start

Pumpkin Seeds, chapter 4

Offramp making farewell to the motorway. A clear path free of potholes and speedbumps. Cumbia rattling glass in the university parking lot. Paco put the money in the wallet. Raced down the hallways. Entered the classroom sweating and sat himself down next to Meche.
“According to Bakhtin, in the monological novel” – the professor did not acknowledge him – “all of the arguments, characters, and situations in the narrative are deployed either to affirm or negate a thesis. The writer who put an end to this type of novel is Dostoyevsky.”
He looked at the diagrams drawn on the chalkboard and in the notebook of his classmate, made a few notes, and then left the room. Chato and Raquel were chatting with a few people at the end of the hall. Should he go over or wave from a distance? The bathroom was empty. He aimed his stream at the disintegrating piece of soap at the bottom of the urinal.
What a shit class. First the heroes and villains thing, like something out of a videogame, and now this shit about monologic. When were they going to get to read some actual literature? It bothered him that they spent entire hours talking about essays that talked about novels. The theorists had constructed entire edifices of knowledge based on the fictional stories of other people. And these were far less clear and far less agreeable than the fiction itself. The books they were dealing with in class seemed to have this need to build endless labyrinths around the essential thing. Paco didn’t stop to look in the mirror or wash his hands after pissing. He walked straight over to them.
“I don’t get this fixation the Russians have with literary theory,” he said, after greeting the group. “Now we’re looking at yet another one.”
“Ah,” Chato said, scratching his head, “yeah I have no idea.”
“We don’t have to bother with that,” interjected Raquel. “We’re doing scriptwriting for radio.”
“Sounds better. I’d rather read novels than go to classes.”
“Then do it…”
“I don’t have the time. I’ve got two jobs and a shitload of things to study.”
“That’s heavy. I have to walk my dog,” Raquel smiled. “That’s my only job.”
“Do you know the corner park?”
“No.”
“We should go. It’s close to our houses and you could bring your dog.”
“Cool.”
“No can do for me, bro,” said Chato. “I have to take my little brother to Muay Thai in the afternoon. If I don’t, I don’t get to borrow the car.”
“Shit… Well - me and you could go for a bit?” Paco asked Raquel.
“Let’s.”
“See you there at 5?”
“Sounds good.”
“Alright I’ve gotta get back to class.”
“Go on – if anything comes up, I’ve got your number.”
“Get a move on, bro.”
Meche was taking notes. Grinning, she turned her notebook towards him. The professor opened Crime and Punishment and wrote something on the chalkboard. Where to even begin? Paco copied a few words and heard laughter from the hallway.
“In the next class, we’ll be looking at centrifugal and centripetal forces in the narrative.”
“We’re going back to Lukács?”
“It’s what we were looking at in today’s class. But on top of arriving late, you had left the room.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, you’ll have to make copies from Meche, Paco. Because I’m not going to repeat what we’ve been doing. If you keep missing out, you’re going to fail.”
“I’ll make copies, prof. I’m sorry – I had to work.”
“Not my fault,” he said on his way out the door.
Meche went out after him. Paco put his things in a bag, hung it over his shoulder, and then turned off the air conditioning. He walked out toward the parking lot, practically dragging his feet. A security guard was standing with his arms crossed at the entrance. Palm trees arching from the weight of their bunches of coconuts. He lowered the volume on the car stereo.
Yo sé que nunca besaré tu boca,
tu boca de púrpura encendida.
What a drag having to ask for copies from Meche. He hadn’t even read the last ones. She at least had managed to find a copy of the book. He circled the roundabout and arrived back at home. The dog was chewing at the cone around his neck and came over to sniff at Paco’s feet when he got out of the truck.
“Ma – Balam is trying to get his cone off.”
“He’s already chewed it off twice.”
“I hope he doesn’t open the stitches.”
“I’m getting tired of being the one to have to care for him. For a moment there I was going to tell you to take him to Mocochá and leave him with Camello.”
“Well yeah… but that would be sad. He’d be more lonely out there.”
“You think so? Who knows what your dad would have done…”
“The dog meant nothing to him. He would’ve left him in the woods and told the horsemen to toss him scraps of food.”
“It was that kind of thing I never liked about him. But these days I’ve been missing him…”
“I know what you mean, Ma.”
“But I’m fine,” Teté said, drying her eyes. “I’m fine. I’ve been spending time with your aunts. The other day I won 500 pesos playing cards.”
“That’s great, Ma. Dad never played around with money like that.”
“Not him, no. He was a tightwad.”
Teté went into the kitchen and Paco went up to his room. His bed was perfectly made. He turned on the air conditioning, threw himself on the bed, and took the pages out of his backpack. Zola’s descriptions of horseraces constitute a splendid example of his literary virtuosity. He read the parts that were underlined. Tolstoy doesn’t describe a “thing,” but rather narrates the destinies of individuals. He closed his eyes.

Paco sat down on a bench. A ways off from the main avenue, the park consisted of an oxidized seesaw, some monkey bars, and a handful of plants. Two fuzzy caterpillars ambled by together, bending themselves like straws. He wondered if they were having sex, or if writhing was just their way of inhabiting the world. Raquel arrived, being pulled by a Labrador, dressed in all black and wearing shorts.
“Meet Chili.”
“Hello there!” he said, petting the dog.
“I almost never let him off the leash – he’s too big. But I love him.”
The dog rubbed his head on Paco’s fingers.
“And what’s up with you?” Raquel asked. “Do you have any pets?”
“Yeah I have a dog. His name’s Balam. He got bit by a rattlesnake recently. He lives with me and my mom and our maid, Lisi.”
“The truck.”
“Ah – because it’s fucking huge, and I don’t know. It brings back memories.”
“That’s why I like riding with Chato. Whenever I go alone I crank up the music.”
“Ah yeah. I loved what you were playing in there the other day.”
“Thanks. I feel like I’m a bit of a music-addict.”
“And what happens when there’s silence?”
“I get bored, or a little sad. Depending on the moment.”
“Ah yeah – I get you. I wish I had more time to read. That’s what helps me get outside myself. The shitty thing is that I’m sick of all the theory we have to read in school. I don’t have the time or the motivation to read it. I’m afraid I’m gonna burn out. How do you do it?”
“Well, the first midterms are coming up, and I won’t be able to take half of them due to all the classes I’ve missed.”
“Damn – that’s harsh.”
“Yeah, but there’s no worries. My dad’s the one who pays the tuition, and never in my life has he scolded me.”
“And they don’t give you any shit about the activism – the picketing and all that?”
“No. My parents don’t have a clue, and neither do the professors. And the other kids in my program don’t give a shit about anything except partying. They’re always coming to class totally hungover, smelling awful.”
“Ah, well – they would hate me in your program.”
“Why – you smell bad?” Blushing, Raquel took Chili’s paw in her hand. “I feel like you’d get on well with them, given the things you read and all that. Anyways, I think it’s cool that you’re kind of a nerd.”
“No – it’s that I almost never go out to parties or anything. Truth is, I don’t drink.”
“I live with my mom, too. We get along well. She’s an anthropologist. Or rather, a historian. Or both of those,” she laughed. “I don’t know, really. But she writes and reads a lot.”
“Damn – lucky. The only book in my house is the Bible.”
“Well, maybe. Intelligent people can be difficult. Wait – how’d he get bit by a snake?”
“My house has this huge patio. When my dad was alive, he made sure everything was kept in order. He even had a shotgun. He’d kill foxes and snakes. He was a country guy – he was into that kind of thing. But I never knew where he hid it.”
“But did the snake just come into your house? Just like that, as if it were nothing?”
“I don’t know. The maid found Balam half dead and they took him to the vet. And there they found out it was a snake.”
“Damn – poor little guy.” She hugged Chili. “I’m totally afraid of snakes. I hope there’s none in my patio.”
“My dad would shoot ‘em with the gun. But usually he was out in the country, in Mocochá, not here in Mérida. I’ve never heard of a snake appearing in a patio and biting a dog.”
“Me neither.”
“That’s why I’m freaked out. Hey – did you ride back with Chato today?”
“Yeah. We’re supposed to take turns driving each week, but we almost always take my car because his mom is using his.”
“Today I had to drive in the truck. I hate that thing.”
“What I do is I always make Chato drive. I can’t be bothered.”
“No shit.”
“Why do you hate it?”
“What?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow – I’ve never known a teetotaler before. What do you do when you go out?”
“Dance, chat…I don’t know. Normal things.”
“Weird. That’s really cool.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Drunks annoy me. Always saying stupid shit.”
“That’s true.”
“Well, I’m glad you got to meet Chili. But I’ve got to go walk him now. He hasn’t shit yet.”
“Want me to come with you?”
Raquel leaned backwards to counteract the weight of the dog pulling on the leash, and Paco looked at her for a second. Should he offer to help? He kept silent. Didn’t want to come on too strong. They went out through the back of the park, the streets full of color. He couldn’t remember ever having walked this way and didn’t realize the facades of the houses shined so brilliantly.
“Hey – I have a few cats up for adoption if you’re interested or know anyone who might be.”
“No cats allowed in my house unfortunately. But I’ll let you know.”
“Damn. Chato can’t take them either.”
He felt a sharp pain within. He wanted to ask if Chato was her boyfriend, or if she wanted to get back together with Roi, or why she agreed to go on this outing to the park with him. Raquel stopped walking, and Paco wanted to silence his doubts with a kiss. His heart beat faster and faster and he couldn’t stop looking at her lips. She took out a key and opened the door.
“Hey – you want to go to a show?”
“Totally. Where is it?”
“In the city center. I’ll send you the flyer.”
“Sounds good. Let me know.”
She gave him a farewell kiss on the cheek.
Snaking vegetation, incomprehensible graffiti, skinny dogs, speedbumps without warnings, curiously shaped potholes. Everything was full of life. As if the whole neighborhood of Chuburná were suddenly coming into being. He felt like taking off running, climbing onto a roof, and throwing himself to the wind. The energy was overflowing. The blood in his veins, each and every muscle in his body, were bidding him to break something. Whatever that might be.
“Are you going to bring the truck in, son?” Teté was watering the garden and Balam was drinking water from the hose.
“What?”
“You left your Dad’s truck outside.”
“Ah yeah – I’ll bring it in right now,” he said, picking the cone up from the yard.

Translator. A. M. Burt (andmaxb@pm.me)
Author: Alf Bojórquez
Original Work: 4th chapter of Pepitas de Calabaza (2023), a novel published in Spanish by Editorial Fondo Blanco, Mexico City

A young man was drinking and playing cards with his friends at the Artillery Academy of St. Petersburg. After three years of revelry, he was expelled and transferred to Minsk, where he became an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard. The expulsion failed to chasten him – instead, comradeship became his only refuge in the world. He was never a believer in political parties. On the way to the cities, workers, women, and children roamed beneath a scorched sky. In their suitcases they carried plants, spices, and cookbooks. They were traversing a century in which the smoke of industry was just beginning to blanket the world.
I was born two centuries later, near the Caribbean Sea, in a house where the scent of marijuana mixed with the sound of Led Zeppelin playing at full blast. I was raised on cold sandwiches and Cheerios which I never allowed to go soft – as soon as the milk hit the bowl I would shovel them into my mouth. The rest of the family funds went to Coca-Cola, beer, and cocaine. The few times my father would come around the house he’d be doing lines in the bathroom. He never did it in front of the kids. He was a well-mannered hippie.
Perhaps, as the young Russian played cards with his friends in the Imperial Guard, laughing until they were crying, he felt more accepted than he had among his own family. He wrote to his parents that “man is made for society. A circle of friends and relations who understand him and share with him his joys and his pain is indispensable.” Little by little, the Russian transformed into a thick-mustached man carrying books by Hegel under his arm. He arrived in Paris with a thick head of hair looking like a nest. In his suitcase he carried articles which declaimed that “the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” They had been published in newspapers under the pseudonym Jules Elysard. These ideas had forced him to flee first from Russia and then from Switzerland. His circle of close friends knew that in reality his name was Mikhail Bakunin.
Every epoch sees important changes in its mediums of communication. In the Russian’s century, newspapers overtook books. In mine we jumped from television to the internet. Paper to paper. Screen to screen. Large to small. Both lit-up boxes were emitting a white noise in the midst of the hundreds of moldy newspaper clippings pasted to the walls of my father’s room when, as a teenager, I went in to let him know I’d be going out to a gig after going skating. In the hardcore punk scene, I ended up coming across zines which contained the first traces of an archive I’ve spent the past 20 years studying and living.
Victoire Léodile Bera, better known as André Léo, was born in a town in the north of France in 1824. She had eight siblings and three mothers. Her grandfather was a bricklayer and an orator who defended the rural poor and fought for education. Léo got married and left town at the age of 27. The same age at which Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, both from drugs. Un Mariage Scandaleux, one of her novels, begins:
Beneath a cloudless sky extends a vast plain... Although it is seeded with flowers and trees and covered in a large mane of brush, from afar it appears uninhabited. But a closer look reveals, around the corner from an elm grove, the roof of a small farmhouse, with its reddish fields and its meadows, whose green splendor stands out against the dismal background of the landscape. It is one of the most fertile zones in France, in Poitou, which encompasses vast uncultivated lands, filled with a very particular poetic beauty - but which saddens us in regard to the wellbeing of the population.
Léo had a feel for country life. Beautiful landscapes and miserable conditions. Her novels describe the violence exercised against women and the rural poor. Although the worst was far from her town, there were people in the vicinity who were dying of hunger. She would not turn a blind eye to all this. From a young age she took up the pen in defense of the idea that “what brings true happiness is the triumph of love.”
Nearly a century later, Ursula K. LeGuin published The Dispossessed, a novel about a capitalist planet called Urras and its anarchist moon Anarres. The division between the two worlds is rooted in a revolution which took place 200 years prior to the events in the novel. Shevek, the protagonist, is a thinker who is working on developing a device to enable telepathy. Toward the end, he travels to Urras to collaborate with other scientists. The story deals with the paradoxes of an anarchist from a poor planet encountering a world of privilege. The bourgeois world of academia in which he finds himself presents him with issues and questions which he had not previously considered. At one point, a woman expresses to him the same idea that André Léo had – that happiness is rooted in love. But Shevek holds an opposing notion – that pain is the basis of our existence.
After reading LeGuin, I discovered that the binary of man/woman, the binary of gender, far from being justified by any biological notion, is socially constructed in order to maintain patriarchy. And that this idea, through fiction and thought, touches on the question of the meaning of our existence, be it love or pain. To gain recognition in this system, some must demonstrate weakness and others strength. Patriarchal heroism can only exist in these conditions.
As he recounts in Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Peter Kropotkin was born in a palace surrounded by “tranquil streets, well-removed from the hustle and bustle of Moscow.” In his autobiography he relates that the first few years of his life transpired in a warm and loving environment. Kropotkin recalls that at the age of three, our mother died of consumption. She was only 35. Before leaving us forever, she had wanted us kids by her side, to caress us, to share with us a moment of joy; and she prepared a little party for us at her bedside, from which at that point she was no longer able to raise herself. I remember her pale and sharpened face and her large, darkened eyes – she looked at us with affection and invited us to join her on the bed; suddenly she burst into tears and began coughing, and we were told we had to leave.
One of Kropotkin’s first memories was of his mother’s death. His childhood was “filled with her memory.” He described her as a loving woman – which was precisely the attitude that he would develop as he grew up. “She did everything she possibly could for us.” Kropotkin saw his mother as having an “artistic temperament.” In the portrait he creates of her at the age of 3, one can already see the endearment which would make him a tender thinker – one who values affection and love for the other, even in moments of hardship.
Kropotkin perceived the spirit of his mother in the domestic workers of his home. “We were her children – we looked like her – and the workers would at times show their affection for us in a most delicate and expressive manner.” Despite the grief, among the workers he found a “nurturing environment” which would later show itself in every word he wrote and every action he took. Kropotkin was sensitive to the feel of the proletariat and of the world. This made him a sentimental communist. For this reason, despite the fact that he was one of the most acclaimed militants of the 19th century, he is one of the least-read today. Western anarchists were read and translated throughout the world beginning in the middle of the 1800’s, but this trend declined between WWI and the fall of the Soviet bloc as the majority of communists sought to construct a classless society by means of the state. Efforts which failed completely, though some of today’s progressives seem to have forgotten.
Despite his origins in the elite classes of society, Kropotkin was as sensitive as he was intelligent. Love and pain were his primary inheritance – the first two phantasms that haunted his life. He was in his late teenage years when André Léo published Une Vieille Fille (1859) and Un Mariage Scandaleux (1862). Like Léo, Kropotkin was also a lover of literature. He was as much a poet as he was a scientist – as much an artist as he was a thinker. For this reason, after reading Voltaire and Marcus Aurelius he would write:

The infinite immensity of the universe, the greatness of nature – its poetry, its life – which manifest all around us, increasingly impress me; and this incessant and harmonious life produces in me an ecstasy of admiration which youth holds dear, while my favorite poets offer me a mode of expressing in words this nascent love for humanity and faith in its progress, and how important a role it plays in the springtime of one’s life, accompanying man as he endures it.

Kropotkin and Léo were enamored with landscapes. It was there where one could encounter “poetic beauty” – the force of life and love. They did not believe, like Shevek, that the basis of our existence is pain. Far from being focused on antagonism, Kropotkin felt a passion for life, despite the fact that from a young age his life story was marked by loss. The absence of his mother made him appreciate the affection of those who worked for him. He discovered something expansive in life and in the world, something unceasing. He perceived a creative unfolding surging outward spontaneously – an involuntary beauty.

Eliseé Reclus, like André, was born in the provinces of France. He was one of 14 children of a Protestant minister who instilled them with a fear of God. Several of his brothers ended up working in the social sciences, politics, and other intellectual fields. Eliseé first read Fourier and Proudhon in his adolescence. He began his university studies in a religious institution, and later ended up at the University of Berlin, where he fell in love with geography. He came to reject the sophisticated world of European elites and preferred the company of working-class people.
William Morris was the third child of an accountant and a woman from a wealthy family from Worcester. And so, after being baptized as a protestant, Morris grew up in a mansion outside of London, reading books and riding ponies through the forest. He enjoyed fishing and gardening, and little by little he began developing an interest in old churches and their architecture. Bakunin and Léo were also sensitive to poetic beauty, to the sadness of the world of agriculture, to the trees and animals and plants which were being scorched by the expansion of industry. Bakunin got to know Karl Marx in Paris:
We were rather friendly… I didn’t know anything about political economy, and I still hadn’t freed myself metaphysical abstractions and my socialism was merely instinctive. He, although younger, was already an atheist, a wise materialist, and a conscious socialist… We saw each other frequently because I respected him a lot for his wisdom and for his passionate and serious devotion – although mixed with personal vanities – for the proletarian cause. And I avidly sought out his conversation – always instructive and spiritual when not inspired by a mean-spirited hatred, which, sadly, happened all too frequently. Nevertheless, there was no true intimacy between us. Our temperaments didn’t allow it. He called me a sentimental idealist – and he was right. I called him vain and treacherous – which was also true.
Marx taught the Russian about the material conditions of the world. He demolished the way of thinking that “begins with God presented as a divine person, idea, or substance.” The point of departure was physical existence – our specific material conditions and the places where free will is lacking. Precisely because of our being bound by our conditions, there arose the need to liberate ourselves from the poverty generated by industry as the people left the countryside and the provincial towns to become workers in the cities. The Russian came to understand the world of labor with Marx, but failed in his desire to become close friends. Later, Bakunin would become close with a Frenchman, six years his senior, who wore tiny round glasses and also wanted to see the world go up in flames. The Frenchman realized that the machines were accelerating and enslaving the world in a way that nobody had imagined. For him, all property was theft. The land should be a common good – a space for all. His name was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His objective was to articulate the ethic of the artisan and the workshop against the injustices of the factories. There was something of value in the old forms of production that capitalist industry was displacing. An artisanal and communitarian way of living and creating, influenced by the medieval guilds, that could still be saved from the invasion of the machines.
Proudhon asked Marx for help in selling the translation of his second book, The System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty. But instead of helping him, Marx wrote pages upon pages criticizing the text. He then compiled these into a book which he published as The Poverty of Philosophy, in which he argues that thought should be a tool for transforming society and that “wanting to conceive of property as an independent relation, as a category apart, and as an abstract and eternal idea is nothing more than a metaphysical or juridical illusion.” Marx surpassed Proudhon with his conception of private property as “the final and most complete expression of the mode of production and the appropriation of what is produced with a basis in class antagonism, in the exploitation of some by others.” Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx raised their voices and wrote dozens of pages in response to every little error made by the others, as if friends were the enemy rather than capitalism. With The German Ideology, Marx and Engels buried Max Stirner – a thinker who promoted a vitalist individualism based in dialectics. This whole atmosphere of combative verbosity between companions hearkened back to Bakunin’s military days – men raising their voices in never-ending discussions to see who could best demonstrate their intellectual prowess.
Proudhon asked himself: “why not make use of things as they are in order to bring about change?” He thought that the tools of oppression could also be used for liberation. For this reason he wanted to create a national bank based on the principles of mutual association. The trade unions and syndicates, he argued, could come together to achieve it without intervention from the State. He hoped that businesses administered by the workers themselves would manage to replace capitalism. The only thing missing was the will to make it happen. But the 27,000 workers who signed up to be a part of the bank weren’t able to provide enough. The project went bankrupt and Proudhon was sentenced to prison. He nearly escaped, but an informer revealed his plans. He wrote Confessions of a Revolutionary and The General Idea of Revolution in the 19th Century while behind bars. In the former he rejects the anti-capitalist current which seeks to organize society by means of the State and instead proposes a socialism by and for the workers. Like Bakunin and Marx, Proudhon put his faith in society rather than the individual. According to Carlos Illades, “in 1850 Rhodakanaty visited Paris to meet Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in person.” Rhodakanaty was a Greek doctor who ended up falling in love with the Mexican countryside.
Eugene Sue was a novelist who achieved fame with The Mysteries of Paris, which tells the story of Rodolfo, a duke who absorbs the language of the street, learns to fight, and is able to pass as a worker. The aristocratic class-traitor represented by Rodolfo and the above-mentioned militants is an archetype and an experience found throughout history and the anti-capitalist imaginary up to the present day. A texture that gives form to anarchist ideas and practice: he who opts for this descent because he has the choice to transcend. The bravery of Rodolfo and the classical anarchists tends to obscure the conditions which enabled them to choose to live a life of adventure – and similarly today there are very few people who are able to choose such a dangerous way of life. It seems to me that those who put themselves at risk in this day and age do so mostly against their will. While certain elites seek out risk, the common people often seek the opposite: protection, refuge, rootedness, permanence. And thus it is all the easier for heroism to distinguish itself.
Proudhon supported Sue in his election bid to the Legislative Assembly of Paris, encouraging people to vote for the novelist in 1850. From the start, many anarchists have hated the State while continuing to go to the polls and in some cases even working for the government. Bakunin was not one of them. He went out to parties, talking music and politics ‘til dawn with Richard Wagner, the composer-in-residence at the court in Dresden (who was also meanwhile publishing incendiary articles in the Volksblätter), until Bakunin was arrested for participating in the uprising of 1849 where some 200 people died and more than 1,000 were arrested. Bakunin was tracked down and imprisoned in Germany, Russia, and Austria before finally being sent to Siberia.
Proudhon understood the novels of Andre Leo, and he began to turn his attention to the countryside. His position began to lean toward federalism, while Marx was opposed to anyone who didn’t agree on the need for centralization. Two opposing positions which were the source of endless debate in those days. Leo, Bakunin, and Kropotkin had to sharpen their arguments to face off against Marx and avoid the onslaught of criticism which had flattened Proudhon and Stirner. Bakunin escaped from prison in Siberia and discovered that the communist scene was changing. Kropotkin ended up in Siberia the following year and would remain there for another five.
The years I spent in Siberia taught me many things that would have been difficult to learn elsewhere: I quickly became convinced of the absolute impossibility of doing anything truly useful for the masses by means of the administrative machine – such an illusion was lost to me forever. I was then able to begin to understand not only man and his character, but also the internal motivation of the life of human societies. The constructive work of the anonymous mass, rarely mentioned in books, and its importance in the growth of the forms of society appeared clearly before my eyes.
Siberia taught Kropotkin the power of self-management. The southeast of Mexico – before being colonized by tourism – shared a similarity with 19th century Siberia: distance from the capital. Such separation from the administrative center of the country made it the cradle of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901) and the Zapatista uprising of 1994. In Mexico and in Russia, places where the State doesn’t reach – or reaches only a little – tend to be breeding grounds for autonomous organization, as Kropotkin noted. The good thing about centralism is that it produces its own shadows and nooks, its own margins – places from which it has always been possible to fight back.
Kropotkin read Proudhon for the first time in Siberia. When Kropotkin mentions the creative genius – the “constructive work” – which surges up spontaneously in society, I think of an Argentine novelist who invented and patented a variety of stockings reinforced with rubber: Roberto Arlt. This creative genius was embodied in Arlt and his work. Decades after Kropotkin’s stay in Siberia, Arlt wrote about a neighborhood character who fails as a bookseller, as a thief, and as a mechanic: Silvio Astier of Mad Toy (1926). At the end of the novel, Silvio says to an engineer:
– No… I already know what you think… but listen to me: I’m not crazy. There is a truth, yes… and it’s that I feel that life is going to be extraordinarily beautiful for me. I don’t know if everyone else will feel this life-force like I do, but within me there is a great joy, a kind of impulsiveness filled with joy
A sudden lucidity enabled me to see the motives behind my past actions, and I went on:
– I am not evil, I am just curious about this enormous force inside me-
And then I shut up.
– Go on, go on…
– Everything surprises me. Sometimes I get the feeling that I just showed up on Earth an hour ago and everything is beautiful and shiny and new. And then I’ll go and embrace a stranger in the street, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to ask: why are you all walking around looking so sad all the time? When life is so beautiful… Don’t you think?
– Sure…
– And knowing that life is beautiful makes me happy, it’s like everything is covered in flowers… it makes me feel like getting down on my knees and giving thanks to God, for having created us.
– You believe in God?
– I believe that God is the joy of living. If only you knew! Sometimes I feel like my soul is as big as the Flores Church… and I feel like laughing and running out into the street and giving everyone a friendly slap on the shoulder…
– Go on…
– I’m not boring you?
– No, go on.
– The thing is, you can’t just talk about this kind of thing with people. They’ll think you’re crazy. And I say to myself: what do I do with all this life within me? And I wish I could give it away, gift it… get close to people and say to them: You have to be joyful! Don’t you know? You have to play...pretend to be pirates...make cities of marble...laugh at yourself...throw firecrackers.

Silvio Astier articulated the thing that Kropotkin came to understand in Siberia: joy. The uncontrollable urge to live and create, to make things happen with whatever is at hand. Silvio, who also grew up in an emotionally challenging environment, was expressing something of the same thing that Kropotkin felt after reading Marcus Aurelius – the same “infinite immensity of the universe, the vastness of nature, its poetry, its spirit, which manifest all around us” which pulls at the heartstrings of the Argentine character. Kropotkin and Silvio, despite their pain and limitations, embody an impulse which I have encountered in all the people who have ever asked to borrow a musical instrument to play or a skateboard to ride: an intentionality and a way of being which enable one to overcome their circumstances. What I have seen and lived in the streets is the opposite of the aristocratic hero figure: the plebe who, like Silvio, finds a way to be happy, to get what is denied him – even if this means lying, stealing, or breaking the law. Common people tend to worry more about what to do with what we already have, and about resolving urgent problems creatively, rather than taking unnecessary risks or sitting around arguing endlessly. It’s almost as if Roberto Arlt were paraphrasing Proudhon:

We begin by satisfying the thirst for life, liberty, and happiness which we’ve never been able to quench. And once everyone has partaken in this joy, we get down to the task at hand: demolishing the last vestiges of the bourgeois regime and all its morality based in balance sheets and its philosophy of credit and debt, its institutions of yours and mine. And in destroying we shall create.

Silvio Aster, Arlt’s character, expresses the same thirst for life we find in Proudhon. A great inner force which pushes one forward with irrational impulse. In order to build, we must demolish. In order to create, we must destroy. Happiness, for Proudhon, is the opposite of accounting. Life and its shades of meaning are not quantifiable. There is a sadness to quantifying – having one foot in the grave of private property, of exploitation. For Proudhon, only through abolishing private property can we create a new world. For Silvio Aster, stealing is a dignified job, a joyful path.
The joy that ties all the aforementioned together is anchored in a destructive project. And the targets of this destructive urge are clear: objectification and boredom. That is, the capitalist form of life. The joyful form of life that I discovered in these novels and essays represents, for me, the polar opposite of the predominant tendency toward guilt – this feeling that we are somehow bad, this false illusion which tells us that if we want to try to overcome adversity we must not break any rules or make any mistakes; let alone laugh and dance and have a good time.
During the years that Kropotkin spent in Russia, he began to “appreciate the difference between serving under a principle of authority and discipline versus securing validation by mutual agreement.” When one is at the head of an expedition to collate maps, in charge of large groups of people, one realizes that “the job has to be done, especially in Russia, not in a military fashion, but rather in a sort of communal mode, by means of general accord.” This mode has always existed here in the Americas. Today this communalism lives on in many pueblos and barrios. But colonialism – that structure which seeks to pit people against each other – makes it difficult to maintain and expand the collective.
Siberia showed Kropotkin that the pyramidal organization of societies was based in a lack of experience in the “school of real life.” Only those who haven’t really lived would dare to develop norms based in authority and the State. Discipline, for Kropotkin, is opposed to the “joy of living” – of doing things together and therefore expanding our capabilities. Only in communality is it possible to have a soul as grand as Silvio Aster’s. Learning to organize oneself and ceasing to center the State were two sides of the same coin for Kropotkin. The laughter in each expedition and the lines on each map arose from self-management. Not from judgments, orders, or scolding. The “joy of living” was a direct consequence of the “school of real life” – of doing things without having a strict plan, of acting before speaking, of not being afraid to improvise or make mistakes, of learning to live with uncertainty, of learning how to live in the moment without falling into the dystopic and apocalyptic despair that tends to paralyze us.
Poorly translated, summarized, and recompiled, these ideas circulated in zines which were passed around from hand to hand in the Yucatecan punk shows of my youth. They were insolent photocopies interspersed with newspaper clippings touched up with a marker to humiliate local politicians. The punks who introduced me to all this also believed that we should take up the tools at hand in order to change the world. They had received a message handed down from the Marxists of the 20th century to the anarchists of the 21st. The punks organized themselves, took over a house in a poor part of Merida, and started printing their own publications. In the period after the fall of the Soviet Union, the punk movement was doing things very similar to what anarchists were doing before the First World War. The punks didn’t own the house – but ownership be damned. All property is theft anyway. They threw raves and shows, they put their ideas into writing, and they didn’t pay a cent in rent or electricity. In 2005 they showed up at the central plaza in Merida for a rally in support of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle. They sold pamphlets and zines alongside discs by Spanish-language punk bands like Eskorbuto, Parálisis Permanente, and Cicatriz. Zapatismo, punk, and anarchism. It all went together. Nevertheless, the punks had somewhat of a tense relationship with the Zapatistas. They didn’t dress the same and they didn’t look the same. But both the punk shows and the demonstrations were a glimpse of radical culture in an otherwise thoroughly conservative city. And as such, no one thought to exclude anyone else over a difference in style or opinion. Bands of various genres played and people read aloud from their zines. Chiapas and the Yucatan Peninsula came together around music and forgotten ideas from Russia.
Leo married an editor of liberal newspapers who came from a rural family. They moved to Paris, where her novels were rejected by a number of publishers. Her characters came off as too obvious – like cardboard cutouts unable to stretch their legs. Perhaps she had moved to the city in order to be able to express ideas that would have been difficult to put forward in the provinces, but she found that the elites of the capital were nearly as stiff as those in the country. And so she published Un Mariage Scandaleux herself. It received good reviews, and she soon became part of the Parisian literary scene, writing one novel after another. The majority of her stories are written in defense of love and the rural way of life and against arranged marriages and a bourgeois morality focused on money and fame. Her books are written in plain language and tend to have happy endings. Her husband died in 1863. They had two children: Andre and Leo. She continued writing and publishing, denouncing the injustices being perpetrated in the countryside. In an article for La Cooperation, she wrote in defense of workers’ associations. For Leo, it was not about “simply creating a new apparatus – it’s about establishing a new order of human relations.” The emphasis on the ties that bond would have pleased Bakunin, who was still supported by – and supportive of – his circle of friends. Leo believed that society would never be able to escape its misery without strong interpersonal bonds. She was sensitive to arguments – she took them seriously. And from this she deduced that the rigidness of certain militants would bring disaster for radical groups. “A rebellious self-love will suffice for the hatred of tyranny, but being equitable toward others requires a spirit of justice and sacrificing the ego.” Leo herself exemplified this. She had the sufficient self-love to continue writing in the face of rejection. She believed in her own words over those of the critics.
A few decades earlier, Mary Shelley had managed to get published. She wrote a novel about a strange creature that defies God: Frankenstein. The creature, like Shelley (and like many punks), was a vegetarian. He was a being with an imposing and aggressive appearance who actually tended to be quite friendly (again, like many punks). Frankenstein was created by a scientist who questioned the limits of morality, knowledge, and science. The reader is made aware of the drama of his creation via a series of letters that a sailor sends to his sister. The narrator is telling someone elses story. Leo and Shelley dedicated their lives to exploring the lives of others through fiction. They absorbed the problems that surrounded them and relieved their own anguish and that of their readers through exercising the imagination.
Leo believed that in order to hate the system one must cultivate a self-love that goes beyond the personal. Self-love is expansive and collective. In fact, it is the end of egotism. It is a communal love with a particular direction: beginning in the individual and from there extending outward to others. Leo did not consider liberation to be a calculated thing. “The people need expansion, joy, movement, and spectacle – something to satisfy the instinctive search for beauty… we need celebrations.” The people need to live and to dance.
According to Yasnaya Aguilar, “celebration greases the machinery of organization with collective pleasure. The organization that can effectively confront and struggle against exhausting problems is the one that knows how to unwind with parties, fun, and joy. Pleasure and joy are fundamental for maintaining an organization.” Andre Leo, William Morris, Roberto Arlt, and many other writers of the past would have agreed with her. The necessity and the desire to have a good time in the here and now is one of the pillars of resistance. Aguilar also points out that the bonds and affinities we already have can help us to resist. Although we are always running the risk of falling into the traps set by the powers that be in order to control and anesthetize us, any strategy in opposition to oppression is capable of producing collective joy. Struggle and pleasure, love and hate, are two sides of the same coin.
My parents divorced before I was born. Both sides of the family criticized my mother for having insisted on having two more kids with my father even after the incident where he set all his clothes on fire after coming home wasted from a concert one night. And so the only money my grandparents would give to the family was to go straight to food and school supplies, out of fear that otherwise it would get spent on cocaine. The punishment of my parents affected my siblings and I as well. We weren’t invited to holidays or trips or other family gatherings because we had been born out of wedlock. We were bastards – the kids of a couple of bohemians punished for living too freely.
I tried to make myself likable with the only things I had: my voice and my sense of humor. And that’s how I managed to get the things I coveted. I learned to ingratiate myself with jokes to get a spot at the big table, to get a little more to eat, to be able to go on vacations in other people’s cars and houses, to procure what had been denied to me- although sometimes these things were given only grudgingly. I didn’t grow up in a house filled with books. But I would borrow them, and almost always return them. Being the child of a single mother raising three kids, with no car and no money, in a Caribbean city where it’s over 100˚F every day of the year, made it so that I missed school constantly and was expelled again and again. I passed through many different schools, moved a lot, fought and shouted a lot. Everything in my childhood was rough and brief, like a punk song.
The Yucatan I grew up in was a place of celebrations. Every town and every neighborhood had a festival for its respective patron saint, with week-long celebrations including bull running, fireworks, dances, feasts, sweets, and carnival rides. In the days after, when my mom would send me out to buy tortillas, I’d see people passed out in the streets, some of them half-naked or wearing clothes soiled with piss and vomit. I grew up with plenty of awareness of the limits of pleasure.
When I was a child, I was envious of those who had the money to attend various celebrations throughout the year – both in the towns and in the city. The world of the private school elites had its own style of celebrating, with quinceañeras, baptisms, weddings, dances in the countryside and plenty of hypocrisy. If the rich people of Merida weren’t so racist, they’d let themselves get down with the workers at the rural trade association parties and spend the year traveling among the Mayan towns, such that they’d never have to return home to see all the city-dwellers filled with bitterness due to the lack of resources – tired and stressed, waiting around for up to an hour for a rusted-out old bus to come along and carry them across the city. I was envious of people like Morris, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Reclús, Rodolfo, and all the rest. I was jealous that they had been able to choose the path of heroic suffering, because if I were in their place I wouldn’t have done it. I would have chosen the path of joy – of celebrating with the common people – and of communality.
I used to play drums in a hardcore punk band. After gaining a certain amount of notoriety in the Mexican underground, we did several tours in the United States. We played in dozens of cities for the workers and marginalized people of that country. Although different from the working-class festivities of the southeast of Mexico, in a way the hardcore punk scene enabled me to be a part of the type of tours I would see as a kid, when the troupes of performers would roll through town each year with their drums and megaphones for Carnival in the heart of Merida. Carnival was a party with no limits, an oasis in a concrete jungle, where people could come together, be close to one another, speak freely, dance, be unruly, and get outside of themselves.
My mother told me about how up until a few decades ago, ordinary Yucatecans used to be able to spend more time at the beach. But now access to the coast has become increasingly expensive. The few who own beachfront property find it better to rent it out to foreigners than to use it. The arrival of tourism and the smoke of heavy industry- both promoted by each successive government – has resulted in the reduction of free time and leisure for the masses. The burdens my family faced were a result of the classism which sought to turn the peninsula into a bastion of industry, to turn the working classes into a hypervisible and hyperproductive subject – individualist in the U.S./European way – and to snatch away their lands, their free time, and their forms of collective living.
Carnival was one of the parties that changed my life. I used to rush down to the heart of the city to get there early and secure a good spot. My grandma lived a few blocks away, and I liked staying over at her place more than being at my parents’ house. My heart would pound as I watched the procession of costumed folk and troupes of dancers making their way down the avenue – the protagonists of a spectacle eagerly awaited by the whole city. I spent hours there, days entire – making friends, seeing people fighting, kissing, stealing, getting drunk on the steps outside the WalMart and pissing on the monuments to the genocidal conquistadors on Paseo de Montejo.
The festivals, the workers’ assemblies, and Carnival were moments when neighbors and strangers came together, met each other face to face, and spent hours and days together. They engendered encounters between various strata of society and unexpected combinations of games, music, vagabonds, criminality, noise, and fried foods. But eventually Carnival was banished from the city center and relocated to the outskirts, because proletarian pleasure – especially in public places – is always under threat. The privatization and displacement of Carnival and other community festivals happened due to investment from beer companies and radio stations, who brought in famous artists to create a homogenized version of the celebration. These companies took the place of the community members who used to organize the events collectively.
The beach houses where I used to spend a lot of time in the summers – far from TV screens and close to mosquitoes – belonged to cousins or friends. Although they were private property, it wasn’t too bad of a theft, because they were always shared and used collectively. All you needed was to bring your hammock, hang it up among all the rest, light up the spirals of bug repellent, and listen to the waves and feel the salt graze your pores. And so it was for many people of the southeast before the real estate boom came along and made it difficult even to access enough fresh water to rinse yourself off after a dip in the ocean.
The displacement of Carnival and the ever-increasing costs at the beach are the results of a change in how provincial cities – particularly coastal ones – are organized. Recreation gets displaced from the local population, who then take on the job of organizing themselves at the family or neighborhood level to rent out their own vehicles and houses to the foreign tourists who have come to appropriate it for themselves. Consumption becomes production. Leisure turns into work, pleasure into suffering. Before the boom, the Yucatan was the Siberia of Mexico. A no-man’s-land, more similar to Cuba than to the rest of the country, where rebels and homosexuals from the capital were sent to do forced labor until dying of heatstroke. The Yucatan was a shadow, a hidden nook in the territory, where it was still possible for the working classes to vacation and celebrate – to take over public spaces and put a pause, however briefly, to the routine of work. In spending the first decades of my life in these streets, on public transport, among laughter and tears, skating around potholes – I came to know the “festive collectivity” that Mark Fisher talked about. By eliminating public celebrations and reducing communal recreation, the market hampers the collective and imposes individualism. And so more and more people take out loans to buy cars, putting themselves in debt for years just to avoid having to go on sharing space with other people on public transport. And as fewer people use public transport, fewer people share space in other areas of society, and increasingly the buses and the block parties are viewed as dirty, criminal, and worthy of contempt.
And so Carnival ceased to be a collective effort, where the people would parade through the streets and create their own entertainment. Instead it became an initiative of big business, where the people – no longer protagonists and collective authors of the spectacle – became no more than a passive audience, there to stand around and clap for whatever artist the beer companies and radio stations brought in to play on the big stage. The people ceased to organize themselves and went from being producers to consumers. Slowly but surely, they passed from the top to the bottom. And, it seems to me, this loss of protagonism has gone mostly unnoticed.
Carnival had enabled a collapsing of “the limits between bodies,” such that you would spend a substantial amount of time stuck with strangers that you would perhaps never see again in your life. And these were by no means homogeneous groups of people. Yet now the multitude has broken down into solitary consumers, and the brief and individual experience of consuming content on screens has overtaken and become more common than inhabiting a shared space among many people for sustained periods of time.
The houses on the coast ceased to be shared, as has tended to happen with all other communitarian initiatives and all the spontaneous cooperation and creativity that make things more affordable and accessible and full of vivacity. And so begins the dwindling away of free time. And so I began to have my first experience of dispossession: leisure, slowness, collective pleasure, celebration, and time itself became privileges. First in my family and later in my town, which continued being obliged to accelerate and conform to a new paradigm of urbanism.
Nature tends to lose its clarity as the internet becomes interposed – not because nature becomes more distant, but because the screen makes us feel as if it’s more distant. Algorithms propagate ways of living which regiment and automatize us, working us into a state of constant anxiety. To know whether or not it’s going to rain, we ask a machine instead of looking up at the sky. It is increasingly difficult to stop and rest, to take the necessary time to replenish ourselves with the energy we need to return to work. With the influx of money from tourism, it is now the norm to own – or aspire to own – one’s own car, to move through the world in one’s own private space, with its own personalized soundtrack and no interruptions. And we see the same trend in the increasing use of headphones – enclosing oneself in a private, individual world.
Today, the few Yucatecans who can afford to vacation at the beach rent rooms in divided houses, to have their own little space, to spend a few days in a hammock with headphones on, only to return to the city to go on working without ever having really distracted oneself. Socializing, sharing, and uncertainty are all to be avoided. Communality and the improvisation of collective life are brushed aside – anything communal is judged with misapprehension.
In the towns and among the lower classes I experienced the joy and movement, the expansiveness and the spectacle that Leo wrote about as the means of satisfying the search for beauty. The beauty of togetherness, survival, and doing things collectively in our own way. An aesthetic and a way of life that exceeds the attempts of galleries, archives, universities, and museums to petrify them and turn them into merchandise with their essays and reasoning and endless verbiage. The towns and provinces of Mexico have a special sort of luxury and abundance, at least spatially and temporally, defined by their being on the edge of, or in the gaps between, the cities, the metropolis, and the State. Capitalism still has not managed to develop large industries in the south as it has in the north. Elites from elsewhere who move to the south tend to arrive with big ambitions and projects that are out of joint with and untranslatable to the local conditions, and that also would tend to diminish regional and collective power. Tourism and the real estate boom, like any other industry, break apart communities by appropriating and selling off communal lands and by reducing the amount of time for rest and the possibilities for leisure available to the local population. In this way, the elites destroy the collective and spontaneous capacities of the people.
The raves that Mark Fisher eulogized have since mutated into a form of entertainment that has displaced the popular celebrations of the Caribbean region of Mexico. A ticket for an electronic music festival can cost as much as a month’s worth of wages for someone who works there. Celebration, joy, and leisure time are the targets of a project of colonial dispossession which today threatens the Mayan lands, along with other regions of the world where extreme climates prevent the State and capital from thoroughly exploiting the land. On the margins, there has always been celebration. Festivity, as Yasnaya Aguilar has said, has always been one of our most powerful political weapons. The problem is that fewer and fewer people are able to truly take advantage of it, and those that can are inevitably cornered and cut off.
Due to “the survival of the older nature cults among the peasantry, along with the joyous poverty of the Franciscan order, and the plebian revelry of the festivals and the great pilgrimages,” as Fredric Jameson puts it, “peasant culture,” regardless of whether it is identified as indigenous or not, “constitutes a fundamental negation and repudiation of its aristocratic masters.” The months that the Yucatecans would spend at the beach were a great pilgrimage. The lack of supermarkets and multinationals meant that people consumed locally – a form of sovereignty which has disappeared. What had remained of peasant culture and popular defiance has increasingly melted away.
I see myself as being shot through with the Yucatan like Kropotkin and Bakunin were with Siberia. The difference is that I didn’t take a step down from the higher classes to the lower. Like most people, I didn’t have that choice. I didn’t get to choose who to socialize with, nor could I pretend to be an aristocratic heroine descended from the old guard of Europe. I coexisted with and got along with whomever I could. Among the provincial proletariat there was a collective way of organizing, celebrating, studying, traveling, and living that marked me just as strongly as the traumas inflicted by precarity and violence. In Carnival and in the public schools there existed a spontaneous sort of rejection of the elites. This was one of my fundamental joys. I had next to nothing in my pockets, but I was able to get attention. Which was something I lacked at home with my parents working all the time to survive at the whims of precarity and addiction. Time and space in the provincial barrio felt like something abundant when I was a child. Their utility seemed to extend infinitely. As if there were no boundaries of any sort. I was an emotional orphan, because I had to take care of myself. I began my education in the “school of real life” much earlier than I would have liked to.
Although I did not grow up in comfort like Kropotkin and many of the classical anarchists, and I was often looked at askance for being an effeminate child with a head full of lice – I did grow up in something of a “nurturing environment” like him. I was a hungry child. Hungry for attention. Hungry for affection. Hungry for stimulation. Hungry for noise. Hungry for life. Hungry for books. Hungry for words. Hungry for beauty. Hungry for friendship. I grew up with a deep envy of what had been denied to us in the masses and a deep resentment toward the upper classes. In the rare moments where I might receive some kind of preferential treatment, the kindness would disappear as soon as they noticed my tattered clothes or that I wouldn’t stop eating whatever they put in front of me. I couldn’t stop talking and I took up too much space. I was too loud. I learned to cook, because no one else in my house did it, and it seemed logical for me to be the one to serve the stone soup to the others. I did whatever I could to gain the confidence of others, to have a sense of belonging. Like many at that age, I transformed myself as often as was necessary to not feel lonely.
Seeing my mother plead with the neighbors to give us food because she didn’t have any money taught me something about storytelling. Without realizing it, I developed a kindness in order to soften the shame and the tears of my mother, to loosen the tension and chase away the sadness of this woman who was trying to care for three children who never shut up and never seemed to be sated. The old tale of the stone soup, which has been passed down in oral and written form for centuries, tells of a drifter who uses nothing more than an empty pot and his rhetoric – his powers of persuasion – to obtain his sustenance. Charisma, laughter, and the compulsion to tell stories are a marker of origin, of the aesthetic of my own survival and that of many others who grew up without money. When I went camping or on trips I would be made fun of for being the one who wanted to stay behind and cook rather than go out to hunt or explore. I only lasted a couple of weeks in the Boy Scouts. The skaters made me cry. One time they tied me to a pole and smeared toothpaste all over my face. The insults and the sting brought on the tears, but I put up with it in order to have a family. I preferred being humiliated in the street to being ignored at home.
The costumes of Carnival, similarly to what happened with janal pixan (Day of the Dead), little by little became reduced to a form of vapid spectacle. The mocking and ridiculing of the elites that characterized the dance of the dead were neutralized. The families, schools, and neighborhoods which put on their own dances and theatrical performances during Carnival gave way to individual entrepreneurs who cashed in with the beer companies and the media to go on privatizing the joys and the desires of the multitude. Within the nation-state, as Bolivar Echevarria writes, everything which represents “contradiction, conflict, instability, fluidity, or the possibility of a different world comes to appear as agreement, harmony, permanence, rigidity: as a closure within the limits of the established order.” If there had been anything of the class struggle in those days-long parties in the heart of the city, where the marginalized took over the streets and were applauded by a public that exploited them during the rest of the year – these conditions engendered by the celebration were shifted away from the center, creating a different sort of harmony in which those with cars no longer have to worry about the closed streets and the traffic that used to come with Carnival week in Merida. Now there’s no subalterns urinating on the monuments to their old oppressors, nor is it possible to take over the city. They have become even more thoroughly marginalized.
In the towns of the Yucatan as much as in the cities of the U.S., I have noticed how capitalism is an “attack on collective, festive consumption.” That is, a “privatization of desire,” as David Graeber puts it. The act of bringing bodies together creates a potency of organization and imbalance which tend toward resistance. The problem is sustaining this potency over time. And as we cease to attend collective celebrations and move away from consuming media in physical formats, the collective cutting edge is dulled. As the internet has swallowed and regurgitated media and communications, the music industry has been left with but one job, where the majority of artists give away their work for free, because the only way to make money is onstage. The music of today is bound up with spectacle. And so the breweries and the radio stations, who have far more capital than the State, were the only ones capable of paying anyone to come play the southeast of Mexico.
Proudhon thought that the role of women was to be mothers and homemakers. In Of Justice in the Revolution and the Church, he gives a scientific argument for the moral, physical, and intellectual inferiority of women. Joseph Dejacque criticized him in a pamphlet entitled The Revolutionary Question, in which he also attacks the State, religions, private property, the idea of “the family based in matrimony”, and the patriarchy. This last idea was read much later through a psychoanalytic lens by Otto Gross, an apprentice of Freud whose life is reflected in the character of Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial. Gross, like Dejacque, argued that we should struggle against “the father and the patriarchy.” Nevertheless, I didn’t have to struggle so much against the father because mine was never around.
Andre Leo’s house was a meeting place for various militants. I imagine them gathered around telling each other stories of their old lives in the towns – where things worked rather differently than in the city – over tea and coffee, in between arguing over the political issues of the day. They ended up founding the Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes, and Andre began to write for Le Droit des Femmes, a newspaper owned by Leon Richter – a mason, feminist, and journalist who, despite his progressive ideas, still didn’t think women should be given the right to vote out of fear that they would be too heavily influenced by the church, and because historically the feminine has been associated with irrationality, weakness, and excessive emotions. In Le Droit, Leo published La Femme et les Moeurs: Liberté ou Monarchie – a response to Proudhon. Leo attacked the idea that men should have more rights for being physically stronger. She also argued that women would lose their autonomy if they let motherhood be the central objective of their lives. In novels such as Marianne, Leo gives examples of emancipatory relationships. But the novel that would change the lives of this whole generation of thinkers was What is to be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
In the novel, Vera Pavlovna leaves an arranged marriage and becomes financially independent. She creates a cooperative of weavers based in the obschina – or communes – of rural Russia. Each worker earns the same, and everyone participates in the decision-making process. The organization even provides food and clothing for its members. They learn how to take care of themselves, although they don’t have the possibility of choosing to move upwards or downwards in class. Eventually the cooperative manages to tackle all of the seamstress’ problems. In narrating collective activities that point to an expansive, shared, and joyful way of life, Chernyshevsky promotes a type of work which is emancipatory, affirmative, full, and not separated from one’s life. Work as a weapon of liberation. Not alienated drudgery.
In some ways, the Russain obschina were similar to the ejidos of Mexico. One of the great achievements of the Mexican revolution, ejidos were communally farmed parcels of land which could not be sold unless every single community member agreed to sign. Like ejidos, cooperatives require the long and hard work of coming together to make decisions – a task that can come to feel vertical, especially for those who are not familiar with the genealogy of the collective or for those who have never experienced a real need, and not just the desire, to organize while taking others into account.
Successive governments in Mexico have enabled the dispossession of ejidal lands, the tourism industry, and the development of megaprojects that destroy families and entire towns. Internal colonization advances by the minute. The idea of industrial modernity that underpins Latin American progressivism has allowed and promoted the entry of such capital, and marks a new phase of domination. The breaking up of collective property in these communities has resulted in the loss of languages, recipes, traditions, forms of struggle, forms of rest, joys, pleasures, and cultural practices which circumvent colonialism – such as tequio (known in the southeast as fajina, a form of collective work for community benefit), the popular Carnival celebrations, and which the cooperatives of the Russian novels also exemplify: an emulation of agrarian organizations in the urban context, in a similar sense to how the classical anarchists wanted to and were able to descend in social class.
Upon escaping from Siberia, Bakunin returned to Europe and began taking part in national liberation movements. The first mass demonstrations by workers’ organizations in Europe had taken shape as nationalist movements. Many others, like Rhodakanaty, went to the Americas. In Italy, Bakunin proposed that the workers unite themselves into fraternities to bring about the revolution. The years spent among convicts in Siberia along with his admiration for the rebellion in the south of Europe had caused Bakunin to change his opinion. Proudhon lost interest in national liberation and became a federalist. The revolution would be oriented toward the future, the unknown – and one way or another it would do away with the world as it had been along with all the identities it had imposed upon us. Back then, the revolution was conceived of as a zero day. Like the birth of Christ, dividing the timeline into a before and after. For them, there was no turning back. Bakunin’s passion for dialectics and materialism began to give rise to a communism without borders. A communism against all authority and against the limits of the nation-state, with an eye towards a future grounded in the totality, where each individual would form an essential part – regardless of their skills, characteristics, or preferences.