recent funding. But since we have been in this position, constantly reinforcing destructive actions in the face of the deafening repetition of empty phrases of democracy, we also know that actions have their own logic, their own forms and needs, which often do not correspond to the possibilities of words.

You cannot expect a book to turn into an action, just as the constant repetition of the words “fire” and “gunpowder” in our publications does not mean that they can actually become tangible, and you might ask us if Letters cannot function as agitation? Yes, they can, but if they allow themselves to be guided beforehand by what they “should be,” they end up becoming a caricature of themselves. When literature loses its distinctiveness, we are left with a hodgepodge of commonplaces and individual ones To do affirmations that ultimately do not outgrow themselves. At this point, we ask words to be something they are not, namely, functional, in the hope that the fact that we write sentences like “arm your affinity group” will truly inspire reciprocity among readers while in reality this should be the primary task of direct communication, the creation of meeting spaces and the deepening of ideas, and in any case literary reflection could reflect on the reasons for these groups, on the social and political characteristics in which how they are involved, how they might work, etc. etc.

After this critical and comparative perspective, we can go back in time and think of the “classic” anarchist newspapers that we ordered in Buenos Aires between 1898 and 1930. The genres and literary topics there ranged from propagandistic and pamphlet-like articles to plays, songs, excerpts from stories and novels to articles on philosophy, history or astronomy, to name just a few examples. These characteristics, typical of the different tendencies, clearly show us the holistic vision of the anarchist project, in which the work of agitation represented only a small part, and at the same time seeing that those that have endured over time find their strength in reflection , found in the literary search itself, regardless of the genre in which they are located, and avoid the Jesuit repetition of anarchism.

Another insinuation that we often find when we hear criticisms that assume the false dichotomy between “writing” and “acting” is the idea that literature itself represents a kind of petite bourgeois pleasure, a logic clearly derived from the Marxism-Leninism and its famous criticism of the “teething disease of the left” in which it says: “The petty bourgeois “gone wild” by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon that, like anarchism, is peculiar to all capitalist countries. The inconstancy of this revolutionaryism, its sterility, its ability to quickly turn into submissiveness, apathy and fantasy, and even to allow itself to be carried away by this or that bourgeois fashion trend to the point of „craziness“ – all of this is well known. So we see how, unfortunately, the conservative ideas of nefarious Leninism feed into anarchist concepts, rendering invisible the fact that our concept of freedom goes beyond and is directly opposed to the classist and partisan vision of Bolshevism.

When anarchism prevents us from sitting down to observe the movement of the stars, from writing about our sexuality, from contemplating the properties of music or human nature, when it is not dedicated to the destruction and reconstruction of this world and our own Having reached ideas about existence, literature, theater or cinema, it only becomes a self-assertion that does not stop navel-gazing out of fear of what lies behind the ideological scheme.

So we might ask ourselves: Can a book be anarchist? Even if it repeats “Long live anarchy” on every page, what if it’s written by someone who doesn’t claim to be an anarchist? What ultimately makes a book anarchist?

What holds together the ideological character of our literature historically is much more than a particular line or a representative type of referentiality, namely the editorial, librarian, and dissemination practices of the companions throughout history. How else could we lump Henry Thoreau or Leon Tolstoy with Alfredo Bonnano or the Angry Brigade? That is, the character that has been given and continues to be given to our literature has to do not only with the books themselves, nor even specifically with the intention of their authors, but with the propagandistic work, the reception and the value that the companions necessarily gave her afterwards.

So this important work, carried out by so many over the last 150 years, has its peculiarities, not only in terms of cataloging, but also in terms of the interesting variety of questions and challenges it can raise. In this sense, we have asked ourselves, for example, whether a book can be reduced to an ideology, and while this answer may be “simpler” within doctrinal spaces, in our circles it acquires a relevant category about the possible anarchist conception in the present and the always latent tension between the revolutionary projection and the ethical foundations of anarchism. For example, if we think of anarchist literature, we can, firstly, consider the external characteristics, for example the refusal of intellectual property, ISBN or collaboration with state or multinational publishers, but these characteristics are summarized in the forms as many publishers fall into these Categories can fall and at the same time have nothing to do with our intentions, so secondly we have to think about anarchist literature itself. And this could be the real challenge: there are some categories that can be easily “classified”, as in the cinema Documentary, in literature the many publications that identify themselves as such and have the general intention of propagating anarchy, but in the case of Rafael Barret, Ursula KL Guin, Manuel Rojas or so many companions who write poems that freed from anarchist clichés, does it make sense to look at them from an ideological point of view?

Perhaps both the question and its answers are much broader, perhaps one needs to engage with the various literary genres to understand the way in which poetry, prose, social or scientific essays can be grouped or embraced under a specifically ideological label – one Task that this little sketch cannot accomplish, but it attempts to bring some of these concerns closer to our attention.

So we finally come to the question: Can literature be “useful” for the revolution? Even though it has historically been used in this way, from Mao’s Red Book to the Bible, it would be absurd to think that the act of writing and reading itself could be responsible for the actions it later uses were justified, because writing is a purely reflexive act in which freedom is experienced both in the face of the emptiness of the blank page that separates us from the world, it lies in the possibility of a relationship between our existence and the materiality outside it , a relationship that can be comprehensive, descriptive or irrational, sonorous and even chaotic.

We agree that there can be no revolutionary action without revolutionary theory, but we also affirm that one cannot come at the expense of the other. It is as naive to expect books to call for revolt as it is to expect an explosive device to tell us something about freedom, however poetically we choose to incorporate it.

NEITHER LITERARY ANARCHISM
NOR UTILITARIST LITERATURE
FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ANY AUTHORITY.

9. AD , Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas is the main independent body in Argentina for promoting research, awarding scholarships, etc.