It Could Happen Here - Anarchism In Uruguay feat. Andrew, Pt. 2

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Andrew and James continue their discussion of Anarchism in Uruguay and talk about the nature of an anarchist military formation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one.

And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.

It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, D***less Me on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless S***less Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast. Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say, que? Yeah.

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Today we'll continue on our journey through Latin American anarchism, where we last left off with a look at the anarchist history of Uruguay. We talked about Uruguay's general history, its radical influences, anarchism's period of popularity in the early 20th century, its radical experiments, and its cultural influence. So today, James and I, because James is here. Hello James. Hi Andrew.

Today we're going to look at what Uruguayan anarchists have been up to from the 50s onward, paying special attention to the activity of the Federacion Anarquista de Uruguay, and the idea of Especifismo. By the way, as James just indicated, I am Andrew, Andrew Sage, you can find me on YouTube as Andrewism. But all that aside, let's get into it. The Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya or FAU was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1956. According to Paul Sharkey in the Federacion Anarchista Uruguaya, the FAU had very strong working class roots, as many of

the militants came from labour-heavy districts like El Cero, which definitely shaped their outlook. The FAU was also very much emphasizing direct action over electoral strategies. It favored armed struggle as a necessity in reaction to state repression and economic exploitation. And the FAU had a very strong stance against Marxist Leninism. Although some members sympathized with aspects of Marxism, many of them resisted the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that milieu. Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may recall us covering in the past,

anarchism persisted in mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and their influence globally, and of course the coinciding fall of the anarchists in Spain. According to Oliver Zizenko's 65 years of revolution, the FAU came about in a time when Uruguay's prosperity coming out of World War II had come to an end, as its agricultural exports were no longer needed to feed the Allies' massive standing armies. This economic downturn triggered major social unrest, which the anarchist presence was able to spring upon. One such instance of unrest involved 150,000 workers going on strike in solidarity with

their fellow workers in a tire factory. During the strike and after, the FAU involved students, unionists, intellectuals, community organizers and even a few exiles from the Spanish Civil War to build up a more united labour movement. So rather than having unions split along political, ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right populists, and so on, there would be one big tent just focused on labour. Now, I personally think a big tent has its benefits and its drawbacks as with any other strategy. I think the benefit is obviously that it has the ability to mobilise a large number of people but I think the difficulty in the drawback is that

having so many affiliations under that big tent can mean that there's not really much of a shared goal left behind. Like yeah, the anarchists want anarchy. The right populists might just want to secure some benefits and protections, and the socialists will be interested in launching a party. Sure, they all proclaim to have some interest on the side of the workers, but how that manifests looks different from group to group. But we'll see how that big tent approach turned out for the FAU. So they formed the National Confederation of Workers, or CNT, as that big tent in 1964. But even before that, there was a split.

Not too much of a surprise. After the Cuban Revolution, the FAU was actually divided between those who were opposed to Castro and those who critically supported the revolution. Those who were opposed to Castro eventually broke away from the FAU in 1963 as Castro entrenched himself in the Soviet bloc, while those who remained in the FAU were critical of Castro and his government but still supported the fall of Batista. Of course, with the Cuban revolution came that very noticeable shift in American foreign policy.

They saw that with all that happening right in their backyard, they'd need to take a very different approach if they wanted to win the Cold War. So Suzanne Coaxer describes how in 1961, JFK changed the approach of the now infamous School of the Americas from preparing for Soviet invasion to preparing for anti-communist counter-insurgency against homegrown revolutions. So as a result, militaries across Latin America became more right-wing and seized power for themselves to protect civilians from the danger of their rights. In 1964, it was Brazil. In 1968, it was Peru. In 1973, it was Chile and Uruguay fell, and in 1976 Argentina fell. As Ozenko noted, in just over a decade, Uruguayan anarchists would become surrounded by right-wing

dictatorships which collaborated to round up and exterminate left-wing dissidents of all flavors. Not to mention, the economic situation wasn't exactly getting better. According to Paul Sharkey, between 1955 and 1959, the cost of living doubled and wages did not keep pace. By 1965, inflation was running at 100%, and by 1967 at 140%. Madness. Yeah. Well, just wait and see, Andrew. Oh yeah, we are living in

some interesting times. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You never know. So the president that preceded the military dictator imposed a wage freeze and devalued the currency. That was his bright idea, his solution to the crisis. So people's lives were obviously getting worse, and the time had come for some decisive action. So the CNT aided in strikes across sectors and even tried to call for a general strike. As Uzenko writes, the FAU decided that they were going to take on a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare. So they tapped into a coalition of leftist groups to robbing Hood food from the corporations to give to the poor.

Awesome. Leftists hate. Yeah, but sadly the coalition couldn't last very long. Differences in strategy would lead to the FAU doing its thing by building defense councils, similar to those organized in the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, yeah, interesting. While the other groups copied a Che Guevara style guerrilla army approach, forming the National Liberation Movement to Pomeros, or the MLNT.

The existential debate among anarchists in arms is this that you've just highlighted. It's need we form authoritarian structures similar to those using, for example, the Cuban Revolution, the Russian Revolution, these kind of status revolutions which characterize the left in the 20th century in some ways, or is it possible for us to go from our community defense and the defence committees, like the six person groups that the CNT organised in Spain, to a more egalitarian large formation, like a truly revolutionary army. And like, the split that you're talking about is a split that almost every movement has. Yeah. Although the MLNT wasn't necessarily anarchist.

Right, they were like following the Castro model, is that right? Like the Che Guevara kind of guerrilla warfare doctrine. Pretty much, the Guevara sort of model. Yeah. Although I'm glad that you bring up this point because it's actually something that I was writing about earlier today in preparation for a video. Oh, interesting. I think there's a conflation that anarchists need to be careful with between leadership

in the sense of authority, as in the right to command and control and that kind of thing, versus leadership in the sense of guidance, advice, coordination, expertise. Yeah. I think that just as you might have even, you might have an anarchist construction collective, right? And they're building a house. You might have something like a foreman who is coordinating all the actions that all the different builders and all the different tradesmen are engaged in to ensure that the different parts of the

house come together cohesively and seamlessly, that nobody is stepping on anybody's toes, that everything is being done in a proper timing. That is an instance where there would be coordination without necessarily having authority. It's just really a division of labour to ensure that the task that everybody is there to accomplish can be accomplished. And the person who is given that particular task within that division of labor is doing so by taking on that responsibility, but just as they have the responsibility, others will also have the responsibilities and that does not elevate them above the other people in

that association. Right. yeah. And so kind of in the same way that you have that in a construction site, I think that that is the kind of approach we need to take in a military formation, where the person who is, you know, respected for their knowledge of military strategy, or has the information or the expertise to be able to handle the planning of that approach because we're all here to win right yeah we're all here to defend our freedom and to defend the freedom of the people we love so there's no sense in splitting off into a bunch of

different groups and failing at our task when we can come together where necessary to engage in together where necessary to engage in the coordination of our strategy to improve the chances of our success. You know, and of course there is a vulnerability in times of warfare that we do have to acknowledge because warfare historically is one of the times that is the most ripe for authoritarian seizure and control. But because that vulnerability exists in those times is when I think we have to be extra vigilant of how that could potentially manifest. You know, we don't sacrifice our cause and defense of the cause, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, definitely. Like, because it's easy to do that. It's easy to be persuaded that this situation is unique and different and therefore we need to accept some kind of compromise of the very essence of what we're doing. The method that like the people I have spoken to, both those within formations today and in Rojava and in Rojava, but also in Myanmar and those, for instance, in the iron column, which was a five column in the Spanish civil war, they're probably most famous for leaving the frontline to attack the cops because they felt like they didn't have enough weapons and the cops had too many. And what they did was they, they, they created a concept of the minimum necessary discipline,

discipline being something that one has for oneself, not the one thing that comes from above. Yeah. And they, they had leaders who would lead in times of combat, right? When we needed to make swift and decisive action, there wasn't time to obtain consensus. They used consensus to arrive at those leaders. Those leaders were able in times of urgency to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power or status outside of that moment.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like in an emergency scenario, you know, if somebody is, you know, leading a surgery, for example, or leading a rescue operation, that doesn't mean that they're elevated above everybody else. It just means that they have the knowledge and the skills to accomplish that particular task and the others of their own free will respect that knowledge enough to go along with what the person is recommending. Exactly. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that that person is inherently

capable of bossing you around. Exactly. And I like the mention of discipline in particular because that really is a distinction because he will talk about, oh, you need to have military discipline. How are you supposed to have military discipline without blind obedience to authority. And sure we're not going to have, we're never going to have discipline to the extent that soldiers are dehumanized and treated like cannon fodder, as you would find in a traditional authoritarian military. But the discipline is derived from solidarity, is derived from the responsibility people have for each other, the care people have for each other within their formation and the responsibility they have for their own actions as being part of that formation

and for how their actions will affect those around them. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's something like you see it again and again when you read the column, the Dorutti column newspaper, right? They talk about discipline and how we have to have our discipline comes from our commitment to our cause and to each other, not from any fear of repercussions or like quote unquote disciplinary action, but from like the fact that we, we don't want to let our comrades down nor do we want to let our cause down. And like, uh, when people do do that, right, there, there are, it doesn't mean that aren't disciplinary actions, but it means that those are like, like you said before, you don't break away from the core of what you're doing so that they

agree by consensus to include with the person who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong, what a suitable punishment would be, um, or a suitable set of repercussions would be. Um, so that it reinforces the idea of like consensus and like discipline coming from oneself rather than from fear of punishment. Yeah, I think there is, of course, the potential for processes to potentially become, how do I want to put this? Well, what I will say is, I think it's necessary, but even in engaging with

those who have broken trust or who have seemingly split from the association or have jeopardized the safety or security of the association, that you find ways to deal with those situations on a case by case basis, that you're responsive to the particular circumstances that cause that action, that particular outcome, rather than as you would find in modern militaries where you have like a very clear, this action has this consequence, this action has this consequence, this action like a lot more flexibility is required because we understand that we don't have this matrix of crime that authorities do. We're dealing with harm, they're dealing with crime, right? And so in dealing with harm, we have to approach each of those situations in the context of

their situations rather than in some sort of cold, distant calculation. I think in approaching it in that way, people are more willing to fess up or to take accountability for their harm because they know that there's that relationship there that they're going to try to work through it. That while there may be many potential consequences to their actions, there's an openness to dialogue there rather than a rigidity of this is what you did, so this is the outcome automatically. Yeah. I mean, that is the latter is like a system that looks not at people, but at quote unquote

crimes, right? And like, this is the opposite of a restorative justice system, which looks at people in the situation they are in and not just the worst thing that they happen to have done. Yep. We should return to South America and once again, diverted. Yes. Yes. Although I feel like these, these digressions always gets, get to something

essential and, and brings out a little something extra to what I would have. You know, prepared in advance. Hey kids. You know, prepared in advance. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, S***less Me on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast. You say you never give in to a meltdown. Ready? Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face.

And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there? No, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out.

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This is a con. I'm conning you. To get the gelato painting. We could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close. And jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito. But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. Fernando is never going to love you as much as he loves

this job. Chulito, that painting is ours. Listen to The Set Up as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we had this split, right? We had the FAU and then you had the MLNT. And they did collaborate where there was common cause, but it wasn't a permanent collaboration. You know, and well, this was taking place in the urban guerrilla warfare sphere, you had different

things taking place in the labour movement. The FAU was dealing with the consequences of Big Tent organizing, as they found that the Uruguayan Communist Party, or PCU, had pretty successfully claimed significant influence in the CNT. So in response, according to Zuzenko, the FAU created a rank and file alliance called the Combative Tendency, which pushed for more militancy and less bureaucracy in the union movement. Through that alliance, the FAU was able to accomplish a lot more outreach and action, but in return, the President of Uruguay introduced emergency laws executed by the military to counter the unrest.

The revolutionary left continued to fight against the military's involvement in civilian life and also formed a daily paper called Ipoka. When the government was like, stop, don't do that, that's illegal. And when the government says stop, don't do that, that's illegal. And when the government says stop, don't do that, that's illegal, that means they put boots on the ground and raided their offices. And so the people fell apart and the groups involved went underground. And like I said, the military raided their bases. But then when the FAU was like, let's get the band back together. Unfortunately, the other groups were too scared to resurface, understandably. And so because of that fear, the PCU kind of had a fall from Greece.

For a while, they were the big boys on campus in the CNT, but after the FAU kind of came to the forefront again and it was all this bravery and stuff, they kind of ended up falling back. And you see, the PCU had chosen to appease the military because they believed that a leftist faction within the ranks of the army might support their bid for power, kind of like what happened during the Russian Revolution. And so they really thought they were cooking something, but as the saying goes, the stove was not even on. The military saw them as pretty much insignificant.

So much so that while other leftist groups were facing severe oppression, the PCU was actually pretty much left alone. And so when the Union rank and file saw that and turned their backs on the PCU, they ended up turning their focus toward the combative tendency because at least they were doing radical and serious stuff. And so the unions were under attack from all sides, the police, the military and even neo-fascist gangs. And the FAU led combatant tendency was focused on defending these workers movements from those threats. According to Zdenko, the FAU held a secret congress and formed their own armed wing,

the OPR 33, which unlike other guerrilla groups in the region, wasn't a top down organisation. Instead, individual cells had the freedom to decide how they carried out missions and which actions they took part in. The FAU still set the overall strategy, but it wasn't about becoming some kind of vanguard. Some of the actions by the way, according to Shar Sharkey included bank robberies and factory owner kidnappings. It's like old school Spanish anarchism. Yeah well there were some old school Spanish anarchists within their ranks.

So you really can't be surprised. Yeah true. There's this wonderful line in Abel Paz's book about De Ruti that De Ruti was very fond of children so he risked his life robbing banks to fund their education. Oh, that's beautiful. It's such a wonderful, like, That is beautiful. I don't know.

I just enjoy it very much. The whole like, you never know what direction that sentence is going to go in. That is a quintessential example of that. Yeah. I think. Yeah. So, you know, you do what you have to do pretty much. that. Yeah. I think. Yeah. So, you know, you do what you have to do pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think it's really like, he wasn't maximalist for

the sake of maximalism. He was maximalist for the sake of like educating children. Yeah. It wasn't it. He didn't see the violence as an end in itself. Exactly. Exactly. It had a cause and a reasoning behind it. Yeah. AndAU was the same way, their reasoning was just that if the capitalist class was going to use force to protect their interests, then the workers should be able to use force to defend theirs. Luke Hickman Yeah, yeah, France Fannon stuff. Jason Vale And so they did what they had to do. Meanwhile,

the PCU was stuck to their policy of appeasement, which actually had a detrimental effect on the broader movement as the military kept growing in strength. And so the very anti-communist military's involvement in breaking up all the work activities emboldened their role in politics, and then once they defeated the MLNT, with the FAU struggling to resist, isolated by the PCUs in action, the military took on the opportunity to coup the government, leading to the rise of Juan Maria Borreberi, the first president of the civic military dictatorship in 1973. In the aftermath, the FAU made the tough call to move their operations to Argentina, which

hadn't yet fallen to military dictatorship. From there, they worked within the CNT to organise a massive 15 day general strike. It shut the country down for a time, but it wasn't enough, and the efforts to keep up the fight were constantly undermined by the PCU, which still insisted on negotiating instead of taking real action. Meanwhile, the people were suffering. According to Sharkey, between 1971 and 1976, there was a 35% fall in real wages,

and by 1979, inflation was running at 80%, with wages limping behind at 45%. So until 1976, the FAU continued to work between Argentina and Uruguay. But after Argentina's coup, that was it. To quote Zenzco directly, during the US's Operation Condor, dictatorships across Latin America continued coordinated to kidnap, torture, and murder leftists. Across the continent, between 60,000 and 80,000 leftists were killed and more than

400,000 were placed in political prisons." End quote. Jesus. And I think we need to sit with those numbers because it's very easy to hear numbers like that and just think, you know, that's just a statistic pretty much. We hear big numbers, our mind kind of goes statistic. Yeah. That's just a statistic, pretty much. We hear big numbers, our mind kind of goes statistic. But to like think about the impact that would have for tens of thousands or hundreds of

thousands of people to be just taken out, whether killed or imprisoned, leaving like a gaping hole of knowledge, of experience, of education, of radicalism. A country may take decades to recover from something like that. of experience, of education, of radicalism. Yeah. A country may take decades to recover from something like that. It's a cultural death in a sense. You know, this is the political movement, but it's kind of similar to how during colonialism, elders would be wiped out and with them, all of their knowledge, all of their oral histories, all of their languages just wiped out in an instant.

Yeah. This is different, of course, as a political ideology, as opposed to an entire culture and ethnicity, but it's still just a massive loss of all that history, all that experience, all that radicalism and information just gone. Right. Yeah. It's hard for a movement to recover from that. Yeah, it's not like a genocide or like this colonial kind of, you could call it like a decap, well it's like a decapitation of a movement I suppose. Well I would say it's more than a decapitation because it's not just like notable figures that were taken out

or particularly influential thought leaders or anything. It's almost everybody. Anybody who had that fight in them or had that radical knowledge or consciousness. Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned or the mistakes they'd made learned from like a gun. The movement has to begin almost from like a blank slate. Yeah, the history is basically race in a sense all that's left is really what they might have written down. Yeah. Which is obviously only a small portion of what they might've had to share with the rest of the world.

Yeah. Especially in a movement that's been criminalized and pursued by the state. Right? Like what they write down is what they risked the state discovering so that they're only going to risk writing certain things down. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, when you look at this, this, this, this didn't just happen in Uruguay,

this happened all over the world. In some cases, this massive wipeout of the anarchist movement took place even earlier, you know, in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s. But in all of these cases, that loss is something that we are still in a sense recovering from. We kind of had to slowly build back, but we still haven't ever reached in many places the height that anarchism was at, at certain points in its history, in certain parts of the world. Yeah.

I mean, look at even like Spain still has very strong anarcho-syndicalist movement, right? But like the best of the anarchists died in Aragon, in Madrid and in concentration camps afterwards or fighting in the Second World War. And like it took decades for that movement to recover and it's still not as strong as it was. And this was one of the like high points. Especially when the legacy is so much erased.

When you look at how histories are taught everywhere in the world, you're barely going to get a mention of anarchism, despite the massive role it played in shaping the 20th century, 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as a historian is that like, when people write histories today, they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of the state. And like, I'm not alone in making this analysis. David Graber does it.

Jim Scott did it too. The idea is that people who exist outside of the state are behind and that they, they have failed or chosen not to advance to the more advanced human existence that is a state. And Jim Scott does this in the art of not being governed, right? Like if we look instead as people who have chosen to refuse a state, then we understand anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the options available to them rather than a step backwards or failure to advance to the state. And we can look at the whole of history from that perspective and

see it very differently, but most historians don't. Exactly. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one.

I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure.

We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like, uh, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay

up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Sonoro and iHeart's MyCultura podcast network present The Setup, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro. The Setup follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life...

Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con. I'm conning you. To get the gelato painting. We could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close.

And jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando to do to do to do. But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. That painting is hours. Listen to the setup as part of the Mike with the podcast network available on the I heart radioRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are your ears bored?

Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say, que? Yeah. Then tune in to Locatora Radio, season 10 today. Okay. I'm Diosa. I'm Mala.

The host of Locatora Radio, a radio phonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. We're launching this season with a mini series, Totally Nostalgic, a four part series about the Latinos who shaped pop culture in the early 2000s. It's Lala checking in with all things Y2K, 2000s. My favorite memory honestly was us having our own media platforms like Mundos and MTV3. You could turn on the TV, you see Thalia, you see JLo, Nina Sky, Evie Queen,

all the girlies doing their things, all of the beauty reflected right back at us. It was everything. Tune in to Look atatora Radio Season 10. Now that's what I call a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm sure you've encountered this where people just kind of assume, oh well the anarchists lost, so that means they're destined to lose.

Yeah. They lost that particular fight, that doesn't mean the war's necessarily lost. And additionally, states have lost too. Yeah, states continue to lose. State projects have lost, continue to lose. You know, the capitalist project, capitalist businesses, they lose, they fail. That doesn't mean that the project is destined to lose or destined to fail. It just means that particular iteration or that particular attempt was not able to succeed in all its ambitions.

Yeah. And like, as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right? We should be attempting to learn from and document the past rather than to sort of categorize it into like failed and successful. Yeah, that too. Because the standards, the standards of failure and success are often dictated by the standpoint of the status quo. Yes, very much so. Yeah.

standpoint of the status quo. Yes, very much so, yeah. It's kind of like how the Haitian Revolution is spoken of as the only successful slave revolt or one of the only successful slave revolts. And the standard for success in that case is that they were able to establish an independent state. Whereas other slave revolts in other parts of the world, including within the Caribbean, would have taken different paths. The Maroons, for example, their former revolt was a withdrawal from the system that surrounded them,

creating a pocket of resistance, isolating themselves. Same thing in Brazil. We had the Quilombos, the settlement that extracted themselves from the surrounding oppressive structure and tried to survive to the extent that they could. Not all of them lasted. But nothing lasts forever, you know? Countries rise and fall. And so I think if we limit ourselves to just the example of Haiti, particularly in the context of success in a slave revolution, I think we miss out on a lot of those other examples and opportunities for inspiration and guidance. Yeah, I think you're right. I think like, it applies to lots of places. I think about

it like, you know, I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but also to be with people in their moments of revolution and to spend time with revolutionaries in Myanmar. One of the analyses that you'll always see is that this creation of liberated spaces is A, not enough, or B, there are also places within the non-government where there is still very strong control from a pseudo state, right? But I think that overlooks the fact that, yeah, there are not like libertarian states, but people are living their lives without gods and masters, that they are experiencing freedom in every moment, and they are liberated in their own lives as they continue to struggle to liberate territory and other people. That might be what success looks like. Yeah. Like they are able to be self-realized.

Yeah, just the psychological experience in itself, it cannot be under-estated or underrated. Even if it's on that small scale of the individual, that's still valuable. on that small scale of the individual, that's still valuable. Yeah. And like, if we, if we acknowledge that, it's much harder to go back. Like those people can't go back because they've existed in liberation, right? Like they've lived in a free way and like, they will always know that that freedom is possible, that they can live without authority, live without state power, that liberation is a thing that can exist not just in our minds but in physical space. And like exactly, they will always know that like that's available. And if we can tell those stories, so will other people.

Exactly, exactly. Because that is something I speak about so often. It's the need in the process of social revolution to develop people's powers, drives and consciousness. You do that by giving people both theoretical education and sharing knowledge in that sense, but also through experience. Because I've used this phrase before you can't put the gene back in the bottle. You can't go from experiencing freedom to a situation of unfreedom and then shrug your shoulders and think, oh, that's all there could ever be.

After you've experienced an alternative to the status quo, you're not going to go back to thinking the status quo is all there is and all that could ever exist. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We have to remember that when we're looking at these things. Like, it's easy to look from where something ended and project that back, but we have to understand how it felt when people were doing it too. Exactly. So we're kind of, we kind of left on a somber chapter in Uruguay's anarchist history because unfortunately it was only after the fall of Uruguay's anarchist history. Because unfortunately it was only after the fall of Uruguay's dictatorship in 1985 that anarchist militants were able to return to Uruguay and re-establish the FAU in a fractured political and social landscape with greatly reduced numbers.

Some of the former anarchists involved in the FAU created the People's Victory Party or PVP in exile, which had attempted to reorganise resistance efforts, but also fell into some Leninist tendencies. But the mainline FAU continued to focus on grassroots organising, worker struggles and political education. It continues to be engaged in Latin-Arcanine networks, particularly with Brazilian and Argentine groups, like the Férrachão Anarquista Caucha, the Férrachão Anarquista Cabocla, the Férrachão Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro, and the Argentine organisation AUCA. Despite its past radicalism, the FAU has shifted towards a broader approach, integrating mass movements

while retaining its commitment to anti-authoritarian socialism. Since then and up to today, their approach has aligned with the practice of Especifismo, which it developed to rebuild their strength in Uruguayan political movements. That approach has since been influential across Latin America and beyond, including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. I've actually spoken about Especifismo on this podcast before and on my channel, but to give a quick summary, Especifismo is an organizational approach guided by three key concepts.

The first is the need for specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and praxis. The second is the use of the specifically anarchist organisation to theorise and develop strategic, political and organisational work. And the third is active involvement in and shaping of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of social insuction. Especifists reject the left-unity idea of a synthesis organisation of revolutionaries or even multiple currents of anarchists loosely united because they

feel it boils down to a lowest common denominator politics. They feel that when this unity is preferred at any cost, it leaves little room for united action or developed political discussion. It can be described in a sense as an affinity group with a shared interest in the advancement of a very specific political group, but they aren't just internally focused. Especifismo is focused on building popular power as a means of revolutionary transformation, rejecting both electoral and vanguardist Marxist approaches. So the Especifismo distinguishes between specifically anarchist political organisations or affinity groups and broader mass movements.

And they advocate for anarchists creating the former and inserting themselves in the latter. Building up anarchist presence and the presence of anarchist ideas in unions, in student groups and in community struggles. So if you want a more in-depth exploration of Especificismo, I suggest reading the discussion between Felipe Correa and Juan Carlos Mercoso called The Strategy of Especificismo on the Anarchist Library. And they talk about how the fragmentation of the working class under neoliberalism has

created some very distinct challenges that require fresh organizational strategies and less dogmatic rigidity to simplistic class analysis. But they also speak for the need to coordinate and discipline and strategically engage anarchist groups within social movements, retaining their independence but engaging in their struggle. And they also end up in that interview discussing the FAU's long term strategy as a process of resistance, rupture and reconstruction. Resistance meaning that they're strengthening grassroots organizations, direct action and ideological development.

Rupture meaning that they're breaking away from careless institutions through revolutionary action. And reconstruction meaning that they're establishing new social relations based on self-management and mutual aid. It's kind of similar to the way that I break down social revolution conceptually as an approach that incorporates both opposition and the proposal of alternatives. So I have been thinking about Especialismo lately. I made that video many years ago and my anarchist understanding has shifted a lot,

especially recently. In going back and looking at how I would have analysed things previously, I think there's some different directions that I might take certain things in. I think, for example, that the idea of affinity groups engaging in social insertion is extremely valuable in shifting the conversation within these mass movements. But I also think that there's a risk in the ways in which Especificismo, if not properly understood or conceptualized, could end up opening ground for co-optation towards some rather un-anarchist outcomes. What I mean by that is, I think it's important when discussing Especifismo to be very careful against the interpretation of it as some kind of vanguard, a strategy or way to dictate

a vision of anarchy. I think that even if somebody's taken the Especifist approach in creating an affinity group organised around a very specific form of anarchism. That group should still be in conversation with different tendencies and engaging in an ongoing process of critique and convergence of ideas. I believe this was the motivation between Malatesta's idea of synthesis and the synthesis federation in anarchist history. I'll still learn a bit about that. But anyway, I'd love to hear about what the FVU and the anarchists need to acquire up to here now. You know, they can feel free to reach out to me. I have a website now, andrewsage.org and I wish them

all power to all the people. That's it for me today. You can find me on YouTube and Patreon. And this has been It Could Happen Here. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.

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