Unos pensadores importantes que tenían influencia sobre la estética ácrata española

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876).  A man of legendary physical presence and vigor, Bakunin  was also an important social philosopher who could speak most European languages fluently.  However, unlike most political thinkers of his century, Bakunin was as comfortable guerrilla-fighting Prussians from behind barricades in the streets of Dresden as he was writing treatises.  Bakunin came from a family which owned a sizable estate, and his father was career diplomat and liberal thinker.  After a short, desultory stint in the military, Bakunin discovered Hegel and Fichte; by the time he was 22, he had in fact translated some of the writings of the latter philosopher.  Bakunin spent most of his life organizing and agitating.  By 1857, he had already build a reputation as a revolutionary par excellence and had spent nearly eight years in the most squalid dungeons of Russia.  Leaving his homeland via Japan, for several weeks in 1861 Bakunin actually passed through the United States and then continued on to London.
     Bakunin and his followers were briefly participants in the Internationals of the 1860s.  However, the growing animosity between he and Karl Marx eventually led to his expulsion in 1872.  As Gerald Brenan explains with concision, the main source of conflict between these two formidable thinkers were their respective visions for the post-revolutionary state:  "...whereas Marx wished to conquer political power for the proletariat, Bakunin wished the proletariat to destroy it" (132).  In spite of Marx and countless other enemies, Bakunin cultivated many friendships with prominent people of his time, including George Sand, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Richard Wagner and Giuseppi Fanelli.  When he died in Bern, Bakunin left behind him a political legacy that would come closest to being implemented in Spain, a country that he hardly visited during his life. As Gerald Brenan points out, "everything of importance in Spanish Anarchism goes back to him" (132).
     The following passages are from his late treatise, Statism and Anarchy (1873), the first chapter of which critiques the Marxist program for social revolution.  In his own review of this work, Marx would write that it was "schoolboy drivel", that Bakunin was an "ass" and that "[i]f Herr Bakunin knew even one thing about the situation of the manager of a workers' cooperative factory, all his hallucinations about domination would go to the devil" (The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd. edition.  Robert C. Tucker, Ed. New York:  Norton, 1978. 543-46.)

"...We, the revolutionary anarchists, are the advocates of education for all the people, of the emancipation and the widest possible expansion of social life.  Therefore, we are enemies of the State and all forms of the statist principle..."

"...In accordance with this belief, we neither intend nor desire to thrust upon our own or any other people any scheme of social organization taken from books or concocted by ourselves. We are convinced that the masses of the people carry in themselves, their instincts..., in their daily necessities, and in their conscious or unconscious aspirations, all the elements of the future social organization.  We seek this ideal in the people themselves.  Every state power, every government, by its very nature places itself outside and over the people and inevitably subordinates them to an organization and to aims which are foreign to and opposed to the real needs and aspirations of the people...We think that people can be free and happy only when organized from the bottom up in completely free and independent associations, without governmental paternalism though not without the influence of a variety of free individuals and parties.
     Such are our ideas as social revolutionaries, and we are therefore called anarchists.  We do not protest this name..."

(From:  Bakunin, Mikhail.  Bakunin on Anarchism.  Ed. and Trans. Sam Dolgoff.  Montréal:  Black Rose, 1980.  327-28.)

 

Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921).  Like Mikhail Bakunin, Kropotkin was born of an aristocratic, land-holding family and was expected to pursue a military career.  While serving in the military, his interest in geography was stimulated and he did some pioneering work in this field.  In the wake of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, however, Kropotkin decided to abandon this promising future in geography and instead devoted himself to political study. Prosecuted for his politcal beliefs and activism, Kropotkin spent two years in the terrible Peter and Paul Fortress; a dramatic escape from this prison and his reputation as an expert in geography provided him access to many prominent intellectual circles.  He joined the International Working Men's Association (the IWMA, or the First International) in 1872; significantly, this was the year that Marx and his collegues expelled Bakunin. In many other ways, particularly in terms of Spanish Anarchism, Kropotkin can be seen as the successor of that first influential anarchist leader.
    Kropotkin was an advocate of a variety of anarchism with more communistic characteristics, and he advanced his vision quite vigorously against the more numerous Bakuninists and their collectivism.  According to Murray Bookchin, the main difference between the theories of these two influential men was that while Bakunin believed that individuals in his system earned what they needed in relation to the amount of labor they contributed to the whole, Kropotkin believed that immediately after the revolution, each commune of workers would provide equally for the individuals.  He wrote, "Need will be put above service...it will be recognized that everyone who cooperates in production to a certain extent has in the first place that right to live comfortably" (Bookchin 115-16).  Returning to Russia after the 1905 Revolution, he devoted the remainder of his life to compiling his writings and consequently had little part in the October Revolution.

 
 Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).  Although he did not exert as much influence on Spanish anarchism as Mikhail Bakunin,  Proudhon is very likely the first person to call themselves an "anarchist" in writing.  Proudhon was not born into wealth or prestige (like Bakunin and Kropotkin); his father had been a cooper.  Nevertheless, the talent of the young scholar was noted immediately and Proudhon was able to receive a thorough education through scholarships.  In the early 1840s, his pamphlet entitled "What is Property?" shocked readers because of the iconoclastic nature of its arguments, among which was the idea that all property constituted theft.  To some extent, his political vision was a mixture of communism, medieval guild structures and a more moderate anarchism.  In 1848--an important year for revolutionary social movements--Proudhon attempted to create a "people's bank" and envisioned in his writings a free society where craftsmen, peasants, scholars and collectively-owned industries negotiated and cooperated with one another.  One might venture to say that his political views represent a slightly more radical form of mutualism.  Proudhon never enjoyed good health and upon his death his more radical friend Bakunin admitted, " He had the instincts of a genius and he glimpsed the right road, but hindered by his idealistic thinking patterns, he fell always into the old errors."
     The influence that Proudhon's writings exerted in Spain is considerable.  In particular, the young Catalan intellectual Francisco Pi y Margall read his works with enthusiasm.  In 1854, Pi published his own volume of radical political theory, La reacción y la revolución, which served as something of a political handbook for many revolutionaries of the second half of the century. Like Proudhon, Pi believed that the freedom of individuals could be established and maintained as long as they were permitted to enter into voluntary contractual agreements with others.  Several of Proudhon's aesthetic theories--particularly in regard to realism--had great influence on the thinking of Spanish anarchists such as Leopoldo Bonafulla and Teobaldo Nieva (Litvak 1988, 26-7).

Anselmo Lorenzo (1842-1914), a printer from Madrid, has been commonly identified as the "Grandfather of Spanish Anarquism".  He was among those present at the first anarchist meeting organized by Giuseppi Fanelli in Barcelona, and throughout his career as a publisher served as director of several important anarchist periodicals, including La solidaridad (Madrid) and El productor (Barcelona).  Lorenzo also contributed frequently to the anarchist press, particularly to the influential periodicals Acracia and La revista blanca.  In his spare time he wrote short stories with clearly political undertones; one of which, "Amoría" is included in Litvak's important anthology, El cuento anarquista:  Antología (1880-1911) (Madrid:  Taurus, 1982. 143-50).  Without a doubt, however, Lorenzo's single most important text are his memoirs, in which he colorfully describes the trajectory of the Spanish anarchist movement from its inception with Fanelli to its declines at the turn-of-the-century and after (El proletariado militante. José Alvarez Junco, ed. [Madrid:  Alianza Editorial, 1974]).
     Lorenzo was instrumental in the establishment of the FRE (la Federación Regional Española) in 1870, which was the Spanish branch of the First International.  At the London Congress of the International in 1871, Lorenzo met with Marx and Engels and was one of the first people to be aware of growing disagreements between those men and Bakunin.  In 1871-72, Lorenzo had to escape to Portugal with important FRE documents because of government prosecution.  When the FRE was effectively replaced by the FTRE (la Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española) in 1881, Lorenzo was forced into semi-retirement from his activism because of internal power struggles.  In 1884, he resumed his role as the leading Spanish anarchist.  Throughout his life, Lorenzo endeavored to design a working strategy for real political action.  His views were more moderate than many anarchists and in the end can be seen as more heavily influenced by Proudhon and Pi y Margall than by Kropotkin or Bakunin.  Lorenzo died on November 30, 1914; some of his contemporaries felt that his death was hastened by the start of the First World War and by the accumulated failures of Spanish anarchism.

José Martínez Ruiz «Azorín» (1874-1967).  José Martínez Ruiz was born in Monóvar, Alicante, where his father was mayor.  In the 1880s, he studied law in the University of Valencia at the same time that the novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez did.  In 1896 he arrived in Madrid, began work as a journalist, and remained there throughout his life (except for the period of the Civil War, during which he lived in Paris).  Martínez Ruiz served in the Spanish government and was elected to the Real Academia Española in 1924.  However, Martínez Ruiz will forever be known to scholars of Spanish literature as Azorín, a nom de plume he adopted early in his long career, and as one of the most prominent members of the so-called Generation of '98, a term he himself coined in an essay of 1913.  He is better remembered for his essays and sketches than for his novels; the famous «estilo azoriniano» presents the reader with a remarkably scrutinizing viewpoint, describing every minute detail of the most familiar--even mundane--objects.  Through this perspective, however, these commonly-overlooked items assume a new significance.  Azorín was a most incisive writer who also liked to suggest the passage of time in his work, which in turn suggests that mundane things of his literary world continue while men, and even civilizations, pass.  Among his most important works are Castilla (1902), Los pueblos (1905), both collections of essays; and the novels Antonio Azorín (1903), Confesiones de un pequeño filósofo (1904) and Doña Inés (1925).  Azorín's outstanding early novel, La voluntad (1902), also uses the anarchist movement and Europe's fin de siècle decadence as background.  Para ver otro enlace sobre Azorín en su contexto social, toque aquí.
     Azorín's relationship to anarchism was productive but, considering his near seven decades of his literary production, short-lived.  In the mid-1890s he began publishing articles in major newspapers and in the many small presses of Madrid, articles that illuminated various points of anarchist ideology and biographical aspects of leading figures such as Kropotkin.  In 1895 Azorín published two major works, Anarquistas literarias and Notas sociales, both of which presented to the public the principle theories of anarchism.  Shortly after the turn-of-the-century, Azorín did not continue advocating anarchism as openly as before; in fact, by the end of his career he was a writer comfortably established in the regime of Francisco Franco.
     Azorín was an enormously erudite writer and his political works drawn upon a wealth of literary and political sources.  In several anarchist writings, he refers to the millenarian themes of the ideology that attracted so many in its time, such as comparing the anarchist to "un Cristo nuevo", and takes issue with them.  Azorín was a secular and philosophical anarchist; he did not view anarchism religiously nor idealistically.  Neither did he view anarchism as anything particularly new.  As the critic Kathleen Glenn points out, "As defined by Azorín, anarchists are those men of independent spirit who love liberty, justice, and their fellow men and have a highly-developed moral sensibility" (Azorín [José Martínez Ruiz].  Boston:  Twayne, 1981. 27.).  Similarly, authors who are not afraid to write what they feel also merit the name of anarchists in Azorín's opinion:

"¿No representan nada los Zola, Reclus, Kropotkine, Malato, Hamon, Mirbeau, Paul Adam, Grauve, Faure, etc.?...Lo diré siempre y lo afirmaré con toda mi alma, con la convicción más firme:  si existe alguna obra verdaderamente grande, de inciativas generosas, de consecuencias fecundas, prolongación, en fin de la labor de los Confucio, Marco Aurelio, Epícteto, Jesús, es precisamente la obra que los nombres antes citados simbolizan" ("Avisos de este" 69-70).

"Uno de mis más amados discípulos, Ernesto Renán, ha dicho que yo fui un anarquista.  Si ser anarquista es ser partidario del amor universal, destructor de todo poder, perseguidor de toda ley, declaro que fui anarquista.  No quiero que unos hombres gobiernen a otros hombres; quiero que todos seáis iguales.  No quiero que trabajen unos y que otros, en la holganza, consuman lo producido; no quiero que haya estados, ni códigos, ni ejércitos, ni propiedad, ni familia; quiero que todos os tengáis tan grande amor que no necesitéis ni verdugos ni jueces..." ("El Cristo nuevo" 71-72).

From:  Azorín, Artículos anarquistas, José María Valverde, ed. (Barcelona:  Editorial Lumen, S.A., 1992).

 
John Ruskin (1819-1900).  Ruskin, whom Lionel Trilling has deemed "the pre-eminent intellectual genius of Victorian England" (The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1973. 941), was born in London, the only child of a well-to-do fiercely religious Scottish couple.  At an early age he learned to read several languages, write extensively, and appreciate fine art.  Over the course of time, his interest in art and criticism became so consuming he decided to pursue a career in it, rather than take orders and become a Protestant bishop.  Profoundly influenced by the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, he wrote his ambitious canonization of the English painter, Modern Painters (1843), to some acclaim and not a little controversy.  Other works followed--the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), The Stones of Venice (1851, 1853), and his eloquent autobiography, Praeterita (1889)--although his interests after 1854 had less to do with art criticism and more to do with society and politics.  He was an enormous influence on his contemporaries.  By 1863, Ruskin began to show the initial signs of the mental illness that would plague him the rest of his life.  There is probably no case as curious and tragic as that of the deterioration of Ruskin (with the possible exception of Swift), as some scholars have noted that he gradually reverted into an infant-like state by the end of his life.
    The intellectual legacy that Ruskin provided the Spanish Anarchists can be summarized as follows:  the strong belief in a social, egalitarian art; the idealization of the Middle Ages; the evil represented by the industrialized production of art; the fierce hatred of the dehumanization of men and the idealization of machines (Litvak 1988, 31-5).  However, it must also be noted that the anarchists did not share all the beliefs of the English critic; for example, many Spanish anarchists welcomed the progress of industrial technology.  They were both horrified and fascinated by it, realistic, and will to accept it so long as the machine "no derivase en perjuicio de la labor del obrero ni en una mutilación de la dignidad humana" (Litvak 1988, 37).  The following selections of Ruskin are from The Stones of Venice, specifically the famous chapter entitled "The Nature of Gothic":

"...You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him.  You cannot make both.  Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions...Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly.  It is verily this degradation of the operative [man] into machine, which more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves..."

"...And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized, and this demand to be regulated?  Easily:  by the observance of three broad and simple rules:
 1.  Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.
 2.  Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.
 3.  Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works..."

"...accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art...Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life..."

(From:  Bloom, Harold, Trilling, Lionel, et al.  The Oxford Anthology of English Literature.  Vol 2.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1973.  964-67.)

William Morris (1834-1896).  Most famous for his intricate designs, William Morris was also a profound social thinker and a poet of great talent.  He was born in Walthamstow, a town near London, and his early life modeled that of John Ruskin to a great extent.  Reading Ruskin's The Stones of Venice while a student at Oxford would prove to be a turning point in his life; his associations with some members of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (Edward Burne-Jones in particular) would only further convince him that his future held something other than taking holy orders and becoming a priest.  He became a professional designer and his business became extremely profitable within twenty or thirty years; in 1881, Morris and Company received the commission to redecorate the Throne and Reception rooms of St. James's Palace.  However, like Ruskin, his later writings began to reflect more concern and criticism of society and the increased commercialization of art.  He read Marx and in 1876 wrote his own manifesto, To the Working-men of England, in which he denounced the aristocracy and war.  Like Ruskin, Morris felt that industrialized work--which the worker neither understood nor performed voluntarily--was dehumanizing.  Morris was an extremely energetic man, and after his death in 1896 his physician said that he died from "simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."
    The following selections are from "The Beauty of Life", a lecture Morris gave in February 1880 before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design.

"...So much is now known of the periods of art that have left abundant examples of their work behind them, that we can judge of the art of all periods by comparing these with the remains of times of which less has been left us; and we cannot fail to come to the conclusion that down to very recent days everything that the hand of man touched was more or less beautiful:  so that in those days all people who made anything shared in art, as well as all people who used the things so made:  that is, all people shared art."

"As to the art of the people; in countries and places where the greater art had flourished most, it went step by step on the downward path...for a long time people did not know it, or what had taken place, crept so to say into its dead body--that pretense of art, to wit, which is done with machines, though sometimes the machines are called men, and doubtless are so out of working hours:  nevertheless long before it was quite dead it had fallen so low that the whole subject was usually treated with the utmost contempt by every one who had any pretense of being a sensible man, and in short the whole civilized world had forgotten that there has ever been an art made by the people for the people as a joy for the maker and the user."

(From:  Bloom, Harold, Trilling, Lionel, et al.  The Oxford Anthology of English Literature.  Vol 2.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1973.  1079, 1081-82.)
 

 

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940):  Born in Berlin of German-Jewish ancestry, the influence of Walter Benjamin has been largely posthumous.  An iconoclast his entire short life, his chances for a career in teaching were forever ruined by a polemically political essay he wrote on Goethe.  Benjamin's writings are a curious mixture of mystical Jewish thought, modernism, and unorthodox Marxism. He united an apocalyptic vision of history with a concern for the material, productive basis of art.  He maintained an uneasy relationship with Adorno but was a close friend of the poet Brecht.  Some of Benjamin's most illuminating essays treat the life and works of Franz Kafka.  Benjamin committed suicide in September of 1940, on the Franco-Spanish border, trying to escape the Nazis who would have murdered him.  (Biographical link.)
   Although Benjamin had no involvement whatsoever with the Spanish anarchism, some of his highly provocative and important theories seem to echo those of prominent anarchists such as Tárrida del Mármol and Federico Urales.  In his classic essay of 1936, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin reflects the same fear and skepticism of the growing influence of capitalist technology on artistic production that many Spanish anarchists felt in their time.  Perhaps what differentiates Benjamin from the Spanish anarchists, however, is his position of the popularization of art.  In this essay, Benjamin suggests that art is the product of a sacred ritual, a timeless tradition, and that means of permitting its mass appreciation dispel the "aura" of an individual work.  The anarchists would have disagreed on this point, perhaps arguing that the relationship of a work of art to society is what legitimizes it as art.  There is a spirit of egalitarianism that seems to be antithetical to this particular essay of the great German critic.  Furthermore, the Spanish anarchists were trying to forge a new art; thus, all talk of a tradition or of a particular work's history was afield of their program.

"...The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated...The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from is substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced...the technique of reproduction detached the reproduced object from the domain of tradition."

"...And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
 The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones.  We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be...To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction."

 "The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition...Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult...for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its paracitical dependence on ritual...But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.  Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics."

"Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art.  The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie.  The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert."

(From:  Benjamin, Walter.  "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  Illuminations.  Ed. Hannah Arendt.  Trans. Harry Zohn.  New York:  Schocken, 1978.  217-252.)

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