eyes gaze out over the land. We think of Ibsen: our foreheads wrinkle, our eyes look sharper and as if in evil doubt, our mouths twitch, our heads sway in uncertainty, and we touch our noses with one finger. But those who have beheld this wild man Tolstoy become his completely: we swing our arms forcefully, throw them up and back, thrust our heads and necks forward; the agitation of our soul has turned into turmoil, into an inability to stand still, a trembling, a rearing up, and a striding forth.91
When reading, then, an anarchist is not (only) engaged in abstract, silent, immobile cognition; reading becomes something concrete, physical, bodily, kinetic. The relation of reader to author is also imagined in terms of a kind of visceral, immediate presence that resists the anomie and isolation O’Connor identifies as the defining features of modern, urban, industrial life.
Anarchist readers, even when they are not really listeners to a lector or lectora, sometimes seem to be trying to create or recreate communal conditions through the practice of reading, in part because they are so often “geographically, economically, and intellectually marginalized,” as Joanne Ellen Passet puts it.92
Geographically, first: they are often prisoners, deportees, immigrants, hobos, refugees, and other people in transit: displaced Andalusian peasants in Barcelona; Catalans in the Brazilian port city of Santos; Puerto Ricans and Germans in New York; Jews and Italians in Buenos Aires or Rosario; Spanish exiles in London or Mexicans in St. Louis; Koreans in China; Chinese in Tokyo or Paris; and so on.
Economically, in the second place: anarchist readers are generally working-class, often in precarious positions; many are (or, having been displaced, were) artisans, practicing trades threatened by the advance of industrial capitalism (e.g., shoemakers, weavers, tanners, cabinetmakers), although many, particularly with the rise of revolutionary syndicalism, are also to be found among the industrial working class (e.g., miners, garment workers, longshoremen, sailors); before the Second World War, a minority are middle-class professionals (e.g., journalists, educators, doctors, artists, engineers) or economically marginalized (tramps, migrant laborers, prostitutes, etc.).93 In the late-twentieth century, with the ethnic assimilation of immigrants, the recuperation of workers’ movements and the emergence of oppositional youth subcultures, young people living in semi-voluntary poverty reinvent drop-out culture. Half the respondents to a recent global survey of anarchists were aged sixteen to twenty-five, and almost two-thirds reported coming from middle-class backgrounds.94
Last, intellectually: many anarchists, particularly in the periods before the First World War, if they are not illiterate, lack a formal education, excluded from the institutions that produce, consecrate, and circulate knowledge (especially before the advent of compulsory public schooling, which arrived especially late in Spain, for instance). Driven by what Lily Litvak describes as an “enormous thirst for knowledge, encompassing all fields of culture and science,” they frequently become autodidacts.95
It is not at all surprising that such “unstable, marginal, and heterogeneous reader[s]” set about constituting counter-communities.96 What is striking is the extent to which it was “the printed word,” as Kenyon Zimmer observes, that “created an imagined, text-based transnational community of anarchists, and transmitted the movement’s ideology across space while sustaining collective identities across time.”97 This took place partly through the establishment of an ongoing conversation in anarchist periodicals among the readers and writers—who were and are often the same people.
Pick up a typical anarchist zine, circa the last thirty years, the great era of low-budget printing—it might be on a rack at a local infoshop, on a table at a punk show or an anarchist book fair, or handed around at a protest98—and notice the design characteristics, the look and feel of it, the whole gestalt. Chances are, it’s got what Sandra Jeppesen kindly calls “a DIY or cut-and-paste aesthetic.”99 Apart from a relative few professional-looking, mass-printed publications (e.g., the German graswurzelrevolution ca. 2000–present, with a circulation of 3,500–5,000; U.S.-based Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed ca. 1990–present, at 6,000-plus circulation; or the French Le Monde Libertaire, with a print run of 15,000),100 most anarchist periodicals look like this (fig. 2). Sloppy layout, misspellings, smudgy drawings, contempt for bourgeois journalistic standards: the zine typically advertises its own amateurishness as a way of signaling not only its authenticity (this is not capitalist media!) but the identity of sender and receiver, writers and readers—in keeping with the principles of an anarchist economy, in which production and consumption are to be fused together as much as possible.101
Fig. 2: Anarchist aesthetic, ca. 2011 (artist unknown).
Fig. 3a: Anarchist design aesthetic ca. 1908–1914: cover for Die Freie Generation 2.12 (June 1908).
Fig. 3b: Fermín Sagristá, cover for the Almanaque de Tierra y Libertad for 1912.
Fig. 3c: and Ludovico Caminita, illustration for first page of Regeneración 4.192 (June 13, 1914).
Turn the dial of history back to the dawn of the twentieth century, and you will find anarchist newspapers that look immediately very, very different (figs. 3). Look closer, though, and you will find a similar dynamic at work, reducing the distance between the poles. Here is an 1883 issue of La Autonomía, a newspaper published by compañeros in Seville. On page 4, we see contributions of poems written by a peasant and a cork-maker, accompanied by letters apologizing for “these poorly drawn lines,” respectfully requesting that the editors correct any spelling mistakes.102 Pick up an issue of O Baluarte (The Bulwark), organ of the anarchist hatmakers’ union in Rio de Janeiro (1907–1912), and alongside the writings of anarchists as illustrious as Anselmo Lorenzo, you can read stories signed by an “anonymous hatter [chapeleiro anônimo],” just as, in the pages of Nuestra Tribuna (1922–1925), directed by the gifted autodidact Juana Rouco Buela (1889–1969), essays, poetry, and fiction written by ordinary women subscribers scattered across Argentina appeared alongside a virtual Who’s Who of international anarchist women: Louise Michel and Madeleine Vernet from France; Lucy Parsons and Luisa Capetillo from the U.S. and its conquests; Teresa Claramunt and Federica Montseny from Spain; Maria Lacerda de Moura from Brazil; Virgilia d’Andrea from Italy.103 A great deal of anarchist poetry published in the newspapers of the Spanish CNT was signed pseudonymously or anonymously, as if to answer Michel Foucault’s famous question, “What Is An Author?” with a resounding “who cares?”104 In short, decades before terms like “zinester” and “DIY” came into use, anarchist publications were challenging the distinctions between authors and readers, constituting anarchist discourse as an open-ended dialogue (a “periodic conversation,” as the writer for Tierra Libre put it) rather than a monologue.
Fig. 4: A poster for the Mujeres Libres’ cultural campaign: “The book you read must affirm your ideological position, enrich your intelligence, and improve your sensibility.”
Active and critical readership also turned the publication of literary writing in anarchist periodicals into a dissensual, reflexive “conversation.” For instance, in 1913, as Sakai Toshihiko’s translation of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman unfolded in serialized installments on the pages of Kindai shisō (Modern Thought), anarchist readers vigorously debated its politico-literary merits (was Shaw’s satire as effective as Ibsen’s harsh social critique?) as well as its implications for gender relations.105 In the anarchist free-love journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the “tragic ending” of a short story by May Huntley (a.k.a. Lizzie M. Holmes, 1850–1926), “Nature and the Law” (Apr. 6–13, 1901),
