Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries is a collection gathered together from the 2017 symposium "Transatlantic Anarchism and Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" held in Würzburg, Germany. It includes findings from a generationally diverse group of scholars who have academic positions in five different countries. Taken as a whole, the book offers a series of surprises in analytical and anecdotal form.Transatlantic Radicalism's strongest chapters include innovative contributions in which the authors rethink figures, topics, and themes that have been at the core of labor and working-class history for decades. Editors Frank Jacob and Mario Keßler lay out the central foundations of the book in their argument that individuals matter in the history of radicalism. The book's point of view, including the symposium and the written volume, was a response to Constance Bantman's (and others') call to reassess transnationalism as a field of study and as a tool of analysis. Ultimately, Jacob and Keßler suggest that transnationalism's scale has meant that scholars have not sufficiently included the "individual" as subject and agent of change. Indeed, the editors argue that their work and its reification of the individual sheds light on what they deem "the understudied ties between radicals in the European and American contexts" (14). The five chapters in each of the two parts are connected by the project's methodological commitment to privilege the "singular" over the social to explain the meaning, experience, and significance of transnationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Carlo Romani and Burno Carréra de Sá e Benevides illuminate the symbiotic relationship between anarchists from Italy and the anarchist communities in Brazil; each were changed by the contact. The authors document the ideological landscape of anarchism and tease out the connections of anarchist individualism (which most Italians in their study adhered to upon their arrival in Brazil). The authors provide the best example of the benefits of this narrow lens. As they argue, "A plural understanding of how Italian anarchism . . . put together different practices of organization appropriate to each specific need" was the result of individuals like Felice Vezzani, Oreste Ristori, and Alessandro Scopetani (61). Their commitment to anarchism never wavered, but it did change from stringent "individualist positions" to a more fluid form of anarchist thought and practice (68). These men moved "themselves among different positions inside anarchism, from a more individualist defense of freedom to more coordinated organization inside the union" (78).Hillary Lazar also focuses on individuals who were part of the transnational anarchist exchange of ideas. She looks at the seven-year run of Man!, the editors of which were more individualist than syndicalist. The paper included regular lessons in anarchist theory, which became more practical over time. Out of necessity, Man! included strategy to support its editor, Marcus (Shmuel) Graham, and other associates who faced increased harassment and eventual deportation from the United States. Lazar's analysis invests in the book project's methodology by focusing on Man!, a single source.James Michael Yeoman provides complementary findings by looking at individualist anarchist print culture in Panama during the construction of the Panama Canal. The newspapers Tierra y Libertad and Acción Libertaria, published in Spain, dedicated space to conditions Spanish anarchists faced in Panama. The former, the first and most significant publication of anarchist individualism, Yeoman argues, helped to sustain "libertarian ideas, which had arrived with the first Spanish migrants" to Panama (105). But it was the "idiosyncratic figure" M. D. Rodriguez who used "the paper . . . to advance an abrasive, minority view of anarchism, which was out of step with the prevailing trends within the international movement" (105). Yeoman includes a critical discussion of the formation of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo during this period and the increased support of syndicalism (over individualist anarchism), which would carry important weight in the battle against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Unlike the impact that Brazil had on Italian anarchist individualists, which resulted in a more fluid and less rigid ideological form, the same was clearly not true in Panama, a connection one wishes the authors and editors had made themselves.The geographical tracings of transnational radicals are carried through in Steven Proffitt's chapter on the rapid rise and eventual fall of the Knights of Labor, indelibly linked to one leader: Terence Powderly. That argument in itself is less innovative than the author's argument about Powderly as a transnational figure. Proffitt lays the groundwork for more studies of Powderly from a global perspective. Frank Jacob also follows the rise and fall of an ideal. Instead of an individual (as in the case of Proffitt) or the case study of a source (as in the case of Lazar), Jacob offers a place as "case": the Kusbas. The Soviet Union banked on the Kusbas, a planned community of industrial production, to draw in needed skilled workers, deliver production goals to the new state, and fulfill the Marxist vision, "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." The environmental reality of Siberia, transnational transplants soon realized, would prevent the dream from coming true. Jacob's study includes well-known individuals like Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood, but the bulk of his focus is on everyday workers. Ford autoworker Herbert Calvert and Ruth Kennell from San Francisco, for example, relocated to the Kusbas to support the USSR's success. Jacob narrates the hope, transformation, disillusionment, and tragedy of the Kusbas and its migrant population. The author's particular skill is in narrating life cycle turning points and relaying the trauma they wrought in the material and spiritual psyche of those who had put so much hope in the enterprise. Georg Leidenberger also focuses on individuals in his biographical sketch of a man, "unlike most exiles" (173). Meyer was a professional architect and integrated into the country, unlike other contemporary political and economic exiles. Leidenberger suggests that the ability to transcend the ethnic enclave of an exile community "illustrates the multivalence of the exile experience of the European Left" (187). That's a tenuous argument, given the author's narrow focus on one man, but Leidenberger offers intriguing points of reference for future studies.The two other chapters in the book are interesting but have weaknesses. Using a "method of 'reconstructivism,' " Ricardo Altieri provides a visualization of the personal, political, and ideological networks two individual radicals traveled through (182). Like other German exiles in the period, Rosi Wolfstein and Paul Frölich altered their worldview as a product of their transnational experiences. From Social Democrats to "radical and internationalist Communist Party" activists, they documented their transformation in letters that Altieri incorporates into the text (191). In fact, the lengthy letter excerpts take up 20 percent of the chapter—too much to go undigested (there is no discussion or interpretation of these important sources). Lack of full engagement in his sources and little explanation of "reconstructivism" make it challenging to fully assess Altieri's claims. Mario Keßler, meanwhile, provides a biography of a man, Ossip K. Fleichtheim, and a field. The author (and volume editor) does not really develop the claim that the life of Fleichtheim "offers more than just an interesting biography" (222).Lutz Häfner introduces a new methodological weakness: lack of historical accuracy. The author's topic, the fluctuating transatlantic public's perception of terrorism as a tactic, is fascinating. Allies and sympathizers of resistance movements, who lived outside the targeted state, were apt to be sympathetic to terrorism and violence against autocratic regimes. The main individual that Häfner uses to follow this argument is Katherine Breschkovsky, an individual with "intense personal networks" that were transnational in scope (40). Häfner uses her transnationality and "versatility" to explain how Americans (temporarily) accepted terrorism against the Russian regime in the early twentieth century (38). Breschkovsky strengthened ties with activists in the US women's movement, Häfner writes. Yet when Häfner dubs one of the elements in the networks the "women's liberation movement," it reveals a lack of context or knowledge about the field (40). Read in the most generous light, this erroneous detail is anachronistic. The "women's liberation movement" came out of a specific series of organizing efforts, experiences, and splits within the feminist movement in the latter half of the twentieth century. Citing Alice Stone Blackwell's 1919 The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution alongside her unpublished 1905 piece, rather than historiography, points to part of the problem.This gaffe both instills doubt about the chapter and shines a light on the project's gender trouble. As a note from the editors reads, The obvious gender imbalance of the present volume was not intended by the editors. However, since neither the open call for a workshop in Würzburg, Germany, in 2017 nor the further recruitment attempts for the volume could solve this problem, the editors eventually decided to publish this volume in its current form. We nevertheless wish to emphasize that there are many female colleagues working in the field of anarchist studies and the history of the international labor movement as well, whose important and often extraordinary works deserve to be acknowledged. (14n66)The point confounds gender and sexual identity with the scholarly community and is problematic for that reason alone. Assuming the editors meant the latter, one wonders whether the lack of response from scholars in the field of women's and gender history explains a conceptual issue that should be addressed more fully. Perhaps if women authors had been consulted and included in the design of the project, the "gender imbalance" would have been eradicated. Furthermore, it's not clear whether the problem is the gender identity of the contributors or the lens through which the topics are viewed. But it's problematic either way and reflects a larger dialogic error in the book. Transnational Radicalism is a volume with little cohesion or discussion between its contributors themselves, let alone the field as a whole. There is no reference in any of the chapters to other authors in the volume, which is emblematic of the project's overall conceptualization. The study of the individual by individuals who work in separate satellites marks a particular type of history that does little service to essays in this volume or to the wider field of labor and the working class.