Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. Which I had this whole plan where I was going to introduce in some clever way this time, because I used to try and do that at the beginning of when I started the show, and then I stopped trying to do and then like I was planning it, and then I forgot. So I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is a show about cool people who did cool stuff. And I have a guest. My guest is Mia Himiya.
Hello, I'm happy, happy to be back on, happy to be guesting and not hosting a podcast. Yeah, it's a good time.
Yeah, for anyone who's curious what me is referencing, she's one of the hosts of I almost said cool People did cool Stuff. But that's it could happen here because all shows on this network must have slightly long names that therefore are easy to confuse when you have do you have a problem where like one down and another now, and if they're like similarly formed or just the same word in your head?
Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely real.
Yeah cool. I'm glad that it's not just me. The other voice you just heard is our producer.
Sound I sound like shit, And it's because I have a cold, but it and when I have a cold, I have a little bit of a Southern accent, is what we've learned. Yes, and that's just that, and you're gonna have to deal with it. And I know I sound like shit, don't message me about it.
What's fun is ever since twenty twenty, if you have a cold, it's you always have to be like, don't worry, it's not COVID. But it's always good. But usually you're talking in person and you're like trying it to warrn. So I had this moment where you're like, are you going to make sure to tell the audience that it's okay?
Oh yeah, well no, because you test.
I mean I'm still not.
I still am not leaving my house because I don't want anybody else to have this cold.
Yeah.
I was supposed to.
I was supposed to have a doctor's support tomorrow for unrelated and now it can't moved for two months from now. Oh god, oh, because I didn't want to give the people working at the office of cold.
They're like, that's really great of you, see you in two months.
I've been punished for my moral decision yeah.
I was like, all right, I guess my allergies don't matter for two more months. Guys. Yeah, that's fine.
We also have an audio engineer we do.
His name is Ian and he's the best of the best. Hi Ian, Hi Ian Hi Ian.
Okay, listener, it's your turn. You have to say it too. And then we have a theme music. You already heard it. It was by Unwoman, you'll hear it again. It's your cue to press forward fifteen seconds, approximately six times on your your thing until you hear the music again. Miam.
I was going to ask if you'd ever heard of the rebellion in Patagonia, but then I remember that the reason that you're this week's guest is because a couple of months ago or some time ago, you and I were talking about overlooked stories and I brought this one up, and then I was like, you should just come on the podcast and be the guest for it.
Yeah. It's also very funny because, completely unrelated to this, out of the blue, my girlfriend was like, started talking about the rebellion Patagonia and I was like, hell, no, hold on, oh.
My god, you have a deep history nerd girlfriend that rules.
He's great. Yeah, and just stuff like this just happens every once in a while, Like you.
Were like, you can't talk about it because you're because I when my guests know what the topic is, they are forbidden from researching it between, which is totally good and not weird that I do that. So this will probably be a four parter. This story is worth it. If this show had seasons, I would do a whole season on the rebellion in Patagonia. This story is the reason that there's a show called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. It's not the reason we picked the title.
It's the reason I wanted to do a history podcast. I first learned this story I don't know, maybe five years ago or something, and it was just so fucking cool that I started like looking at how better to tell this kind of history. For a long time, I was just like, I'm going to have a podcast and it's going to be me explaining the rebellion and Patagonia to someone and making them care. I wanted to take someone who didn't care about anarchist history and make them
care about this story because it's so cool. This case, it didn't work because I have a feeling that Mia cares about anarchists history because I learned a lot of Yeah, but I pitched the show to cool Zone Media. Here we are, and I didn't come out the gate with this because I wanted to get better at telling stories first,
because it is the coolest shit story. But it's not a simple story, and it's also a story that not a lot of people in the global North have, you know, Yeah, I mean this is like so, I mean I kind of vaguely had heard of it, but like, of of the like three question mark like big anarchist things that happened in Chile and Argentina, like this is the one I know the least about. Okay, Oh I don't know, I'm oh, yeah, the other ones.
So in between about nineteen seventeen nineteen nineteen, there was like a wave of huge well okay, and there there was just a lot of in you know, ok I probably shouldn't have started this without actually making sure I have my data specifics right, But there was a whole bunch of general strikes in both countries, and I think it was Chile where they tried to do a Bolshevik style coup because the the Russian Revolution had just happened and they like looked at it and we're like, oh, hey,
they read a bunch of stuff about how how they did it, and we're like, oh, we're gonna do this year. And it was a complete disaster. The police found out about everyone got arrested.
Okay, I think that.
Was a Chilean one. In the Argentinian one was a bunch of general strikes that got crushed really badly.
We're going to talk about those. Yeah, yeah, I didn't know as much about the Chilean one. It makes sense. The Argentinian one is it'll be the end of this week when we talk about the tragic week. Yeah, different than the other, the tragic week that we talked about in one of our million episodes about Spain. I don't
remember which one this one. Yeah, Okay. So basically, because it's this show, I'm going to talk about this thing that happened in nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty two in Argentina, and by doing that, I'm going to take this half to talk about before then, because that's what I like to do, because context is half the joy. Also because
history without context is just like boring to me. It's like the kind of stuff that like like it's like it's like someone showed you, like a a close up take, like the handsomest man, and then zoom in on his nose and then send him a picture of his nose. I'm not gonna be like, damn, like what a nose? You know, Like you gotta like zoom out and see the face to be like, I.
Don't know, Michael B. Jordan has a nice nose.
I'm even like a nosegirl. I they sent this on air, and I do.
You know this about you?
There's one thing about Margaret Killjoy. She's a nosegirl.
Anyway. So Patagonia, where our story takes place, where no noses exist, Lest I get distracted, Patagonia is a region that basically takes up the southern trunk of South America. I'm explaining this. I have a feeling mea has a better grasp of history of geography than the average North Estatus and Edensian.
Be fair, my geography is actually real. I happen to know this. But also I'm terrible at geography. Oh okay, Like I okay, I'm gonna say that. The most embarrassing thing about me is it wasn't until the last few years that I realized that Illinois, the state that I live and has a border with Kentucky. I never realized this.
Yeah, because you think the enemy in the way somehow or something.
You know, it doesn't. It's terrible by Kentucky. This, this must be redressed somehow. I like, awful, terrible crime.
I like Kentucky. It's part of Appalachia. But that's fair. I used to uh, I used to hold that I was only responsible for the geography of places I've been, which is not true. But and then like I used to feel really bad about my bad you know, Americans, especially white Americans, of this like historically bad grasp of geography or whatever. But I remember once being in the Netherlands. Oh, I'm going to get the details of this wrong and make this whole story, make me be the embarrassing person.
And I remember talking to this person who was like, she was Dutch and she didn't know where Denmark was, And I was like, you have a border with that country. Like, as an American, I grew up knowing where Canada and Mexico are, you know.
To be fair, I have had I had people in my high school who didn't know where Canada and Mexico were. I had a classmate who thought that you thought that what was it, Saudi Arabia was in the Yucatan.
Huh.
It was lot going on there, It was a whole thing.
Yeah. Well, we're not going to make any assumptions about people's level of understanding of geography, because there's a lot of things that are hard to keep track of. There are a lot of countries in this world. And so Argentina, okay, so Patagonia southern trunk of South America. Part of it is an Argentina, part of is in Chile. None of it is actually an outdoors clothing brand, and I am annoyed that the outdoor clothing brand comes up first when
you google a place where two million people live. Yeah, but it is one of the the least densely populated chunks of the world. It is only slightly more dense than Alaska. A lot of it is the Patagonian Step, which is the eighth largest desert in the world. And it's like kind of just like shrubby, right, It's not
a cigaro cactus place. It's a shrub place. Most of the stories about Argentinian Patagonia and it ties into Argentinian history more generally, the shortest version of the story the elevator pitch that I'm bringing to you late in the first episode. The short version is this, from the years of nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty two, thousands of indigenous people in rural anarchists threw off their chains left led a massive rural strike across a huge chunk of the country.
They fought with everything. They had to be treated decently by the plantation owners that they worked for, and it was an ostensibly liberal government that mowed them down. They executed probably around fifteen hundred people who had already surrendered,
quite likely making them dig their own grapes. It is a story that ties together a pacifist assassin, a hardened anarchist bandit whose name is a number, and half a century of organizing culture, organizing and culture, and a ton of other really interesting people, like there's going to be a I'm just gonna tell you about these people. They're
really cool. We're going to get to them. The movie that they made about this event, which won awards around the world, saw a lot of the filmmakers like forced into exile or imprisoned and shit. The governor who allowed it to be filmed, saw the end of his career, and I think saw jail time. But I'm not actually done writing this episode. Even though I like read about this stuff a lot, I can't remember that detail and so I'll know it by the time we record the rest.
But yeah, no, yeah, the film caused a fuss.
That is that is a wild production thing, Like I'm trying to think of if I can, if I can remember another film that had that much like political consequences with people who made it.
Yeah, I like, yeah, it's pretty wild, I know. And like when I find this stuff out that like even extra made me be like, why did I not know about this story? You know, there's gonna be a part
where anarchists are gonna almost take over Buenos Aires. There's gonna be a part where like there's gonna be so much stuff and like and I mean whatever, I don't want to blame my ignorance of these things on like broader xenophobia and like American exceptionalism and you know, eurocentrism, but as like a broader problem, but that is a broader problem within the movement, the movement I hate that phrase. Okay, Anyway,
like any great story, this story starts with pastries. Ah, did you know this about Argentina?
I think I do.
I'm really okay, Okay, Well, we're going to get to it. We're gonna talk about pastries first. We're gonna talk about Argentina. Argentina is the second largest country in South America. If you don't know your geography, there's a huge country in South America that's Brazil. Then there's a pretty big country that takes up most of the southern trunk that's Argentina. Now you know where we are at. It is the
eighth largest country in the world. Buenos Aires is likely the only city that the average person who doesn't live anywhere near there has heard of. If you didn't know where Argentina was, the city, you've probably heard of. About forty seven million people live in Argentina at the time of this story. Way less than that, about ten million people so are living there. I'm going to speed run the first trunk of Argentinian history. If I'm missing anything major,
you should let me know. I'm something going to put you on the hook to pretend like you're an expert in this country's history.
No, a little bit, but I'm not a not an Argentina nowhere.
Yeah, well you will be by the time we're done, or you'll be a knowwhere about some really strange details about unions. Okay, So Argentina, people have lived there for a long ass fucking time, a ton of different cultures, some of which were influenced by the Incas to the northwest, some of which weren't. White people showed to fuck the place up, and early fifteen hundreds. By the fifteen fifties
you've got Spanish settlements, mostly along the coast. It's very to me, it felt very comparable to like reading about the US, where it was like, oh, the US has been around for a long time, or the collegies has been around for a long time, and then it was like only more recently that they were like, zoom, let's kill everyone and go west. I mean they were killing people all along, but like you know, the westward expansion came later.
Yeah, it takes them, takes them like a hug, Well not one hundred years, but yeah, like fifty sixty non that okay.
No, Actually, in the United States, it was like until the fucking Revolution before settlers went west.
Oh yeah, oh sorry, for some reason, I was doing revolution forward to Oh, I see, there's like coast to coast, like military control.
I see. Yeah, no, it seems like about one hundred actually.
Yeah.
So in the early eighteen hundreds, the settlers in Argentina were like, well, we want to have a colonial state, but not be attached to Europe anymore. Worked for the United States, why can't it work for us? So they started a revolution in eighteen sixteen. They did a declaration of independence thing, and then it stayed really fucking messy for decades and they didn't get constitution for a long as time. Yeah, and I don't know the details of that.
I tried if you want. If you want a long account of that, Mike Duncan does a pretty good one on revolutions. Oh, of course in America. But it's the stuff after that is it's really chaotic and complicated. And yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. I'm a big Mike Duncan fan. That's
sounded sarcastic, but it's not. When I built my cabin I built a huge chunk of it listening to revolutions, So I like, in my mind, I'm like, oh, yeah, like the Russian Revolution, that thing where I was wiring the twelve volt lights that are in my ceiling, you know, like I remember that the drill bit wasn't right. That's the main thing I remember about part nineteen oh five, part of the revolution, you know, which is gonna come up today or maybe maybe Wednesday. We're gonna talk about
nineteen oh five Russian revolutions. Somehow. It's all going to tie together. We got the Spanish Civil War in here, don't worry anyway, So they didn't get a constitution for like a long ass time decades. Right before and during independence, indigenous people were getting their land stolen for cattle ranching and I think sheep farming also, and a ton we're
getting forced to work shit jobs on the ranches. And you get this whole class of people who are of mixed ancestry, who are just rural peasants who are poor as fuck. In Argentina. This conquering takes a long ass time because the indigenous people fall like hell, and all the while is doing it's like civil war thing, you know about what kind of nation to make. It took until about eighteen sixty one for the like quote unquote revolution to get it shipped together or and the modern
nation of Argentina to be born. At this point, immigrants start flooding the country from Europe, especially Spain and Italy. Miam, do you know what you get when you let Italians come to your country in the nineteenth century? A bunch of anarchists.
Yes, Like this is like the single predictor of are there, Like, is there going to be anarchists in this country? It is like do they have a bunch of battalions?
Yeah? So pastries. Argentina is the only Spanish speaking country where the word for pastries is factoras everywhere else that word means bill or invoice, and it comes from the Latin to make, because the bakers wanted you to know that making pastries was actual, real work that deserved a living wage.
They're rips.
As for the names of these pastries for which they deserved a living wage, and these are still the case today. Apparently I haven't I haven't been to Argentina, but there's a lot of articles about this, a lot of everything from political articles to like food articles, like this is a story that people sometimes hear about, and it's a good story. Some of the pastries include Bullista Frayela Friar's Balls, canoncitos little canyons, bombas bombs, libritos, little books, so spiitas
de monja nuns size and vigilantes vigilantes. And then there's a pastry called the cremona, which is a circular I don't know if the name means I don't think it means anything saucy. It is a circular pastry that was designed to be a sort of infinity of a's. The A stands for anarchist, Yeah yeah, which gives you a hint of why the bakers have made these types of gas because anarchist bakers named the pastries in Argentina in
the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. Ask for where to start this particular story of pastries in Well, first let's start with the thing that they all had to do. They actually these these They just felt that they deserved money for their work of making pastries, and the way they did that was naming them a certain way. And then the way that we deserve This is an ad transition is the worst one I've ever done, because it seems earnest, and I don't mean it to be earnest.
Here's some stuff that you can buy, I guess in case you need a new car and We'rebecca. And in eighteen seventy nine, General Julio Argentino Rocca set out to wipe out the indigenous people of pattin Petaconia.
That was a jarring tone shift. Yeah, I guess that's what ad breaks are for.
Yeah, totally. I'm sure he absolutely would have encouraged you to get all of those things that just happened. Oh yeah, although he might not have wanted you to listen to some of the podcasts that probably just got advertised so much like a true crime villain himself. He went on a fucking murder spree which went with the shitty fucking title The Conquest of the Desert oohoo, terrible name, bad thing. Yeah,
it's usually portrayed as a genocide because it was a genocide. Yeah, it was not portrayed that way for you know, at the time by the powers that be. Any honest historian looking at it is like, this is a specific plan to eradicate the following groups of people, and they were not subtle about it. Indigenous people were subdued or killed,
and settlers moved on to the land. Indigenous people were forcibly prevented from having children, and then a year later, General Julio Argentina Rocca becomes fucking president a fucking Argentina.
Hi.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's funny because like I do a lot of these episodes where it'll be like and then this cool fucking strike and then all these people were fighting cops, and I don't usually like focus on like why people are doing it, because like, to me, it's like self evident.
You're like a poor immigrant in the nineteenth century. You're fucking starving, you know, and like the people who are presidents are even more blatantly garbage or something than the average I don't know, than the average average president right now in the world is pretty bad. But so murder sprey guy becomes president. Anarchists are showing up from Europe. The first anarchists and like socialists and radical and stuff actually arrived earlier eighteen seventy one from France. There were
refugees from the Paris Commune. By eighteen seventy six, anti authoritarian socialism aka our friend anarchism is the dominant strain of leftism in the country. But shit really got going in Argentina in eighteen eighty five. One my favorite historical anarchist thinker. Can you guess, is it Melantesta? Yeah, it's Mala Testa. Yeah, for anyone who's listening. There is an Italian anarchist who I think very fondly of based on
a lot of the stuff I've read by him. And he was not afraid to criticize wanton violence, and he believed in creating a veteran for your world for all people. But he was not a pacifist either, and I find him very interesting. Erico Malatesta. In eighteen eighty five, he was in like Naples in Italy, and he was like nursing cholera victims, because that's just what you do in your Mala testa. And then the Italian state was like, we should kill this guy, and he was like, but
I don't want to die. I'm not going to do an entire an accent. He was like, but I'd rather not get murdered, you know. So he does what everyone does in this situation, which is put himself into a crate full of sewing machines and then get himself smuggled to Argentina from Italy.
I did not know that's how we did that. That is so funny.
I know it, Like, I know, I want to know more about it.
Like did he like he had to have broken out of the crate on the ship, right? Like what did he just like have enough supplies that he brought with him to.
Like I long, I know, I wish I knew. I like, it's possible he just like fucking like at each dock got in and out of the crate. I think it wasn't that he smuggled himself. I think he was smuggled. I think is a better way to put it, because we have this like problem of like big Man of history. Shit even leaks into antithiritarianism and we're like, oh, Malotesta, he's the guy, right, you know, and he's like part of a movement, right, it's very power or movement and
it has you know, all the workers in it. And so I think, but I don't know. I I tried. Yeah, I mean it makes sense. I read a bunch of different things, but none of the things I read got beyond the the like one or two sentence part of this story, you know.
Yeah, I mean that is kind of the other problem with Bryan ro Maltesta is he does so much stuff. I know, that he's like, yeah, this is this is a thing that for a normal person will be this is the wildest thing you've ever done, and this this is just like Wednesday.
Yeah, yeah, Now he's gonna do more shit like that. That doesn't even make it into any of the Like, if you read a ten page biography of Malatesta, it does not mention you're lucky if it mentions he goes to Argentina, even though he like the chain the dominoes that he starts whatever. Anyway, I'll get to the dominoes. So you know, he's not the guy who brought anarchism. Anarchism is already there. He's sort of a figurehead that people ascribe a lot of shit too. But he's fucking cool.
Sewing machine gun, the sewing thing is cool. And his friends in Argentina are these anarchist bakers, and they wanted a union, so they formed a union in eighteen eighty six. And they did this. It wasn't like Mala Testa started their union. Another Italian anarchist at Torre Mattey. He's the name that's most often attached to this union. I think it's just like, you know, pick a guy that's the guy who we're going to write into the history books.
And this union has the sick name of the Cosmopolitan Society of Resistance and Placement of Bakery Workers.
That's awesome. We need, we need, we need, we need to go back to sick union names or I feel like our union names have gotten kind of boring and now we can do better.
I know, but they did follow. There's only two styles of nineteenth century radical newspaper names. There's either the like the torch or the bomb or whatever, and then there's like the worker's paper. And their paper was yeah, their paper was the working Baker.
Oh my god.
Okay.
You know, look, you have to use all of your cool naming on one thing. You have to concentrate it all to make sure you don't have enough left for the other one.
Totally. I mean to be fair.
I read a podcast called cool People Did Cool Stuff. But you know, I wrote another one called live like the World's Dying. That's poetic, right, so like, look at me plugging my shit.
Okay. The Working Baker was often banned by the government and was often printed and distributed illegally, which is like, if you're gonna have a paper with a boring name. It's gotta be the like, oh shit, man, did you get a fucking copy of the Working Baker? Like, yo, don't tell anyone, you like, open up your trench coat and you pull out a couple of copies of the Working Baker, you know, next to some croissants.
Was this one of those things where it was like they had a bunch of friends in like the printing press unions or whatever, or were they like doing get themselves.
I don't know the answer to that. There are so many people printing papers at this point. Yeah, that's true that, like, and we're gonna talk about a bunch more of them. I don't know the answer. Unfortunately, I was tempted to just answer and be like, I think it's this, but you know, I don't know. In eighteen eighty seven, the Cosmopolitan Society of Resistance and Placement of Bakery Workers had
their first strike. It lasted ten days. They the cops tried to stop them, they fought back, and they won the strike. After ten days they gained a thirty percent wage increase.
Wow.
Shortly thereafter, the rail and steel workers were like, oh that sounds good, and they went on stroke.
Yeah hell yeah.
The Baker's Union wasn't just one of the first unions in Argentina. For a while, like I think like fifteen years, it was like the union in Argentina. It was the biggest, the baddest, and the most anarchy. Mali Testo wrote their articles of incorporation and the other which is probably not what they called it, but you know, he like wrote the things that like this is how we do things,
and all the other unions were like, sweet, we'll use those. Thanks. Also, in eighteen eighty six, a thing Malatesta did that I can only find the two sentence version that would be an entire fucking novel if it had happened to anybody else. Mala Testa set out to do what like everyone in
every Western I've ever seen has done. He and four people wandered into the desert looking for gold supposedly hidden there by the Argentinian army that had been stolen from indigenous people during the conquest of the desert.
Why yeah, sure, why not?
Yeah, he's just like, I'm even better to do.
Malatesta treasure Hunter or not what I thought was gonna be happening in this episode. When I woke up this.
Morning, I want to write this story is so bad. I'm sure he wrote about it. This man did not. This man wrote a lot, you know, but I like, I might have to learn Italian just to fucking read his take on it. And I'm too embarrassed to learn other languages solely for the purpose of anarchist history research, like until I get better at my Spanish, I'm not allowed to do that, like the language that people actually
speak in the country I live in. Yeah, so he returns empty handed a few weeks later, and who knows, or maybe he found it all and I don't know, but you know, and he just like socked it away. He stuck around Argentina for a few more years, and they returned to Italy to keep getting interested and get organizing and being cool. And one day I'll just like give up on life and do a ten part episode on him or something.
Yeah.
Anyway, so this is Baker's union, and part of the reason it was such a big deal. It seems like such a like minor thing to me, Like a baker is like, oh, it's cool, Like I like making bread. I started learning to do that. You know, bread is a really big deal, and it's a big deal in a kind of interesting way. That's different than a lot of other places. You did this whole sea on food rides and how they're like the basis of everything, right, Yeah, and most of the times, correct me if I'm wrong.
Most of the times, it's like bread is the staple food, and therefore the price of bread is like what everything revolves around, and so all these like revolutions around bread or like we demand bread blah blah blah. Right, basically saying like we demand food, we want calories. Is that a correct assessment of like Europeans.
Yeah, yeah, And I mean also like, yeah, it's just how a lot of it's just it's the thing that a lot of food production is based off of for a really really long time in a lot of places.
Okay, Argentina, it's different. It's a class thing. Bread. A loaf of bread costs three times more than meat. Jesus. Yeah, So a loaf of bread was a symbol of working class resistance because it was a symbol of like upper class bougie shit. Right, And I think pastries and stuff like that probably tie into that too, But basically like they're like we get to eat bread. That is a thing that we deserve. We don't just need meat, you know.
So well, what I'm getting out of this is the old bread and Roses slogan. The significance of the bread and the roses have been flipped.
Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah no, And it's just so funny to me because like, yeah, usually like bread, like usually meat is the like, well, rich people get to eat meat. I could eat meat too, I mean not in the United States, where everyone eats too much meat, but that's okay anyway, So the bakers they're not fucking around. They organized one hundred and six strikes between eighteen eighty seven and nineteen oh seven.
Wow, that's that's a lot of strike. Yeah, and I guess also part of that too is like given so immediately I was like, okay, how many strikes per day? Is that?
I know?
I was like yeah, But the problem is you can't even do a measure like that because strikes last time, so like there's only it's a number of strikes you could conceivably have, assuming your strikes are like lasting more than like a day. Totally, I think makes it even more impressive.
I know, and like I don't entirely know if these are all baker strikes, and they are all over the country. Right, there's a bunch of other anarchists like strongholds besides Buenos Aires. And most of today's story is going to be about Buenos Aires, but there's like all these all these things are also happening in other cities, in towns. And one of the reasons that they're such a powerful union is one, the upper class really likes their stuff, right, and two
it's skilled labor. And it's hard to bring in scabs because if like all of the bakers, you're like, you know how to bake, you're an anarchist now, right, So like, who the fuck are you going to get to scab? It's not lift this heavy thing and move it. I don't believe in unskilled labor, but there's still different scales of certain types of things, right, And you know, and and an artisan thing is different than factory line production. I'm not sure to talk show on factory line workers.
They so the bakers, they four mutual aid societies, which is a different sort of thing than modern mutual aid organizations that I think is like worth pointing out. These are like anarchists fraternal organizations where the members take care of one another rather than like most modern conceptions of
anarchist mutual aid is like for all comers, right. They started turning bakeries into workers cooperatives, which is like where I like, I love when people just start getting to the point where they're like, wait, why do we need bosses at all? Fuck this? Yeah, they coordinated with the other unions. Basically, whenever someone else went on strike, if the bakers joined them, it was over. It would soon spiral into a general strike, which is a fuck ton of and owners would be forced to give up to
the workers demands. Anarchists led like six general strikes around the turn of the century. And that's not even There's gonna be a bunch more later that we're gonna talk about that you mentioned the top of the episode. Along the way, they named their bag goods to make fun of their three main enemies, the government, the military, and the church. So they had friars, balls, none size bombs,
little cannons. The names remain today, and I'm like the little books, I kind of wonder because some of them are like, oh, these are to make like the like or like little cannons, or to make fun of the military. I'm like are they or were they like we like shooting people.
Yeah, you know, like, well, I mean, I guess, I guess. My Kenner argument to that is that I feel like the unions are less likely to have cannons, and the government.
Is that's true. Although some of these people came from the fucking Paris Commune which started over the workers had some cannons, that's true, and then the government was like, wait, we don't want to have cannons anymore, and they were like come and take it, like the fucking Texas thing, only it was real and it was about cannons anyway. Sorry, it's a tangients.
Yeah, I guess, I mean, I guess you're sometimes we have cannons, like is the motto of the nineteenth Citry workers movement.
Yeah, yeah, totally. One of the worst mix strips I ever did was like anarchist pirates and they're like, bring up the cannons, and the person was like, bring up the cannon. The person's like, we have no cannon and it's like spelled with one end because you know, there's no holy books and the anarchist tradition, and then the other the pirate captains like you fucking pedant like, bring up the canons with two ends, and he's like, oh,
we don't have those either. He used to write comic strips a long time ago anyway, So where the fuck am I? Okay, that's the background. The pastries part of the background. We're going to do some more background now. Argentina and the turn of the twentieth century is incredibly full of immigrants. By nineteen fourteen, Argentina had the highest percentage of foreign born residents of any country in the world.
Wow.
Also, notably, and hard to understand from an American exceptionalist point of view, it had a higher GDP per capita than the US did around this time, so it was like a more successful country for the upper class. The labor movement kept growing, and for much but not all, of that time, we'll talk about when it slips in and out of that. It was largely an anarchist A bunch of anarchist newspapers were published and then regularly repressed. The Voice of the Woman was in a narca feminist
newspaper around that time, edited by Virginia Bolton. And I'm going to talk about her because I think she's as good of a person as I need to understand some stuff about the movement at the time, and she's cool.
Virginia Bolton probably born in eighteen seventy. Some things I read to at eighteen seventy six, but I think they're wrong because I did some math and I also saw all the ones that sad eighteen seventy She was born in Uruguay, the daughter of working class German immigrants, and she grew up to be like I, well, grew up to be. I think she did this as a kid. She was a shoemaker and a sugar maker, which are like the two jobs that two of the jobs that
like poor girls can work. As a teenager, she's hanging out with the baker's union. And then she led the first women strike in Argentina in eighteen eighty nine, which is a sea strike, like probably nineteen years old when she runs this, And I don't even think she's a seamstress, although there will be if we count the sewing machines
from before, there's at least three. Anyway, Yeah, at twenty years old, she becomes the first woman to address a labor rally in the country, at a May Day rally, and this is like right when May day is becoming a thing. Right. This is only a couple years after the Haymarket martyrs have died in Chicago. See the very first episode of this show. She was one of the women who ran this newspaper, The Woman's Voice for two years.
It was in our anarchist communist newspaper. And it was not only the first anarchic feminist South America newspaper, this was the first buy and four women publication of any kind in South America. Wow, I love when we get that shit. I love that the first gay newspaper in the world was an anarchist. Like, I love that, like finding all the shit that were just like left out of you know. But it was printed using basically the sugar workers and the shoe workers were like they used
their own wages to make this newspaper happen. It was labeled appears when it can, rather than like monthly or daily or whatever, which a bunch of the other newspapers were also using. And it was a little bit like, oh, it's hard to afford, and it was a little bit like a lot of the shit's illegal half the time we do it, you know. It included voices from anarchists women around the world, and you like this part. I think it included articles that like talk shit on specific
misogynist anarchists men. Hell yeah, and this scared the shit out of shitty anarchist bros. She toured around the continent speaking on feminism and anarchist communism. She helped set up Castado Pueblo, the house of the People Cultural Center that had reading. Said the library had an orchestra, and just like all the coldal shit that proved like it's like one of the things I keep running across. I fucking love's like working class class people coming together and be like, no,
we can have all the rich shit. We just have to fucking do it together, you know. Yeah, and uh, and the other way to get rich shit is to sell advertising on a podcast. I mean to buy things to participate in whatever. I keep doing these things where I'm like, oh, I hate selling ads, and it's like I do right, Like I don't like that.
This is a thing that I'm really good at doing the ad transitions.
Thank you. I appreciate it. And it's like because I want to like flag it a little bit, but I'm also not like it just fucking eat is what it is. Everyone fucking has work. Some people, you know, we all work for things, and including a bunch of people we're talking about today, you know, and I work for this thing, and I really appreciate the chance to get to talk to you all, not just you two although YouTube specifically, but even the greater you all in the audience. So
here's some mats and we're back. I was supposed to do that, like really ironically, and I went Ernest, and I'm very sorry. It won't happen again.
You know what you did though? You provided context?
Oh god, Margaret context killed joy. The reason I picked that middle name is because.
The way that's not a bit.
Yeah, yeah, totally so later Virginia Bolton she forms the Central Feminino Anarchista the Anarchist Women's Center in nineteen oh seven with a bunch of other women, including some of the other Actually I don't remember if some of these other women got into the scripture not. I don't remember. I sometimes whenever it's like a ton of names, sometimes I'm like, I'm going to not introduce a new name
because I can't remember names for shit. And I used to hate history because it was just like memorized dates and names and like that wasn't what is interesting. If it'd been like if the history books have been like here's when like, you know, Jews and Irish immigrants kicked out all the like beat up all the fascists in England, I'd be like, whoa history rules instead of being like, on what date did the following three named people beat
the shit out of all the fascists? And you know, it's like, that's not the way that my brain works. Do you have that problem or where are you at here?
Yeah? I mean I well, for the longest time I had I just couldn't do dates at all. It was a real disaster. But then I don't know, I mean, I think I think the thing you're getting at is like it's history as narrative is just much easier to follow than history is like timeline, which is the way that it's usually thought of.
Totally.
I think the thing that the thing that I got to was like once you've once you know the story and you know enough of the context, you like you kind of just start figuring out the dates because you know, like around when what cycle of thing is happening?
And yeah, yeah, and then I start carrying I only care about dats is because they relate to other things. If I want to say, like, oh, led this may day strike, and then I'm like, oh, that's actually really interesting because it was like three years after the Chicago Martyrs, right, you know, like that's when it becomes interesting. Like dates are the things that tie the pieces together of the web,
but they're not the substance, you know. Okay, So Virginia Bolton when she gets sick and anarchist theater troop fund raises for her recovery. Oh, I know. In nineteen oh two, the state passed a residency law, which is basically an anti anarchist law. They were like, they gave themselves permission to deport any immigrant who disturbs public order, and I think they explicitly name anarchists in the text of the law. This is used. You will be shocked to know, to
deport immigrants that they believe are disturbing the public order. Wow, who could have anticipated that happening in this country and other countries I know. And so in nineteen oh five, her partner was kicked out of the country during a sweep of anarchists and he ended up taking the kids, but they were still dating. So this actually just like seems like a cool thing. Like I think it was like he was like, all right, you're busy doing all this shit, So I'll take the kids and take care
of them in Duguay. And so she stays in Argentina for a couple more years. A few years later, she becomes the first woman to ported under the residency laws. Oh no, yeah, so she's able to reunite with her family. I doubt she's like crazy bummed about it, you know. Yeah where She starts a new anarchist feminist newspaper called The New Path, and starts in a feminist association that met at the Electrical Workers' Union. And she lived a long ass life. She died sometime around nineteen sixty, still
down for the fucking cause. Wow, Virginia Bolton, you were cool as hell. Hell yeah, anarchism in Argentina. I usually don't read the headlines, the headings of the sections, but here I did. I already did it, and I can't. There's no takebacks, there's no editing. We're live people. Whenever you're listening to this, I it sends a ping and me and Mia get back on the fucking mic.
Sorry, what was the title of that section and.
Because I'm in Argentina, Yeah, there's no editing.
Now you've said it twice.
Ah crap. See, being a podcaster means you constantly have to be on your on your toes for the clever traps throat. Now you I.
Can imagine like doing radio and like still apping a job the way that we talk.
Yeah, I just wouldn't. I'm pretty sure that they'd make a new residency law. I don't care. If you're a sim then yeah, you're kicked out of the radio.
I'm like, no way.
Yeah. Every now and then I do like live radio, like an interview, like talking about a topic or something like that, and it's so hard not to cuss.
It's so hard to cut.
And uh, that's why we're on the podcasting.
Yeah, where we can say bad words like fudge and darn. Yeah, and if they if we just said the bad ones, but if you heard the not bad ones, it means that they got edited by the overlords.
So the FCC's got to us.
Yeah, just come up with all of the most obscene things I could possibly say that are not technically involving, like descriptions of sex or anyway.
So it's the eighteen nineties, and anarchism is doing this thing. In Argentina, Communist anarchism in particular have set up a bunch of studios socialis, which translates to social studies. But I think in this case means like social centers that I think focus mostly on education. Clearly, I didn't find more than one source that gave me more than the name of it and then started trying to infer, and that's not what I'm supposed to do. But they did
form what I know more about. They formed what they called resistance societies. Have you heard of this model?
No?
So I think early anarchists, you know, you start off with these mutual aid organizations, right, which are essentially fraternal organizations in some ways, and then they would move into resistance societies, which is somewhere between that and a union. It's like where they start being like a mutual aids to a society that's like armed. Basically they're not necessarily armed, but like ready to do direct action. You know. It's like the affinity group model meets the fraternal organization model.
They're really interesting to me. Eventually these evolve into the unions, right, This is not the only evolution of unions. I don't know enough about the history, but I has something to do with the land enclosures in England and some other stuff. Since this is leftism that we're talking about, the Marxists and the anarchists waged a bitter war of words against each other for the hearts and minds of the working class. Ah arguing whether or not you can use tyranny to
raise tyranny from the world, said clearly the anarchist. Then within the anarchists, they also argued bitterly, and they argued bitterly over whether large scale organizations were chill or whether
like nothing should get beyond the resistance society level. And they also argued about whether propaganda of the deed in this case, like at this time it's like mostly like a lot of like killing of kings and other like rulers and cops and stuff, whether that's justified, right, And so they argue about all these things because history is a wheel and we are lashed to it, and it
will repeat yep. In eighteen ninety seven, a Catalan carpenter and an Italian baker came together to form the most influential newspaper on the left, an anarchist paper called Lo Protesta Yumana the Human Protest. By nineteen oh three it was just La Protesta.
I was about to say, like that, that's a that's a surprisingly interesting name for the largest paper. It's like, no, no, screw that, it's not the protest That that was too different.
Yeah, they're right. They were like, well, we need a we had to name something else fancy, so they had to unfancy their newspaper. You know. By nineteen oh four, this is a daily paper. No more appears when it can. This is a daily paper in the country, and all over the country. There are dozens of anarchist newspapers and other labor papers, but again anarchism being the dominant thing until about nineteen fifteen, and anyway there's another. There's at
least one other daily. There's newspapers in Spanish, Italian and French. And there's like a chicken and egg thing about the newspapers and the labor struggles, because you're kind of like they feed into each other and the country is alive with workers fighting for a world without a state or capitalism, and they're also those Then those same workers are running these newspapers which are encouraging other people and like it's cool.
I don't recommend it as a model right now. Just to be clear, when I'm talking about how amazing anarchist newspapers were, I would recommend other forms of media that people actually consume.
Whatever that was, like matrotskyite, yeah, no, the crank standing outside of the school with the newspaper, yeah, bankless task yeah.
Instead stand outside of the newspaper with a little business card that says cool people who did cool stuff and be like, hey, have you listened to this? And then people will be like that's weird. Why are you doing that? And they'll be like I don't know, and everyone will be a little bit sadder. So in nineteen oh one, seven thousand of these different resistance societies send thirty five
delegates and they form the Workers Federation of Argentina. Since this was run by anarchists, it was politically pluralist and it didn't turn away workers for not being anarchists. It was also explicitly anti racist. As long as you were down for direct action and workers struggle, you were in. It was also anti nativist. There's a lot of more conservative of unions were like, we only want Argentinians who
were born in Argentina working these things. And they don't mean indigenous people for anyone who's not when you're nativism, it's not like it's like the settlers who want only them to be the only settlers. It's that, however, the good, the good people the federation. They also included women, including
all women unions like the sugar refining finery workers. From the very beginning, Marxists tried to take it over immediately because they were allowed to be in it, but there weren't enough of them, so they quit to do their own thing. They had a Worker's Party whose first goal was to centralize all control over workers struggle in Argentina. Never change authoritarians.
Yeah.
The group they formed was called the UGT. So then the workers, minus the grouchy Marxist who cut themselves out, they just went fucking trade by trade and got better, better hours and better pay. The sign painters got the eight hour daynineteen oh one, the doc workers got the nine hour day in nineteen oh two. They're just like fucking doing it. They're just like all right, we're we're like all the workers. We can just do I mean, they clearly can't immediately do what they actually want, right.
They can't. They don't have enough power to like end capitalism, right, but they are like they know how to get certain stuff done, and they are getting stuff done. In nineteen oh four, they changed FOA, changed their name to FURA or FORA. They added regional to the name Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina. Why did they add regional? Can you guess it's not immediately obvious?
Is it one of those like we're this thing but just in this area, like there's especially the war or is it so weird? Okay, but weirder than that.
It's kind of like when people say so called the United States of America. Oh my god, incredible, Yeah, absolutely incredible. Yeah, they were refusing to acknowledge that Argentina is a nation state. Hell yeah, it is a region. Nation states shouldn't exist. And since at this point they're like, look where anarchist communists. Our goal is a classless society without a state or private property, and so they're like, fuck the nation of Argentina.
Their influence is creeping even into that Marxist offshoot, the UGT, and it stops being Marxist and starts being neutral syndicalism, which means that they're like want to use syndicalism, but they're not picking a specific ideological line. And so at this point they start becoming way more down with direct action. The Marxist version was like way more reformist actually at this point, which is funny because that's not the way that people would necessarily assume or act today.
What like points is that roughly like nineteen oh five.
Yeah, that makes sense.
This is ah, this is this is the before the BULTI we need social democratic Marxists.
Yeah, yeah, no, actually that's a that's a good way to put it. Yeah, totally. And so they start becoming more down with general strikes and shit. So the two groups start working together better, and there's like all of
these times. I'm not going to get into all of the most of the books that I read about this stuff are just the back and forth between these unions, and it does not actually interest maybe on like a certain level, you know, But like they keep trying to get together, and it sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't, and when it works, it's actually really fucking beautiful. So I like get why they kept trying to come together, but they co run a bunch of general strikes, which
is cool as shit. They had a three day general strike in nineteen oh seven that ended in total victory for the workers, and then in nineteen oh seven the same year, they had a three month general strike that started as a tenant strike and was like started by women, actually specifically women tenants because one of our villains is
gonna be related to this. Cops are murdering strikers wherever they can because they're fucking cops, and people are getting arrested and deported constantly, and lot of these strikes are actually about the residency law. They're like, please get rid of the law that lets you deport us in the States, Like, but we want to deport you because you keep having strikes, you know. And so they would like catch like Lapretesta's editors and be like haha, and like kick them out
of the country. You know. I think they had to laugh like that. It actually wasn't legal to arrest someone unless you go ha when you do it. A lot of people got off on technicality because not everyone could laugh like that. There's one guy who's like the main repression guy, Colonel Falcon, the head of the Buenos Aires
police who swore to eradicate the anarchists. Spoiler alert, The anarchists eradicated Colonel Falcon Ay and his full name is Colonel Raman Falcon And if that isn't an asshole name, I've never heard one. Yeah, there's an eighties action film cop name. Yeah, totally. If you are from the upper class, you are not allowed to name your kids something that rhymes. I'm sorry. I don't make the rules. I just make
the rules. Or my Spanish is worse than I think, and it doesn't rhyme, but I'm pretty sure it does the accents in the same place. Yeah, he'd been an officer in the Desert campaign, that genocide of indigenous people I talked about earlier, and then he'd risen through the ranks by repressing that, like that nineteen oh seven tenements
strike by immigrant women who couldn't afford their rent. So on May first, nineteen oh nine, there's like this huge crowd, I think sixty thousand people or something at the May Day demonstration and Falcon's men shoot into the crowd. They kill either eight or twelve people, depending on your source. I'm going to put the more reliable at twelve, including children. And the elderly, and they wound more than one hundred
other people. The UGT, the neutral syndicalists. They call for a general strike the next day in solidarity with the anarchists, and this one the anarchists were allowed to organize again, and over eight hundred in prison anarchist workers who'd been arrested in the strike were set free. I'm sure there's not a lesson in there for anyone, certainly not for me.
It's like, Darian isn't as fine when I do it, even though when we get the fuck over ourselves anyway, but the eight or twelve dead workers and children made some people really fucking angry. They made one person in particular angry enough to decide to do something about it. Actually, lots of people did stuff about it, calling for a general strike, that's one of things you can do about it. But one guy, his name was a Simon Radowitski, and he was a young Jewish anarchist, just eighteen years old.
He's from Ukraine, and he was like, you know what, he'd been studying magic, right, and you want to do a magic trick. He wanted to make Colonel Falcon disappear into a cloud. Of blood. That's probably what he said, that's probably the way you phrased it. It's also what he did. He got himself a bomb, and Colonel Fakhnn got himself a funeral, and Simon kills Ramon Falcon.
And that's honestly, it's honestly really impressive that. I mean, I'm assuming this, well, actually I don't know why I'm assuming this kid's a first time bomber, but first time bombing actually working and not blowing up and killing you is really impressive, especially with like terrible nineteen hundreds bombs.
Yeah, I mean, well, you know, nineteen yeah, yeah, no, it's still not a great period. And I actually I think people will know this because I've said it before on the show. I specifically don't learn about bomb technology because I'm fucking too paranoid. I have no idea that's reasonable. I don't know.
I just I just I just assume that like well, I mean, I don't know, like I I just assume on average that if someone is trying to make a bomb, they're gonna blow themselves up.
And this is the extent of my yeah you heard it here. First, we are not advocating anything anti bombing.
I want this on the record, play this in the courtroom, bombing bad, don't do it.
Mine's neutral, I you know, with the way the rest of the script goes, I can't so for how it all went, and the wild life that Radowitski lived, and the wild life of the woman who later got him free from prison, and the week when Buenos Aires almost became an anarchist society. We're going to talk about on Wednesday.
Hey, come back. You have to come back. You have no choice.
Now, I know hooked, I know, the cliffhanger. It's the the cheap trick that I always there's a word for when you like specifically point out that you're doing something coat hang, No, I don't know. There's a thing that I'm doing. And the thing I'm doing is switching over to plugs Mia, Hi, what do you do? Who are you? How'd you get hear him?
Yeah? I those are a lot of existential questions there. The thing that I do is, yeah, I'm I'm one of the hosts of it Could Happen Here. You can find us wherever find podcasts are distributed. Yeah, I We're on Twitter and Instagram at Happened Here pod. It's also you can find cools in media. Yeah, you can't find me on Twitter anymore because I got banned for a statement that I want to put on the record was not a death threat, but was interpreted as one towards
the teosphobic New York Times columnists. Yeah so rip me. You can no longer find me on the internet.
Yeah, yes, tweet podcast I do mis tweet was I do not advocate bombing the following person.
Look. Look, I merely suggested that it would be bad if New York Times people, if New York Times columnists, we're treated the same way that trans people are. And this was interpreted as a death threat. So that's funny. I mean that's fun Well yeah, yeah, so rip me. Yeah so don't find me there, Get off of social media, go do strikes.
Yeah, I am on the internet. I have a sub stack. It's under my name, Margaret Kiljoy. I also now have another. It's not really a podcast, but it's a thing. It's a thing. It's in this feed, it's in the it can Happen here feed, It's in all the feeds. I somehow slipped it into every feed. It's in what's a podcast that's clearly not in it's in Revolutions by Michael Duncan's that thing. I have a thing that I'm doing
called the Cool Zone book Club. And because my other thing I do is write fiction, and I also edit fiction, and so I am going to be finding amazing short stories and short books and reading them to you and every Sunday on this feed and the it could happen here feed and probably not the Revolutions feed by Michael Duncan. But you should go listen to it. You probably already do if you listen to the show, to be honest, But if you don't, you probably should. I don't know
why I'm plugging him, but I listened to it. He doesn't know who I am. Uh, that's what I have to plug, Sophie. What do you got that?
That's what I was gonna plug?
Oh? Sorry, you would have done it better, let's hear it.
Well, normal me would have. But sick me. Margaret, Margaret Kiljoy, do you have a book club?
I do have a book club. Is it called the Cool Zone book Club or the Cool Zone Media book Club?
You know?
Unclear? Unclear? But uh what book are you discussing? First?
Well, my own book, The Lambles Slaughter of the Lion. I am reading it to Robert Evans, who is an obscure journalist who writes about driver. Yeah. Here's a book. It's called a Vice A guy at a History of Advice.
Yeah. Yeah, I kind of gotta sign copy of it.
Oh nice. Yeah, it'll be worse something someday, you know, and makes it. Yeah, every I don't know why this is funny. It's kind of loopy today.
But it is. But it is kind of funny. Yeah, so we got we got the Cool Zone. I'm gonna call it the Cool Zone Media Book Club. Full name it cool And you could check that out every Sunday and this feed worthy you could happen to your feed or whatever feed you're feeding.
And you can also check us out on Wednesday to hear the rest of this part of this longer story that is absolutely worth it. And I'm not being sarcastic because this is one of my favorite stories that I know.
Bye, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
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