Anarchism In Uruguay feat. Andrew, Pt. 2

in nineteen fifty six. According to Paul Sharki in Di Ferraci and Araquista Irauguaya, the FAU had very strong work in class roots, as many of the militants came from labor heavy districts like Zero, which definitely shaped their outlook. The FAU was also very much emphasized in direct action over electoral strategies. It favored armed struggle as a necessity in reaction to safer pression 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 bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that milia. Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may have recalled us covering in the past, anarchism persisted in mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and the Wents globally, and of course the coincide and fall of

the anarchists in Spain. According to all of us Zenkos sixty five years of Revolution, the FAU came about in a time when uriquires prosperity coming out of World War Two 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 one hundred and fifty thousand 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 labor movement.

So rather than having unions split along political ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right populists and so on, there'll be one big tent just focused on labor. 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 mobilize a large

number of people. But I think the difficulty in the drawback is it having so many affiliations under that big tent can mean it 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 or 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 nineteen sixty four. But even before that there was a split, not too much of us as after the Cuban Revolution. The FAU is 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 nineteen sixty three 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 and foreign policy. They saw that with all that happening right in their backyard, they need to take a very different approach if they wanted to win the Cold War. Such a zign coo actually describes how in nineteen sixty one JFK changed the approach of the now infamous school of the Americas from preparing for Soviet invasion to preparing

for anti communist counterinsurgency 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 nineteen sixty four, it was Brazil. In nineteen sixty eight, it was Peru, in nineteen seventy three was Chile, and Uruguay fell, and in nineteen seventy six

Argentina fell. So Zenko noted in jest. Over a decade, Uruguay and anarchists will becomes surrounded by right wing dictatorships which collaborated to round up and extillminate left wing dissidents of all flavors. Not to mention, the economic situation wasn't exactly getting better. According to Paul Sharky, between nineteen fifty five and nineteen fifty nine, the cost of living doubled

and wages did not keep peace. By nineteen sixty five, inflation was running at one hundred percent, by nineteen sixty seven at one hundred and forty percent. Madness.

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 robin hood food from the corporations to be able to the poor.

the left in the twentieth century in some ways. Or is it possible for us to go from our community defense and the defense committees like the six person groups that the CNT organized in Spain to a more egalitarian large formation, like a like a truly revolutionary army, And like the split that you're talking about is the split that almost every movement has.

that just as that 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 and all the different builders and all the different treatment of engaging in to ensure that the different parts of the house come together cohesively and seamlessly, that nobody's like stepping on anybody's tools, that everything is

being done in a proper time. And that is an instance where there will be coordination without necessarily having authority. It's just really a division of labor 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 all

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 out our task when we can come 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 the knowledge because warfare historically is one of the times that is the most ripe for authoritaria and 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 course and defense of the cause, you know what I'm saying.

They're probably the most famous for leaving the frontline to attack the cops because they felt like they didn't have enough weapons and that the cops had too many. And what they did was that they created a concept of the minimum necessary discipline, discipline being something that one has for oneself, not the hunting that comes from above. And 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.

authoritarian military. But the discipline is derived from solidarity, is derived from the responsibility people have for each other, the capable have for each other within their formation, and the responsible do they have for their own actions as being part of that formation, and for how their actions will affect those around them.

course down, and like when people do do that. Right, there are It doesn't mean there aren't disciplinary reactions, 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 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 or a suitable set

of repercussions would be. So then it reinforces the idea of like consensus and like discipline coming from oneself rather than from fear of punishment.

on a case by keys basis. You know 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 concert this action like a lot more flexibility is required because we understand that, you know, we don't have this matrix of crime that

authorities do. You know, we're dealing with calm. They deal with crime, right, and so in dealing with harm, we have to approach each of these situations in the context of their situations rather than in some sort of cold,

like distant calculation, you know. And I think in approaching it in that way, people are more willing I think, to fess up or to take accountability for their harm because they know that there's that relationship there that you're going to try to work through it that well, 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.

taking place in the labor movement. The FAU was dealing with the consequences of big tent organizing as they found that the Uruguayan Communist Party or PCU had pretty success, they claimed significant influence in the cnt SO. In response, according to Suzenko, 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 military's involvement in civilian life and also formed a daily people called Ipoka. Then the government was like, stop, don't do that, that's illegal.

And when the governments has stopped on that, that's a legal that means they put boots on the ground and you know, raided their offices. And so the people fell apart and the group's 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. You know, for a while they were big boys on campus in the CNT. But after the FAU kind of came to the forefront again and it was all its bravery and stuff, they kind of end

up falling back. And you see, the PCU had chosen to appease the military because they believed that a leftist faction within the rounds the army might support their bid for power, kind of like what happened in the Russian Revolution, and so you know, they really thought they were cooking something, but as it saying goes, the store was not even on.

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 combatitive tendency was focused on defending these workers' movements from those threats. According to Suzenko, the FAU held a secret congress and formed their own armed wing, the OPR thirty three, which, unlike other gorilla groups in the region, wasn't a top

down organization. Instead, individual cells had the freedom to decide how they carried out missions and which actions it took part in. The FAU still set the overall strategy, but it wasn't about becoming some kind of Vanguard. Some of the actions bad the way, according to Sharki, included bank robberies and factory owner kidnappings.

activities embolden their role in politics. And then, once they defeated the m l n T, with the FAU struggling to resist isolated by the PCU's in action, the military to on the opportunity to coop the government, leading to the rise of Juan Maria Porterberi, the first president of the civic military dictatorship in nineteen seventy three. In the aftermath, the FAU made the tough call to move the operations

to Argentina, which hadn't yet fallen to military distatorship. From there, they worked within the CNT to organize a massive fifteen 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 Sharky, between nineteen seventy one and nineteen seventy six, there was a thirty five percent fall in real wages, and by nineteen seventy nine inflation was running at eighty percent, with wages limping behind at forty five percent. So until nineteen seventy six, the FAU continued to work between Argentina and Uruguay, but after Argentina's

coup that was it. The coach is Zenko directly. During the US's Operation Condo, dictatorships across Latin America continued coordinated to kidnap, torture, and murder leftists across the continent. Between sixty eight thousand and eighty thousand leftists were killed and more than four hundred thousand were placed in political prisons.

End Court, 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 on mine kind of goes statistic. Yeah, 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, leaven like a keeping hole of knowledge, 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 cluingism, elders would be white out and with them all of their knowledge, all of their oral histories, all their languages, just wiped out in an instant.

in a sense recovering from. We kind of had to Sowy build back, but we still haven't ever reached in many places the height that aarchism's at at certain points in its history. It's certain parts of the wolf.

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 the 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 a whole of history from that perspective and see it very differently, but most historians don't exactly.

a pocket of resistance, isolating themselves. Same thing in Brazil we had Kilombo's, these settle ones that extracted themselves from the surround and oppressive structure and try to survive to the extent that they could.

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 like experiencing freedom in every moment, and they are liberated in their own lives as they continue to struggle to liberate territory in other people. That might be what success looks like, like that they are able to be self realized.

gene back in the bottle. You can't go from experience in freedom to a situation of unfreedom and then shruggishulers and think, oh that's all they could have a be after you've experienced or 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.

Some of the former anarchists involved in the FAU created the People's Victory Party or PvP in exile, which had attempted to reorganize resistance efforts but also fell into some

Leninist tendencies. But the main line, after you continue to focus on crassroots organizing, workers struggles and political education, it continues to be engaged in Latin Ercan anarchist networks, particularly with Brazilian and Argentine groups like the Ferrasau Anarchista Culture, the Ferrau Araquista KABOCLA, the Ferrachau Anarchista do Rio de Geraneiro, and the Argentine organization ALCA. Despite its past radicalism, the FU has shifted towards a broader approach integrating mass movements

while retaining its equipment to anti authoritarian socialism. Since then and up to today, the approach has aligned with the practice of especifismo, which it developed to rebuild their strength in Iraguai and put 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 a specifismo on this podcast before and on my channel, but to give a quick summary, a specifismo 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 praxie. The second is the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic political and organize and work.

And the food is active involvement in and shaping of autonomous and popular social movement, which is described as the process of social in social as, Pacifists reject the left unity idea of a synthesis organization of revolutionaries or even multiple currents of anarchists loosely united, because they feel it

boils down to the lowest common denominator politics. They feel that when this unity is preferred at any cost, it leaves little room for united action or develops political discussion if being described in a sense as an affinity group with the shared interest in the advancement of a very specific politic But they aren't just internally focused, you know. Specifismo is focused and build in popular power as a means of revolutionary transformation, rejecting both electoral and vang Goddess

Marxist approaches. So the especifies more distinguishes between specifically anarchist political organizations 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 especifismo, I suggests reading the discussion between Philippe Corea and Juan Carlos Micoso called the Strategy of Specifismo on the Anarchist Library, and they talk about how the fragmentation of the working class undernoliberalism has created some very distinct challenges that require fresh organizational strategies and less dog

batter critgity to simplistic class analysis. But they also speak for the need to coordinate and discipline and strategically engage anarchist groups within social movements, retaining the independence but engaging in their struggle. And they also end up in that interview discussed in the fause long term strategy as a process of resistance, rupture, and reconstruction. Resistance meaning that the

strengthening crassroots organizations, direct action and ideological development. Rupture meaning that they're breaking away from canast institutions through revolutionary action, and reconstruction meanings they 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 specifies more lately. I made that video many years ago, and my anarchist understanding has shifted a lot, especially recently. In going back and look at how I would have analyzed things previously, I think there's some different directions that I might take it and things in I think, for example, the idea of affidency groups engaging in social intution is extremely valuable in

shifting the conversation within you know, these mass movements. But I also think that there's a risk in the ways in which a SPECIFIESMO, if not properly understood or conceptualized, could end up opening ground for cooptation towards some rather unanarchist outcomes. You know what I mean by that is, I think it's important one discussing a SPECIFIESMO to be very careful against the interpretation of it as some kind of vanguard as strategy, or way to dictate a vision

of anarchy. I think that even if somebody is taken the pacifist approach in creating an effinency group organized 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 is the sort of motivation between Malichesta's idea of

synthesis and the Synthesis Federation in anarchist history. I'm still it in a bit about that, but anyway, I'd love to hear about you know what they are for you and an anarchists you require up to here. Now you know they can feel free to reach out to me. I have website now adressage dot org, and I wish them or 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.