Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. Which
Speaker 2: I had this whole plan where I was going to
Speaker 2: introduce in some clever way this time, because I used
Speaker 2: to try and do that at the beginning of when
Speaker 2: I started the show, and then I stopped trying to
Speaker 2: do and then like I was planning it, and then
Speaker 2: I forgot. So I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this
Speaker 2: is a show about cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 2: And I have a guest. My guest is Mia Himiya.
Speaker 3: Hello, I'm happy, happy to be back on, happy to
Speaker 3: be guesting and not hosting a podcast. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: good time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for anyone who's curious what me is referencing, she's
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Speaker 2: did cool Stuff. But that's it could happen here because
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Speaker 2: What's fun is ever since twenty twenty, if you have
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Speaker 2: Okay, listener, it's your turn. You have to say it too.
Speaker 2: And then we have a theme music. You already heard it.
Speaker 2: It was by Unwoman, you'll hear it again. It's your
Speaker 2: cue to press forward fifteen seconds, approximately six times on
Speaker 2: your your thing until you hear the music again. Miam.
Speaker 2: I was going to ask if you'd ever heard of
Speaker 2: the rebellion in Patagonia, but then I remember that the
Speaker 2: reason that you're this week's guest is because a couple
Speaker 2: of months ago or some time ago, you and I
Speaker 2: were talking about overlooked stories and I brought this one up,
Speaker 2: and then I was like, you should just come on
Speaker 2: the podcast and be the guest for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's also very funny because, completely unrelated to this,
Speaker 3: out of the blue, my girlfriend was like, started talking
Speaker 3: about the rebellion Patagonia and I was like, hell, no,
Speaker 3: hold on, oh.
Speaker 2: My god, you have a deep history nerd girlfriend that rules.
Speaker 3: He's great. Yeah, and just stuff like this just happens
Speaker 3: every once in a while, Like you.
Speaker 2: Were like, you can't talk about it because you're because
Speaker 2: I when my guests know what the topic is, they
Speaker 2: are forbidden from researching it between, which is totally good
Speaker 2: and not weird that I do that. So this will
Speaker 2: probably be a four parter. This story is worth it.
Speaker 2: If this show had seasons, I would do a whole
Speaker 2: season on the rebellion in Patagonia. This story is the
Speaker 2: reason that there's a show called Cool People Who Did
Speaker 2: Cool Stuff. It's not the reason we picked the title.
Speaker 2: It's the reason I wanted to do a history podcast.
Speaker 2: I first learned this story I don't know, maybe five
Speaker 2: years ago or something, and it was just so fucking
Speaker 2: cool that I started like looking at how better to
Speaker 2: tell this kind of history. For a long time, I
Speaker 2: was just like, I'm going to have a podcast and
Speaker 2: it's going to be me explaining the rebellion and Patagonia
Speaker 2: to someone and making them care. I wanted to take
Speaker 2: someone who didn't care about anarchist history and make them
Speaker 2: care about this story because it's so cool. This case,
Speaker 2: it didn't work because I have a feeling that Mia
Speaker 2: cares about anarchists history because I learned a lot of Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I pitched the show to cool Zone Media. Here
Speaker 2: we are, and I didn't come out the gate with
Speaker 2: this because I wanted to get better at telling stories first,
Speaker 2: because it is the coolest shit story. But it's not
Speaker 2: a simple story, and it's also a story that not
Speaker 2: a lot of people in the global North have, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean this is like so, I mean I kind
Speaker 2: of vaguely had heard of it, but like, of of
Speaker 2: the like three question mark like big anarchist things that
Speaker 2: happened in Chile and Argentina, like this is the one
Speaker 2: I know the least about. Okay, Oh I don't know,
Speaker 2: I'm oh, yeah, the other ones.
Speaker 3: So in between about nineteen seventeen nineteen nineteen, there was
Speaker 3: like a wave of huge well okay, and there there
Speaker 3: was just a lot of in you know, ok I
Speaker 3: probably shouldn't have started this without actually making sure I
Speaker 3: have my data specifics right, But there was a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of general strikes in both countries, and I think
Speaker 3: it was Chile where they tried to do a Bolshevik
Speaker 3: style coup because the the Russian Revolution had just happened
Speaker 3: and they like looked at it and we're like, oh, hey,
Speaker 3: they read a bunch of stuff about how how they
Speaker 3: did it, and we're like, oh, we're gonna do this year.
Speaker 3: And it was a complete disaster. The police found out
Speaker 3: about everyone got arrested.
Speaker 2: Okay, I think that.
Speaker 3: Was a Chilean one. In the Argentinian one was a
Speaker 3: bunch of general strikes that got crushed really badly.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about those. Yeah, yeah, I didn't
Speaker 2: know as much about the Chilean one. It makes sense.
Speaker 2: The Argentinian one is it'll be the end of this
Speaker 2: week when we talk about the tragic week. Yeah, different
Speaker 2: than the other, the tragic week that we talked about
Speaker 2: in one of our million episodes about Spain. I don't
Speaker 2: remember which one this one. Yeah, Okay. So basically, because
Speaker 2: it's this show, I'm going to talk about this thing
Speaker 2: that happened in nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty two in Argentina,
Speaker 2: and by doing that, I'm going to take this half
Speaker 2: to talk about before then, because that's what I like
Speaker 2: to do, because context is half the joy. Also because
Speaker 2: history without context is just like boring to me. It's
Speaker 2: like the kind of stuff that like like it's like
Speaker 2: it's like someone showed you, like a a close up take,
Speaker 2: like the handsomest man, and then zoom in on his
Speaker 2: nose and then send him a picture of his nose.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna be like, damn, like what a nose?
Speaker 2: You know, Like you gotta like zoom out and see
Speaker 2: the face to be like, I.
Speaker 4: Don't know, Michael B. Jordan has a nice nose.
Speaker 2: I'm even like a nosegirl. I they sent this on air,
Speaker 2: and I do.
Speaker 4: You know this about you?
Speaker 1: There's one thing about Margaret Killjoy. She's a nosegirl.
Speaker 2: Anyway. So Patagonia, where our story takes place, where no
Speaker 2: noses exist, Lest I get distracted, Patagonia is a region
Speaker 2: that basically takes up the southern trunk of South America.
Speaker 2: I'm explaining this. I have a feeling mea has a
Speaker 2: better grasp of history of geography than the average North
Speaker 2: Estatus and Edensian.
Speaker 3: Be fair, my geography is actually real. I happen to
Speaker 3: know this. But also I'm terrible at geography. Oh okay,
Speaker 3: Like I okay, I'm gonna say that. The most embarrassing
Speaker 3: thing about me is it wasn't until the last few
Speaker 3: years that I realized that Illinois, the state that I
Speaker 3: live and has a border with Kentucky. I never realized this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you think the enemy in the way somehow
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 3: You know, it doesn't. It's terrible by Kentucky. This, this
Speaker 3: must be redressed somehow. I like, awful, terrible crime.
Speaker 2: I like Kentucky. It's part of Appalachia. But that's fair.
Speaker 2: I used to uh, I used to hold that I
Speaker 2: was only responsible for the geography of places I've been,
Speaker 2: which is not true. But and then like I used
Speaker 2: to feel really bad about my bad you know, Americans,
Speaker 2: especially white Americans, of this like historically bad grasp of
Speaker 2: geography or whatever. But I remember once being in the Netherlands. Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm going to get the details of this wrong and
Speaker 2: make this whole story, make me be the embarrassing person.
Speaker 2: And I remember talking to this person who was like,
Speaker 2: she was Dutch and she didn't know where Denmark was,
Speaker 2: And I was like, you have a border with that country. Like,
Speaker 2: as an American, I grew up knowing where Canada and
Speaker 2: Mexico are, you know.
Speaker 3: To be fair, I have had I had people in
Speaker 3: my high school who didn't know where Canada and Mexico were.
Speaker 3: I had a classmate who thought that you thought that
Speaker 3: what was it, Saudi Arabia was in the Yucatan.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 3: It was lot going on there, It was a whole thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, we're not going to make any assumptions about
Speaker 2: people's level of understanding of geography, because there's a lot
Speaker 2: of things that are hard to keep track of. There
Speaker 2: are a lot of countries in this world. And so Argentina, okay,
Speaker 2: so Patagonia southern trunk of South America. Part of it
Speaker 2: is an Argentina, part of is in Chile. None of
Speaker 2: it is actually an outdoors clothing brand, and I am
Speaker 2: annoyed that the outdoor clothing brand comes up first when
Speaker 2: you google a place where two million people live. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but it is one of the the least densely populated
Speaker 2: chunks of the world. It is only slightly more dense
Speaker 2: than Alaska. A lot of it is the Patagonian Step,
Speaker 2: which is the eighth largest desert in the world. And
Speaker 2: it's like kind of just like shrubby, right, It's not
Speaker 2: a cigaro cactus place. It's a shrub place. Most of
Speaker 2: the stories about Argentinian Patagonia and it ties into Argentinian
Speaker 2: history more generally, the shortest version of the story the
Speaker 2: elevator pitch that I'm bringing to you late in the
Speaker 2: first episode. The short version is this, from the years
Speaker 2: of nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty two, thousands of indigenous
Speaker 2: people in rural anarchists threw off their chains left led
Speaker 2: a massive rural strike across a huge chunk of the country.
Speaker 2: They fought with everything. They had to be treated decently
Speaker 2: by the plantation owners that they worked for, and it
Speaker 2: was an ostensibly liberal government that mowed them down. They
Speaker 2: executed probably around fifteen hundred people who had already surrendered,
Speaker 2: quite likely making them dig their own grapes. It is
Speaker 2: a story that ties together a pacifist assassin, a hardened
Speaker 2: anarchist bandit whose name is a number, and half a
Speaker 2: century of organizing culture, organizing and culture, and a ton
Speaker 2: of other really interesting people, like there's going to be
Speaker 2: a I'm just gonna tell you about these people. They're
Speaker 2: really cool. We're going to get to them. The movie
Speaker 2: that they made about this event, which won awards around
Speaker 2: the world, saw a lot of the filmmakers like forced
Speaker 2: into exile or imprisoned and shit. The governor who allowed
Speaker 2: it to be filmed, saw the end of his career,
Speaker 2: and I think saw jail time. But I'm not actually
Speaker 2: done writing this episode. Even though I like read about
Speaker 2: this stuff a lot, I can't remember that detail and
Speaker 2: so I'll know it by the time we record the rest.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, yeah, the film caused a fuss.
Speaker 3: That is that is a wild production thing, Like I'm
Speaker 3: trying to think of if I can, if I can
Speaker 3: remember another film that had that much like political consequences
Speaker 3: with people who made it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like, yeah, it's pretty wild, I know. And
Speaker 2: like when I find this stuff out that like even
Speaker 2: extra made me be like, why did I not know
Speaker 2: about this story? You know, there's gonna be a part
Speaker 2: where anarchists are gonna almost take over Buenos Aires. There's
Speaker 2: gonna be a part where like there's gonna be so
Speaker 2: much stuff and like and I mean whatever, I don't
Speaker 2: want to blame my ignorance of these things on like
Speaker 2: broader xenophobia and like American exceptionalism and you know, eurocentrism,
Speaker 2: but as like a broader problem, but that is a
Speaker 2: broader problem within the movement, the movement I hate that phrase. Okay, Anyway,
Speaker 2: like any great story, this story starts with pastries. Ah,
Speaker 2: did you know this about Argentina?
Speaker 3: I think I do.
Speaker 2: I'm really okay, Okay, Well, we're going to get to it.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk about pastries first. We're gonna talk about Argentina.
Speaker 2: Argentina is the second largest country in South America. If
Speaker 2: you don't know your geography, there's a huge country in
Speaker 2: South America that's Brazil. Then there's a pretty big country
Speaker 2: that takes up most of the southern trunk that's Argentina.
Speaker 2: Now you know where we are at. It is the
Speaker 2: eighth largest country in the world. Buenos Aires is likely
Speaker 2: the only city that the average person who doesn't live
Speaker 2: anywhere near there has heard of. If you didn't know
Speaker 2: where Argentina was, the city, you've probably heard of. About
Speaker 2: forty seven million people live in Argentina at the time
Speaker 2: of this story. Way less than that, about ten million
Speaker 2: people so are living there. I'm going to speed run
Speaker 2: the first trunk of Argentinian history. If I'm missing anything major,
Speaker 2: you should let me know. I'm something going to put
Speaker 2: you on the hook to pretend like you're an expert
Speaker 2: in this country's history.
Speaker 3: No, a little bit, but I'm not a not an
Speaker 3: Argentina nowhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you will be by the time we're done,
Speaker 2: or you'll be a knowwhere about some really strange details
Speaker 2: about unions. Okay, So Argentina, people have lived there for
Speaker 2: a long ass fucking time, a ton of different cultures,
Speaker 2: some of which were influenced by the Incas to the northwest,
Speaker 2: some of which weren't. White people showed to fuck the
Speaker 2: place up, and early fifteen hundreds. By the fifteen fifties
Speaker 2: you've got Spanish settlements, mostly along the coast. It's very
Speaker 2: to me, it felt very comparable to like reading about
Speaker 2: the US, where it was like, oh, the US has
Speaker 2: been around for a long time, or the collegies has
Speaker 2: been around for a long time, and then it was
Speaker 2: like only more recently that they were like, zoom, let's
Speaker 2: kill everyone and go west. I mean they were killing
Speaker 2: people all along, but like you know, the westward expansion
Speaker 2: came later.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it takes them, takes them like a hug, Well
Speaker 3: not one hundred years, but yeah, like fifty sixty non
Speaker 3: that okay.
Speaker 2: No, Actually, in the United States, it was like until
Speaker 2: the fucking Revolution before settlers went west.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, oh sorry, for some reason, I was doing
Speaker 3: revolution forward to Oh, I see, there's like coast to coast,
Speaker 3: like military control.
Speaker 2: I see. Yeah, no, it seems like about one hundred actually.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So in the early eighteen hundreds, the settlers in Argentina
Speaker 2: were like, well, we want to have a colonial state,
Speaker 2: but not be attached to Europe anymore. Worked for the
Speaker 2: United States, why can't it work for us? So they
Speaker 2: started a revolution in eighteen sixteen. They did a declaration
Speaker 2: of independence thing, and then it stayed really fucking messy
Speaker 2: for decades and they didn't get constitution for a long
Speaker 2: as time. Yeah, and I don't know the details of that.
Speaker 2: I tried if you want. If you want a long
Speaker 2: account of that, Mike Duncan does a pretty good one
Speaker 2: on revolutions. Oh, of course in America. But it's the
Speaker 2: stuff after that is it's really chaotic and complicated. And yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: that makes sense. I'm a big Mike Duncan fan. That's
Speaker 2: sounded sarcastic, but it's not. When I built my cabin
Speaker 2: I built a huge chunk of it listening to revolutions,
Speaker 2: So I like, in my mind, I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: like the Russian Revolution, that thing where I was wiring
Speaker 2: the twelve volt lights that are in my ceiling, you know,
Speaker 2: like I remember that the drill bit wasn't right. That's
Speaker 2: the main thing I remember about part nineteen oh five,
Speaker 2: part of the revolution, you know, which is gonna come
Speaker 2: up today or maybe maybe Wednesday. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 2: nineteen oh five Russian revolutions. Somehow. It's all going to
Speaker 2: tie together. We got the Spanish Civil War in here,
Speaker 2: don't worry anyway, So they didn't get a constitution for
Speaker 2: like a long ass time decades. Right before and during independence,
Speaker 2: indigenous people were getting their land stolen for cattle ranching
Speaker 2: and I think sheep farming also, and a ton we're
Speaker 2: getting forced to work shit jobs on the ranches. And
Speaker 2: you get this whole class of people who are of
Speaker 2: mixed ancestry, who are just rural peasants who are poor
Speaker 2: as fuck. In Argentina. This conquering takes a long ass
Speaker 2: time because the indigenous people fall like hell, and all
Speaker 2: the while is doing it's like civil war thing, you
Speaker 2: know about what kind of nation to make. It took
Speaker 2: until about eighteen sixty one for the like quote unquote
Speaker 2: revolution to get it shipped together or and the modern
Speaker 2: nation of Argentina to be born. At this point, immigrants
Speaker 2: start flooding the country from Europe, especially Spain and Italy. Miam,
Speaker 2: do you know what you get when you let Italians
Speaker 2: come to your country in the nineteenth century? A bunch
Speaker 2: of anarchists.
Speaker 3: Yes, Like this is like the single predictor of are there, Like,
Speaker 3: is there going to be anarchists in this country? It
Speaker 3: is like do they have a bunch of battalions?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So pastries. Argentina is the only Spanish speaking country
Speaker 2: where the word for pastries is factoras everywhere else that
Speaker 2: word means bill or invoice, and it comes from the
Speaker 2: Latin to make, because the bakers wanted you to know
Speaker 2: that making pastries was actual, real work that deserved a
Speaker 2: living wage.
Speaker 3: They're rips.
Speaker 2: As for the names of these pastries for which they
Speaker 2: deserved a living wage, and these are still the case today.
Speaker 2: Apparently I haven't I haven't been to Argentina, but there's
Speaker 2: a lot of articles about this, a lot of everything
Speaker 2: from political articles to like food articles, like this is
Speaker 2: a story that people sometimes hear about, and it's a
Speaker 2: good story. Some of the pastries include Bullista Frayela Friar's Balls,
Speaker 2: canoncitos little canyons, bombas bombs, libritos, little books, so spiitas
Speaker 2: de monja nuns size and vigilantes vigilantes. And then there's
Speaker 2: a pastry called the cremona, which is a circular I
Speaker 2: don't know if the name means I don't think it
Speaker 2: means anything saucy. It is a circular pastry that was
Speaker 2: designed to be a sort of infinity of a's. The
Speaker 2: A stands for anarchist, Yeah yeah, which gives you a
Speaker 2: hint of why the bakers have made these types of
Speaker 2: gas because anarchist bakers named the pastries in Argentina in
Speaker 2: the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. Ask for where to
Speaker 2: start this particular story of pastries in Well, first let's
Speaker 2: start with the thing that they all had to do.
Speaker 2: They actually these these They just felt that they deserved
Speaker 2: money for their work of making pastries, and the way
Speaker 2: they did that was naming them a certain way. And
Speaker 2: then the way that we deserve This is an ad
Speaker 2: transition is the worst one I've ever done, because it
Speaker 2: seems earnest, and I don't mean it to be earnest.
Speaker 2: Here's some stuff that you can buy, I guess in
Speaker 2: case you need a new car and We'rebecca. And in
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy nine, General Julio Argentino Rocca set out to
Speaker 2: wipe out the indigenous people of pattin Petaconia.
Speaker 3: That was a jarring tone shift. Yeah, I guess that's
Speaker 3: what ad breaks are for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I'm sure he absolutely would have encouraged you
Speaker 2: to get all of those things that just happened. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: although he might not have wanted you to listen to
Speaker 2: some of the podcasts that probably just got advertised so
Speaker 2: much like a true crime villain himself. He went on
Speaker 2: a fucking murder spree which went with the shitty fucking
Speaker 2: title The Conquest of the Desert oohoo, terrible name, bad thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's usually portrayed as a genocide because it was a genocide. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was not portrayed that way for you know, at
Speaker 2: the time by the powers that be. Any honest historian
Speaker 2: looking at it is like, this is a specific plan
Speaker 2: to eradicate the following groups of people, and they were
Speaker 2: not subtle about it. Indigenous people were subdued or killed,
Speaker 2: and settlers moved on to the land. Indigenous people were
Speaker 2: forcibly prevented from having children, and then a year later,
Speaker 2: General Julio Argentina Rocca becomes fucking president a fucking Argentina.
Speaker 4: Hi.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's funny because like I do a lot of
Speaker 2: these episodes where it'll be like and then this cool
Speaker 2: fucking strike and then all these people were fighting cops,
Speaker 2: and I don't usually like focus on like why people
Speaker 2: are doing it, because like, to me, it's like self evident.
Speaker 2: You're like a poor immigrant in the nineteenth century. You're
Speaker 2: fucking starving, you know, and like the people who are
Speaker 2: presidents are even more blatantly garbage or something than the
Speaker 2: average I don't know, than the average average president right
Speaker 2: now in the world is pretty bad. But so murder
Speaker 2: sprey guy becomes president. Anarchists are showing up from Europe.
Speaker 2: The first anarchists and like socialists and radical and stuff
Speaker 2: actually arrived earlier eighteen seventy one from France. There were
Speaker 2: refugees from the Paris Commune. By eighteen seventy six, anti
Speaker 2: authoritarian socialism aka our friend anarchism is the dominant strain
Speaker 2: of leftism in the country. But shit really got going
Speaker 2: in Argentina in eighteen eighty five. One my favorite historical
Speaker 2: anarchist thinker. Can you guess, is it Melantesta? Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: Mala Testa. Yeah, for anyone who's listening. There is an
Speaker 2: Italian anarchist who I think very fondly of based on
Speaker 2: a lot of the stuff I've read by him. And
Speaker 2: he was not afraid to criticize wanton violence, and he
Speaker 2: believed in creating a veteran for your world for all people.
Speaker 2: But he was not a pacifist either, and I find
Speaker 2: him very interesting. Erico Malatesta. In eighteen eighty five, he
Speaker 2: was in like Naples in Italy, and he was like
Speaker 2: nursing cholera victims, because that's just what you do in
Speaker 2: your Mala testa. And then the Italian state was like,
Speaker 2: we should kill this guy, and he was like, but
Speaker 2: I don't want to die. I'm not going to do
Speaker 2: an entire an accent. He was like, but I'd rather
Speaker 2: not get murdered, you know. So he does what everyone
Speaker 2: does in this situation, which is put himself into a
Speaker 2: crate full of sewing machines and then get himself smuggled
Speaker 2: to Argentina from Italy.
Speaker 3: I did not know that's how we did that. That
Speaker 3: is so funny.
Speaker 2: I know it, Like, I know, I want to know
Speaker 2: more about it.
Speaker 3: Like did he like he had to have broken out
Speaker 3: of the crate on the ship, right? Like what did
Speaker 3: he just like have enough supplies that he brought with
Speaker 3: him to.
Speaker 2: Like I long, I know, I wish I knew. I like,
Speaker 2: it's possible he just like fucking like at each dock
Speaker 2: got in and out of the crate. I think it
Speaker 2: wasn't that he smuggled himself. I think he was smuggled.
Speaker 2: I think is a better way to put it, because
Speaker 2: we have this like problem of like big Man of history.
Speaker 2: Shit even leaks into antithiritarianism and we're like, oh, Malotesta,
Speaker 2: he's the guy, right, you know, and he's like part
Speaker 2: of a movement, right, it's very power or movement and
Speaker 2: it has you know, all the workers in it. And
Speaker 2: so I think, but I don't know. I I tried. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it makes sense. I read a bunch of
Speaker 2: different things, but none of the things I read got
Speaker 2: beyond the the like one or two sentence part of
Speaker 2: this story, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that is kind of the other problem
Speaker 3: with Bryan ro Maltesta is he does so much stuff.
Speaker 3: I know, that he's like, yeah, this is this is
Speaker 3: a thing that for a normal person will be this
Speaker 3: is the wildest thing you've ever done, and this this
Speaker 3: is just like Wednesday.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Now he's gonna do more shit like that.
Speaker 2: That doesn't even make it into any of the Like,
Speaker 2: if you read a ten page biography of Malatesta, it
Speaker 2: does not mention you're lucky if it mentions he goes
Speaker 2: to Argentina, even though he like the chain the dominoes
Speaker 2: that he starts whatever. Anyway, I'll get to the dominoes.
Speaker 2: So you know, he's not the guy who brought anarchism.
Speaker 2: Anarchism is already there. He's sort of a figurehead that
Speaker 2: people ascribe a lot of shit too. But he's fucking cool.
Speaker 2: Sewing machine gun, the sewing thing is cool. And his
Speaker 2: friends in Argentina are these anarchist bakers, and they wanted
Speaker 2: a union, so they formed a union in eighteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: And they did this. It wasn't like Mala Testa started
Speaker 2: their union. Another Italian anarchist at Torre Mattey. He's the
Speaker 2: name that's most often attached to this union. I think
Speaker 2: it's just like, you know, pick a guy that's the
Speaker 2: guy who we're going to write into the history books.
Speaker 2: And this union has the sick name of the Cosmopolitan
Speaker 2: Society of Resistance and Placement of Bakery Workers.
Speaker 3: That's awesome. We need, we need, we need, we need
Speaker 3: to go back to sick union names or I feel
Speaker 3: like our union names have gotten kind of boring and
Speaker 3: now we can do better.
Speaker 2: I know, but they did follow. There's only two styles
Speaker 2: of nineteenth century radical newspaper names. There's either the like
Speaker 2: the torch or the bomb or whatever, and then there's
Speaker 2: like the worker's paper. And their paper was yeah, their
Speaker 2: paper was the working Baker.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: You know, look, you have to use all of your
Speaker 3: cool naming on one thing. You have to concentrate it
Speaker 3: all to make sure you don't have enough left for
Speaker 3: the other one.
Speaker 2: Totally. I mean to be fair.
Speaker 5: I read a podcast called cool People Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 5: But you know, I wrote another one called live like
Speaker 5: the World's Dying. That's poetic, right, so like, look at
Speaker 5: me plugging my shit.
Speaker 2: Okay. The Working Baker was often banned by the government
Speaker 2: and was often printed and distributed illegally, which is like,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna have a paper with a boring name.
Speaker 2: It's gotta be the like, oh shit, man, did you
Speaker 2: get a fucking copy of the Working Baker? Like, yo,
Speaker 2: don't tell anyone, you like, open up your trench coat
Speaker 2: and you pull out a couple of copies of the
Speaker 2: Working Baker, you know, next to some croissants.
Speaker 3: Was this one of those things where it was like
Speaker 3: they had a bunch of friends in like the printing
Speaker 3: press unions or whatever, or were they like doing get themselves.
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer to that. There are so
Speaker 2: many people printing papers at this point. Yeah, that's true that, like,
Speaker 2: and we're gonna talk about a bunch more of them.
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer. Unfortunately, I was tempted to
Speaker 2: just answer and be like, I think it's this, but
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know. In eighteen eighty seven, the
Speaker 2: Cosmopolitan Society of Resistance and Placement of Bakery Workers had
Speaker 2: their first strike. It lasted ten days. They the cops
Speaker 2: tried to stop them, they fought back, and they won
Speaker 2: the strike. After ten days they gained a thirty percent
Speaker 2: wage increase.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Shortly thereafter, the rail and steel workers were like, oh
Speaker 2: that sounds good, and they went on stroke.
Speaker 3: Yeah hell yeah.
Speaker 2: The Baker's Union wasn't just one of the first unions
Speaker 2: in Argentina. For a while, like I think like fifteen years,
Speaker 2: it was like the union in Argentina. It was the biggest,
Speaker 2: the baddest, and the most anarchy. Mali Testo wrote their
Speaker 2: articles of incorporation and the other which is probably not
Speaker 2: what they called it, but you know, he like wrote
Speaker 2: the things that like this is how we do things,
Speaker 2: and all the other unions were like, sweet, we'll use those. Thanks. Also,
Speaker 2: in eighteen eighty six, a thing Malatesta did that I
Speaker 2: can only find the two sentence version that would be
Speaker 2: an entire fucking novel if it had happened to anybody else.
Speaker 2: Mala Testa set out to do what like everyone in
Speaker 2: every Western I've ever seen has done. He and four
Speaker 2: people wandered into the desert looking for gold supposedly hidden
Speaker 2: there by the Argentinian army that had been stolen from
Speaker 2: indigenous people during the conquest of the desert.
Speaker 3: Why yeah, sure, why not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's just like, I'm even better to do.
Speaker 3: Malatesta treasure Hunter or not what I thought was gonna
Speaker 3: be happening in this episode. When I woke up this.
Speaker 2: Morning, I want to write this story is so bad.
Speaker 2: I'm sure he wrote about it. This man did not.
Speaker 2: This man wrote a lot, you know, but I like,
Speaker 2: I might have to learn Italian just to fucking read
Speaker 2: his take on it. And I'm too embarrassed to learn
Speaker 2: other languages solely for the purpose of anarchist history research,
Speaker 2: like until I get better at my Spanish, I'm not
Speaker 2: allowed to do that, like the language that people actually
Speaker 2: speak in the country I live in. Yeah, so he
Speaker 2: returns empty handed a few weeks later, and who knows,
Speaker 2: or maybe he found it all and I don't know,
Speaker 2: but you know, and he just like socked it away.
Speaker 2: He stuck around Argentina for a few more years, and
Speaker 2: they returned to Italy to keep getting interested and get
Speaker 2: organizing and being cool. And one day I'll just like
Speaker 2: give up on life and do a ten part episode
Speaker 2: on him or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, so this is Baker's union, and part of the
Speaker 2: reason it was such a big deal. It seems like
Speaker 2: such a like minor thing to me, Like a baker
Speaker 2: is like, oh, it's cool, Like I like making bread.
Speaker 2: I started learning to do that. You know, bread is
Speaker 2: a really big deal, and it's a big deal in
Speaker 2: a kind of interesting way. That's different than a lot
Speaker 2: of other places. You did this whole sea on food
Speaker 2: rides and how they're like the basis of everything, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and most of the times, correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: Most of the times, it's like bread is the staple food,
Speaker 2: and therefore the price of bread is like what everything
Speaker 2: revolves around, and so all these like revolutions around bread
Speaker 2: or like we demand bread blah blah blah. Right, basically
Speaker 2: saying like we demand food, we want calories. Is that
Speaker 2: a correct assessment of like Europeans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I mean also like, yeah, it's just
Speaker 3: how a lot of it's just it's the thing that
Speaker 3: a lot of food production is based off of for
Speaker 3: a really really long time in a lot of places.
Speaker 2: Okay, Argentina, it's different. It's a class thing. Bread. A
Speaker 2: loaf of bread costs three times more than meat. Jesus. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So a loaf of bread was a symbol of working
Speaker 2: class resistance because it was a symbol of like upper
Speaker 2: class bougie shit. Right, And I think pastries and stuff
Speaker 2: like that probably tie into that too, But basically like
Speaker 2: they're like we get to eat bread. That is a
Speaker 2: thing that we deserve. We don't just need meat, you know.
Speaker 3: So well, what I'm getting out of this is the
Speaker 3: old bread and Roses slogan. The significance of the bread
Speaker 3: and the roses have been flipped.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah no, And it's just so funny
Speaker 2: to me because like, yeah, usually like bread, like usually
Speaker 2: meat is the like, well, rich people get to eat meat.
Speaker 2: I could eat meat too, I mean not in the
Speaker 2: United States, where everyone eats too much meat, but that's
Speaker 2: okay anyway, So the bakers they're not fucking around. They
Speaker 2: organized one hundred and six strikes between eighteen eighty seven
Speaker 2: and nineteen oh seven.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's that's a lot of strike. Yeah, and I
Speaker 3: guess also part of that too is like given so
Speaker 3: immediately I was like, okay, how many strikes per day?
Speaker 3: Is that?
Speaker 5: I know?
Speaker 3: I was like yeah, But the problem is you can't
Speaker 3: even do a measure like that because strikes last time,
Speaker 3: so like there's only it's a number of strikes you
Speaker 3: could conceivably have, assuming your strikes are like lasting more
Speaker 3: than like a day. Totally, I think makes it even
Speaker 3: more impressive.
Speaker 2: I know, and like I don't entirely know if these
Speaker 2: are all baker strikes, and they are all over the country. Right,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of other anarchists like strongholds besides Buenos Aires.
Speaker 2: And most of today's story is going to be about
Speaker 2: Buenos Aires, but there's like all these all these things
Speaker 2: are also happening in other cities, in towns. And one
Speaker 2: of the reasons that they're such a powerful union is one,
Speaker 2: the upper class really likes their stuff, right, and two
Speaker 2: it's skilled labor. And it's hard to bring in scabs
Speaker 2: because if like all of the bakers, you're like, you
Speaker 2: know how to bake, you're an anarchist now, right, So like,
Speaker 2: who the fuck are you going to get to scab?
Speaker 2: It's not lift this heavy thing and move it. I
Speaker 2: don't believe in unskilled labor, but there's still different scales
Speaker 2: of certain types of things, right, And you know, and
Speaker 2: and an artisan thing is different than factory line production.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure to talk show on factory line workers.
Speaker 2: They so the bakers, they four mutual aid societies, which
Speaker 2: is a different sort of thing than modern mutual aid
Speaker 2: organizations that I think is like worth pointing out. These
Speaker 2: are like anarchists fraternal organizations where the members take care
Speaker 2: of one another rather than like most modern conceptions of
Speaker 2: anarchist mutual aid is like for all comers, right. They
Speaker 2: started turning bakeries into workers cooperatives, which is like where
Speaker 2: I like, I love when people just start getting to
Speaker 2: the point where they're like, wait, why do we need
Speaker 2: bosses at all? Fuck this? Yeah, they coordinated with the
Speaker 2: other unions. Basically, whenever someone else went on strike, if
Speaker 2: the bakers joined them, it was over. It would soon
Speaker 2: spiral into a general strike, which is a fuck ton
Speaker 2: of and owners would be forced to give up to
Speaker 2: the workers demands. Anarchists led like six general strikes around
Speaker 2: the turn of the century. And that's not even There's
Speaker 2: gonna be a bunch more later that we're gonna talk
Speaker 2: about that you mentioned the top of the episode. Along
Speaker 2: the way, they named their bag goods to make fun
Speaker 2: of their three main enemies, the government, the military, and
Speaker 2: the church. So they had friars, balls, none size bombs,
Speaker 2: little cannons. The names remain today, and I'm like the
Speaker 2: little books, I kind of wonder because some of them
Speaker 2: are like, oh, these are to make like the like
Speaker 2: or like little cannons, or to make fun of the military.
Speaker 2: I'm like are they or were they like we like
Speaker 2: shooting people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, like, well, I mean, I guess, I guess.
Speaker 3: My Kenner argument to that is that I feel like
Speaker 3: the unions are less likely to have cannons, and the government.
Speaker 2: Is that's true. Although some of these people came from
Speaker 2: the fucking Paris Commune which started over the workers had
Speaker 2: some cannons, that's true, and then the government was like, wait,
Speaker 2: we don't want to have cannons anymore, and they were
Speaker 2: like come and take it, like the fucking Texas thing,
Speaker 2: only it was real and it was about cannons anyway. Sorry,
Speaker 2: it's a tangients.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess, I mean, I guess you're sometimes we
Speaker 3: have cannons, like is the motto of the nineteenth Citry
Speaker 3: workers movement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. One of the worst mix strips I
Speaker 2: ever did was like anarchist pirates and they're like, bring
Speaker 2: up the cannons, and the person was like, bring up
Speaker 2: the cannon. The person's like, we have no cannon and
Speaker 2: it's like spelled with one end because you know, there's
Speaker 2: no holy books and the anarchist tradition, and then the
Speaker 2: other the pirate captains like you fucking pedant like, bring
Speaker 2: up the canons with two ends, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we don't have those either. He used to write comic
Speaker 2: strips a long time ago anyway, So where the fuck
Speaker 2: am I? Okay, that's the background. The pastries part of
Speaker 2: the background. We're going to do some more background now.
Speaker 2: Argentina and the turn of the twentieth century is incredibly
Speaker 2: full of immigrants. By nineteen fourteen, Argentina had the highest
Speaker 2: percentage of foreign born residents of any country in the world.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Also, notably, and hard to understand from an American exceptionalist
Speaker 2: point of view, it had a higher GDP per capita
Speaker 2: than the US did around this time, so it was
Speaker 2: like a more successful country for the upper class. The
Speaker 2: labor movement kept growing, and for much but not all,
Speaker 2: of that time, we'll talk about when it slips in
Speaker 2: and out of that. It was largely an anarchist A
Speaker 2: bunch of anarchist newspapers were published and then regularly repressed.
Speaker 2: The Voice of the Woman was in a narca feminist
Speaker 2: newspaper around that time, edited by Virginia Bolton. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk about her because I think she's as
Speaker 2: good of a person as I need to understand some
Speaker 2: stuff about the movement at the time, and she's cool.
Speaker 2: Virginia Bolton probably born in eighteen seventy. Some things I
Speaker 2: read to at eighteen seventy six, but I think they're
Speaker 2: wrong because I did some math and I also saw
Speaker 2: all the ones that sad eighteen seventy She was born
Speaker 2: in Uruguay, the daughter of working class German immigrants, and
Speaker 2: she grew up to be like I, well, grew up
Speaker 2: to be. I think she did this as a kid.
Speaker 2: She was a shoemaker and a sugar maker, which are
Speaker 2: like the two jobs that two of the jobs that
Speaker 2: like poor girls can work. As a teenager, she's hanging
Speaker 2: out with the baker's union. And then she led the
Speaker 2: first women strike in Argentina in eighteen eighty nine, which
Speaker 2: is a sea strike, like probably nineteen years old when
Speaker 2: she runs this, And I don't even think she's a seamstress,
Speaker 2: although there will be if we count the sewing machines
Speaker 2: from before, there's at least three. Anyway, Yeah, at twenty
Speaker 2: years old, she becomes the first woman to address a
Speaker 2: labor rally in the country, at a May Day rally,
Speaker 2: and this is like right when May day is becoming
Speaker 2: a thing. Right. This is only a couple years after
Speaker 2: the Haymarket martyrs have died in Chicago. See the very
Speaker 2: first episode of this show. She was one of the
Speaker 2: women who ran this newspaper, The Woman's Voice for two years.
Speaker 2: It was in our anarchist communist newspaper. And it was
Speaker 2: not only the first anarchic feminist South America newspaper, this
Speaker 2: was the first buy and four women publication of any
Speaker 2: kind in South America. Wow, I love when we get
Speaker 2: that shit. I love that the first gay newspaper in
Speaker 2: the world was an anarchist. Like, I love that, like
Speaker 2: finding all the shit that were just like left out
Speaker 2: of you know. But it was printed using basically the
Speaker 2: sugar workers and the shoe workers were like they used
Speaker 2: their own wages to make this newspaper happen. It was
Speaker 2: labeled appears when it can, rather than like monthly or
Speaker 2: daily or whatever, which a bunch of the other newspapers
Speaker 2: were also using. And it was a little bit like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's hard to afford, and it was a little bit
Speaker 2: like a lot of the shit's illegal half the time
Speaker 2: we do it, you know. It included voices from anarchists
Speaker 2: women around the world, and you like this part. I
Speaker 2: think it included articles that like talk shit on specific
Speaker 2: misogynist anarchists men. Hell yeah, and this scared the shit
Speaker 2: out of shitty anarchist bros. She toured around the continent
Speaker 2: speaking on feminism and anarchist communism. She helped set up
Speaker 2: Castado Pueblo, the house of the People Cultural Center that
Speaker 2: had reading. Said the library had an orchestra, and just
Speaker 2: like all the coldal shit that proved like it's like
Speaker 2: one of the things I keep running across. I fucking
Speaker 2: love's like working class class people coming together and be like, no,
Speaker 2: we can have all the rich shit. We just have
Speaker 2: to fucking do it together, you know. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 2: and the other way to get rich shit is to
Speaker 2: sell advertising on a podcast. I mean to buy things
Speaker 2: to participate in whatever. I keep doing these things where
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, I hate selling ads, and it's like
Speaker 2: I do right, Like I don't like that.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that I'm really good at doing
Speaker 1: the ad transitions.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate it. And it's like because I
Speaker 2: want to like flag it a little bit, but I'm
Speaker 2: also not like it just fucking eat is what it is.
Speaker 2: Everyone fucking has work. Some people, you know, we all
Speaker 2: work for things, and including a bunch of people we're
Speaker 2: talking about today, you know, and I work for this thing,
Speaker 2: and I really appreciate the chance to get to talk
Speaker 2: to you all, not just you two although YouTube specifically,
Speaker 2: but even the greater you all in the audience. So
Speaker 2: here's some mats and we're back. I was supposed to
Speaker 2: do that, like really ironically, and I went Ernest, and
Speaker 2: I'm very sorry. It won't happen again.
Speaker 4: You know what you did though? You provided context?
Speaker 2: Oh god, Margaret context killed joy. The reason I picked
Speaker 2: that middle name is because.
Speaker 4: The way that's not a bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally so later Virginia Bolton she forms the
Speaker 2: Central Feminino Anarchista the Anarchist Women's Center in nineteen oh
Speaker 2: seven with a bunch of other women, including some of
Speaker 2: the other Actually I don't remember if some of these
Speaker 2: other women got into the scripture not. I don't remember.
Speaker 2: I sometimes whenever it's like a ton of names, sometimes
Speaker 2: I'm like, I'm going to not introduce a new name
Speaker 2: because I can't remember names for shit. And I used
Speaker 2: to hate history because it was just like memorized dates
Speaker 2: and names and like that wasn't what is interesting. If
Speaker 2: it'd been like if the history books have been like
Speaker 2: here's when like, you know, Jews and Irish immigrants kicked
Speaker 2: out all the like beat up all the fascists in England,
Speaker 2: I'd be like, whoa history rules instead of being like,
Speaker 2: on what date did the following three named people beat
Speaker 2: the shit out of all the fascists? And you know,
Speaker 2: it's like, that's not the way that my brain works.
Speaker 2: Do you have that problem or where are you at here?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean I well, for the longest time I
Speaker 3: had I just couldn't do dates at all. It was
Speaker 3: a real disaster. But then I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 3: I think I think the thing you're getting at is
Speaker 3: like it's history as narrative is just much easier to
Speaker 3: follow than history is like timeline, which is the way
Speaker 3: that it's usually thought of.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 3: I think the thing that the thing that I got
Speaker 3: to was like once you've once you know the story
Speaker 3: and you know enough of the context, you like you
Speaker 3: kind of just start figuring out the dates because you know,
Speaker 3: like around when what cycle of thing is happening?
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, and then I start carrying I only
Speaker 2: care about dats is because they relate to other things.
Speaker 2: If I want to say, like, oh, led this may
Speaker 2: day strike, and then I'm like, oh, that's actually really
Speaker 2: interesting because it was like three years after the Chicago Martyrs, right,
Speaker 2: you know, like that's when it becomes interesting. Like dates
Speaker 2: are the things that tie the pieces together of the web,
Speaker 2: but they're not the substance, you know. Okay, So Virginia
Speaker 2: Bolton when she gets sick and anarchist theater troop fund
Speaker 2: raises for her recovery. Oh, I know. In nineteen oh two,
Speaker 2: the state passed a residency law, which is basically an
Speaker 2: anti anarchist law. They were like, they gave themselves permission
Speaker 2: to deport any immigrant who disturbs public order, and I
Speaker 2: think they explicitly name anarchists in the text of the law.
Speaker 2: This is used. You will be shocked to know, to
Speaker 2: deport immigrants that they believe are disturbing the public order. Wow,
Speaker 2: who could have anticipated that happening in this country and
Speaker 2: other countries I know. And so in nineteen oh five,
Speaker 2: her partner was kicked out of the country during a
Speaker 2: sweep of anarchists and he ended up taking the kids,
Speaker 2: but they were still dating. So this actually just like
Speaker 2: seems like a cool thing. Like I think it was
Speaker 2: like he was like, all right, you're busy doing all
Speaker 2: this shit, So I'll take the kids and take care
Speaker 2: of them in Duguay. And so she stays in Argentina
Speaker 2: for a couple more years. A few years later, she
Speaker 2: becomes the first woman to ported under the residency laws.
Speaker 2: Oh no, yeah, so she's able to reunite with her family.
Speaker 2: I doubt she's like crazy bummed about it, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah where She starts a new anarchist feminist newspaper called
Speaker 2: The New Path, and starts in a feminist association that
Speaker 2: met at the Electrical Workers' Union. And she lived a
Speaker 2: long ass life. She died sometime around nineteen sixty, still
Speaker 2: down for the fucking cause. Wow, Virginia Bolton, you were
Speaker 2: cool as hell. Hell yeah, anarchism in Argentina. I usually
Speaker 2: don't read the headlines, the headings of the sections, but
Speaker 2: here I did. I already did it, and I can't.
Speaker 2: There's no takebacks, there's no editing. We're live people. Whenever
Speaker 2: you're listening to this, I it sends a ping and
Speaker 2: me and Mia get back on the fucking mic.
Speaker 4: Sorry, what was the title of that section and.
Speaker 2: Because I'm in Argentina, Yeah, there's no editing.
Speaker 4: Now you've said it twice.
Speaker 3: Ah crap. See, being a podcaster means you constantly have
Speaker 3: to be on your on your toes for the clever
Speaker 3: traps throat. Now you I.
Speaker 1: Can imagine like doing radio and like still apping a
Speaker 1: job the way that we talk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just wouldn't. I'm pretty sure that they'd make
Speaker 2: a new residency law. I don't care. If you're a
Speaker 2: sim then yeah, you're kicked out of the radio.
Speaker 4: I'm like, no way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Every now and then I do like live radio,
Speaker 2: like an interview, like talking about a topic or something
Speaker 2: like that, and it's so hard not to cuss.
Speaker 4: It's so hard to cut.
Speaker 1: And uh, that's why we're on the podcasting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where we can say bad words like fudge and darn. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and if they if we just said the bad ones,
Speaker 2: but if you heard the not bad ones, it means
Speaker 2: that they got edited by the overlords.
Speaker 3: So the FCC's got to us.
Speaker 6: Yeah, just come up with all of the most obscene
Speaker 6: things I could possibly say that are not technically involving,
Speaker 6: like descriptions of sex or anyway.
Speaker 2: So it's the eighteen nineties, and anarchism is doing this thing.
Speaker 2: In Argentina, Communist anarchism in particular have set up a
Speaker 2: bunch of studios socialis, which translates to social studies. But
Speaker 2: I think in this case means like social centers that
Speaker 2: I think focus mostly on education. Clearly, I didn't find
Speaker 2: more than one source that gave me more than the
Speaker 2: name of it and then started trying to infer, and
Speaker 2: that's not what I'm supposed to do. But they did
Speaker 2: form what I know more about. They formed what they
Speaker 2: called resistance societies. Have you heard of this model?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: So I think early anarchists, you know, you start off
Speaker 2: with these mutual aid organizations, right, which are essentially fraternal
Speaker 2: organizations in some ways, and then they would move into
Speaker 2: resistance societies, which is somewhere between that and a union.
Speaker 2: It's like where they start being like a mutual aids
Speaker 2: to a society that's like armed. Basically they're not necessarily armed,
Speaker 2: but like ready to do direct action. You know. It's
Speaker 2: like the affinity group model meets the fraternal organization model.
Speaker 2: They're really interesting to me. Eventually these evolve into the unions, right,
Speaker 2: This is not the only evolution of unions. I don't
Speaker 2: know enough about the history, but I has something to
Speaker 2: do with the land enclosures in England and some other stuff.
Speaker 2: Since this is leftism that we're talking about, the Marxists
Speaker 2: and the anarchists waged a bitter war of words against
Speaker 2: each other for the hearts and minds of the working class.
Speaker 2: Ah arguing whether or not you can use tyranny to
Speaker 2: raise tyranny from the world, said clearly the anarchist. Then
Speaker 2: within the anarchists, they also argued bitterly, and they argued
Speaker 2: bitterly over whether large scale organizations were chill or whether
Speaker 2: like nothing should get beyond the resistance society level. And
Speaker 2: they also argued about whether propaganda of the deed in
Speaker 2: this case, like at this time it's like mostly like
Speaker 2: a lot of like killing of kings and other like
Speaker 2: rulers and cops and stuff, whether that's justified, right, And
Speaker 2: so they argue about all these things because history is
Speaker 2: a wheel and we are lashed to it, and it
Speaker 2: will repeat yep. In eighteen ninety seven, a Catalan carpenter
Speaker 2: and an Italian baker came together to form the most
Speaker 2: influential newspaper on the left, an anarchist paper called Lo
Speaker 2: Protesta Yumana the Human Protest. By nineteen oh three it
Speaker 2: was just La Protesta.
Speaker 3: I was about to say, like that, that's a that's
Speaker 3: a surprisingly interesting name for the largest paper. It's like, no, no,
Speaker 3: screw that, it's not the protest That that was too different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're right. They were like, well, we need a
Speaker 2: we had to name something else fancy, so they had
Speaker 2: to unfancy their newspaper. You know. By nineteen oh four,
Speaker 2: this is a daily paper. No more appears when it can.
Speaker 2: This is a daily paper in the country, and all
Speaker 2: over the country. There are dozens of anarchist newspapers and
Speaker 2: other labor papers, but again anarchism being the dominant thing
Speaker 2: until about nineteen fifteen, and anyway there's another. There's at
Speaker 2: least one other daily. There's newspapers in Spanish, Italian and French.
Speaker 2: And there's like a chicken and egg thing about the
Speaker 2: newspapers and the labor struggles, because you're kind of like
Speaker 2: they feed into each other and the country is alive
Speaker 2: with workers fighting for a world without a state or capitalism,
Speaker 2: and they're also those Then those same workers are running
Speaker 2: these newspapers which are encouraging other people and like it's cool.
Speaker 2: I don't recommend it as a model right now. Just
Speaker 2: to be clear, when I'm talking about how amazing anarchist
Speaker 2: newspapers were, I would recommend other forms of media that
Speaker 2: people actually consume.
Speaker 3: Whatever that was, like matrotskyite, yeah, no, the crank standing
Speaker 3: outside of the school with the newspaper, yeah, bankless task yeah.
Speaker 2: Instead stand outside of the newspaper with a little business
Speaker 2: card that says cool people who did cool stuff and
Speaker 2: be like, hey, have you listened to this? And then
Speaker 2: people will be like that's weird. Why are you doing that?
Speaker 2: And they'll be like I don't know, and everyone will
Speaker 2: be a little bit sadder. So in nineteen oh one,
Speaker 2: seven thousand of these different resistance societies send thirty five
Speaker 2: delegates and they form the Workers Federation of Argentina. Since
Speaker 2: this was run by anarchists, it was politically pluralist and
Speaker 2: it didn't turn away workers for not being anarchists. It
Speaker 2: was also explicitly anti racist. As long as you were
Speaker 2: down for direct action and workers struggle, you were in.
Speaker 2: It was also anti nativist. There's a lot of more
Speaker 2: conservative of unions were like, we only want Argentinians who
Speaker 2: were born in Argentina working these things. And they don't
Speaker 2: mean indigenous people for anyone who's not when you're nativism,
Speaker 2: it's not like it's like the settlers who want only
Speaker 2: them to be the only settlers. It's that, however, the good,
Speaker 2: the good people the federation. They also included women, including
Speaker 2: all women unions like the sugar refining finery workers. From
Speaker 2: the very beginning, Marxists tried to take it over immediately
Speaker 2: because they were allowed to be in it, but there
Speaker 2: weren't enough of them, so they quit to do their
Speaker 2: own thing. They had a Worker's Party whose first goal
Speaker 2: was to centralize all control over workers struggle in Argentina.
Speaker 2: Never change authoritarians.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The group they formed was called the UGT. So then
Speaker 2: the workers, minus the grouchy Marxist who cut themselves out,
Speaker 2: they just went fucking trade by trade and got better,
Speaker 2: better hours and better pay. The sign painters got the
Speaker 2: eight hour daynineteen oh one, the doc workers got the
Speaker 2: nine hour day in nineteen oh two. They're just like
Speaker 2: fucking doing it. They're just like all right, we're we're
Speaker 2: like all the workers. We can just do I mean,
Speaker 2: they clearly can't immediately do what they actually want, right.
Speaker 2: They can't. They don't have enough power to like end capitalism, right,
Speaker 2: but they are like they know how to get certain
Speaker 2: stuff done, and they are getting stuff done. In nineteen
Speaker 2: oh four, they changed FOA, changed their name to FURA
Speaker 2: or FORA. They added regional to the name Federacion Obrera
Speaker 2: Regional Argentina. Why did they add regional? Can you guess
Speaker 2: it's not immediately obvious?
Speaker 3: Is it one of those like we're this thing but
Speaker 3: just in this area, like there's especially the war or
Speaker 3: is it so weird? Okay, but weirder than that.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like when people say so called the
Speaker 2: United States of America. Oh my god, incredible, Yeah, absolutely incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they were refusing to acknowledge that Argentina is a nation state.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, it is a region. Nation states shouldn't exist.
Speaker 2: And since at this point they're like, look where anarchist communists.
Speaker 2: Our goal is a classless society without a state or
Speaker 2: private property, and so they're like, fuck the nation of Argentina.
Speaker 2: Their influence is creeping even into that Marxist offshoot, the UGT,
Speaker 2: and it stops being Marxist and starts being neutral syndicalism,
Speaker 2: which means that they're like want to use syndicalism, but
Speaker 2: they're not picking a specific ideological line. And so at
Speaker 2: this point they start becoming way more down with direct action.
Speaker 2: The Marxist version was like way more reformist actually at
Speaker 2: this point, which is funny because that's not the way
Speaker 2: that people would necessarily assume or act today.
Speaker 3: What like points is that roughly like nineteen oh five.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: This is ah, this is this is the before the
Speaker 3: BULTI we need social democratic Marxists.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, actually that's a that's a good way
Speaker 2: to put it. Yeah, totally. And so they start becoming
Speaker 2: more down with general strikes and shit. So the two
Speaker 2: groups start working together better, and there's like all of
Speaker 2: these times. I'm not going to get into all of
Speaker 2: the most of the books that I read about this
Speaker 2: stuff are just the back and forth between these unions,
Speaker 2: and it does not actually interest maybe on like a
Speaker 2: certain level, you know, But like they keep trying to
Speaker 2: get together, and it sometimes works and it sometimes doesn't,
Speaker 2: and when it works, it's actually really fucking beautiful. So
Speaker 2: I like get why they kept trying to come together,
Speaker 2: but they co run a bunch of general strikes, which
Speaker 2: is cool as shit. They had a three day general
Speaker 2: strike in nineteen oh seven that ended in total victory
Speaker 2: for the workers, and then in nineteen oh seven the
Speaker 2: same year, they had a three month general strike that
Speaker 2: started as a tenant strike and was like started by women,
Speaker 2: actually specifically women tenants because one of our villains is
Speaker 2: gonna be related to this. Cops are murdering strikers wherever
Speaker 2: they can because they're fucking cops, and people are getting
Speaker 2: arrested and deported constantly, and lot of these strikes are
Speaker 2: actually about the residency law. They're like, please get rid
Speaker 2: of the law that lets you deport us in the States, Like,
Speaker 2: but we want to deport you because you keep having strikes,
Speaker 2: you know. And so they would like catch like Lapretesta's
Speaker 2: editors and be like haha, and like kick them out
Speaker 2: of the country. You know. I think they had to
Speaker 2: laugh like that. It actually wasn't legal to arrest someone
Speaker 2: unless you go ha when you do it. A lot
Speaker 2: of people got off on technicality because not everyone could
Speaker 2: laugh like that. There's one guy who's like the main
Speaker 2: repression guy, Colonel Falcon, the head of the Buenos Aires
Speaker 2: police who swore to eradicate the anarchists. Spoiler alert, The
Speaker 2: anarchists eradicated Colonel Falcon Ay and his full name is
Speaker 2: Colonel Raman Falcon And if that isn't an asshole name,
Speaker 2: I've never heard one. Yeah, there's an eighties action film
Speaker 2: cop name. Yeah, totally. If you are from the upper class,
Speaker 2: you are not allowed to name your kids something that rhymes.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. I don't make the rules. I just make
Speaker 2: the rules. Or my Spanish is worse than I think,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't rhyme, but I'm pretty sure it does
Speaker 2: the accents in the same place. Yeah, he'd been an
Speaker 2: officer in the Desert campaign, that genocide of indigenous people
Speaker 2: I talked about earlier, and then he'd risen through the
Speaker 2: ranks by repressing that, like that nineteen oh seven tenements
Speaker 2: strike by immigrant women who couldn't afford their rent. So
Speaker 2: on May first, nineteen oh nine, there's like this huge crowd,
Speaker 2: I think sixty thousand people or something at the May
Speaker 2: Day demonstration and Falcon's men shoot into the crowd. They
Speaker 2: kill either eight or twelve people, depending on your source.
Speaker 2: I'm going to put the more reliable at twelve, including children.
Speaker 2: And the elderly, and they wound more than one hundred
Speaker 2: other people. The UGT, the neutral syndicalists. They call for
Speaker 2: a general strike the next day in solidarity with the anarchists,
Speaker 2: and this one the anarchists were allowed to organize again,
Speaker 2: and over eight hundred in prison anarchist workers who'd been
Speaker 2: arrested in the strike were set free. I'm sure there's
Speaker 2: not a lesson in there for anyone, certainly not for me.
Speaker 2: It's like, Darian isn't as fine when I do it,
Speaker 2: even though when we get the fuck over ourselves anyway,
Speaker 2: but the eight or twelve dead workers and children made
Speaker 2: some people really fucking angry. They made one person in
Speaker 2: particular angry enough to decide to do something about it. Actually,
Speaker 2: lots of people did stuff about it, calling for a
Speaker 2: general strike, that's one of things you can do about it.
Speaker 2: But one guy, his name was a Simon Radowitski, and
Speaker 2: he was a young Jewish anarchist, just eighteen years old.
Speaker 2: He's from Ukraine, and he was like, you know what,
Speaker 2: he'd been studying magic, right, and you want to do
Speaker 2: a magic trick. He wanted to make Colonel Falcon disappear
Speaker 2: into a cloud. Of blood. That's probably what he said,
Speaker 2: that's probably the way you phrased it. It's also what
Speaker 2: he did. He got himself a bomb, and Colonel Fakhnn
Speaker 2: got himself a funeral, and Simon kills Ramon Falcon.
Speaker 3: And that's honestly, it's honestly really impressive that. I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm assuming this, well, actually I don't know why I'm
Speaker 3: assuming this kid's a first time bomber, but first time
Speaker 3: bombing actually working and not blowing up and killing you
Speaker 3: is really impressive, especially with like terrible nineteen hundreds bombs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, well, you know, nineteen yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's still not a great period. And I actually I
Speaker 2: think people will know this because I've said it before
Speaker 2: on the show. I specifically don't learn about bomb technology
Speaker 2: because I'm fucking too paranoid. I have no idea that's reasonable.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I just I just I just assume that like well,
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know, like I I just assume
Speaker 3: on average that if someone is trying to make a bomb,
Speaker 3: they're gonna blow themselves up.
Speaker 2: And this is the extent of my yeah you heard
Speaker 2: it here. First, we are not advocating anything anti bombing.
Speaker 3: I want this on the record, play this in the courtroom,
Speaker 3: bombing bad, don't do it.
Speaker 2: Mine's neutral, I you know, with the way the rest
Speaker 2: of the script goes, I can't so for how it
Speaker 2: all went, and the wild life that Radowitski lived, and
Speaker 2: the wild life of the woman who later got him
Speaker 2: free from prison, and the week when Buenos Aires almost
Speaker 2: became an anarchist society. We're going to talk about on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Hey, come back. You have to come back. You have
Speaker 3: no choice.
Speaker 2: Now, I know hooked, I know, the cliffhanger. It's the
Speaker 2: the cheap trick that I always there's a word for
Speaker 2: when you like specifically point out that you're doing something
Speaker 2: coat hang, No, I don't know. There's a thing that
Speaker 2: I'm doing. And the thing I'm doing is switching over
Speaker 2: to plugs Mia, Hi, what do you do? Who are you?
Speaker 2: How'd you get hear him?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I those are a lot of existential questions there.
Speaker 3: The thing that I do is, yeah, I'm I'm one
Speaker 3: of the hosts of it Could Happen Here. You can
Speaker 3: find us wherever find podcasts are distributed. Yeah, I We're
Speaker 3: on Twitter and Instagram at Happened Here pod. It's also
Speaker 3: you can find cools in media. Yeah, you can't find
Speaker 3: me on Twitter anymore because I got banned for a
Speaker 3: statement that I want to put on the record was
Speaker 3: not a death threat, but was interpreted as one towards
Speaker 3: the teosphobic New York Times columnists. Yeah so rip me.
Speaker 3: You can no longer find me on the internet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, tweet podcast I do mis tweet was I
Speaker 2: do not advocate bombing the following person.
Speaker 3: Look. Look, I merely suggested that it would be bad
Speaker 3: if New York Times people, if New York Times columnists,
Speaker 3: we're treated the same way that trans people are. And
Speaker 3: this was interpreted as a death threat. So that's funny.
Speaker 3: I mean that's fun Well yeah, yeah, so rip me.
Speaker 3: Yeah so don't find me there, Get off of social media,
Speaker 3: go do strikes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am on the internet. I have a sub stack.
Speaker 2: It's under my name, Margaret Kiljoy. I also now have another.
Speaker 2: It's not really a podcast, but it's a thing. It's
Speaker 2: a thing. It's in this feed, it's in the it
Speaker 2: can Happen here feed, It's in all the feeds. I
Speaker 2: somehow slipped it into every feed. It's in what's a
Speaker 2: podcast that's clearly not in it's in Revolutions by Michael
Speaker 2: Duncan's that thing. I have a thing that I'm doing
Speaker 2: called the Cool Zone book Club. And because my other
Speaker 2: thing I do is write fiction, and I also edit fiction,
Speaker 2: and so I am going to be finding amazing short
Speaker 2: stories and short books and reading them to you and
Speaker 2: every Sunday on this feed and the it could happen
Speaker 2: here feed and probably not the Revolutions feed by Michael Duncan.
Speaker 2: But you should go listen to it. You probably already
Speaker 2: do if you listen to the show, to be honest,
Speaker 2: But if you don't, you probably should. I don't know
Speaker 2: why I'm plugging him, but I listened to it. He
Speaker 2: doesn't know who I am. Uh, that's what I have
Speaker 2: to plug, Sophie. What do you got that?
Speaker 4: That's what I was gonna plug?
Speaker 2: Oh? Sorry, you would have done it better, let's hear it.
Speaker 4: Well, normal me would have. But sick me. Margaret, Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 4: do you have a book club?
Speaker 2: I do have a book club. Is it called the
Speaker 2: Cool Zone book Club or the Cool Zone Media book Club?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 4: Unclear? Unclear? But uh what book are you discussing? First?
Speaker 2: Well, my own book, The Lambles Slaughter of the Lion.
Speaker 2: I am reading it to Robert Evans, who is an
Speaker 2: obscure journalist who writes about driver. Yeah. Here's a book.
Speaker 2: It's called a Vice A guy at a History of Advice.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I kind of gotta sign copy of it.
Speaker 2: Oh nice. Yeah, it'll be worse something someday, you know,
Speaker 2: and makes it. Yeah, every I don't know why this
Speaker 2: is funny. It's kind of loopy today.
Speaker 1: But it is. But it is kind of funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we got we got the Cool Zone. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: call it the Cool Zone Media Book Club. Full name
Speaker 1: it cool And you could check that out every Sunday
Speaker 1: and this feed worthy you could happen to your feed
Speaker 1: or whatever feed you're feeding.
Speaker 2: And you can also check us out on Wednesday to
Speaker 2: hear the rest of this part of this longer story
Speaker 2: that is absolutely worth it. And I'm not being sarcastic
Speaker 2: because this is one of my favorite stories that I know.
Speaker 1: Bye, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 1: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 1: out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts
Speaker 2: Here,