Noam Chomsky - The Spanish Revolution
I was reading a great book on Anarchists in Spain. They started out as very poor farmer peasants - too hungry to have sex! So they were celibate. The females refused the males until there was organizing for freedom and better pay, etc.
The Anarchists of Casas Viejas
This tradition goes back to our original human culture as Professor Chris Knight details - and he critiques Chomsky as well.
So there is a deeper dynamic going on.
"For its intelligence and humanitarian achievements, for its political honesty, for its power and its beauty (there is no other word), this book deserves to be called a masterpiece." ...American Ethnologist Google Books
Originally published: 1982
Jerome R. Mintz (1930–1997) was Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University
https://libcom.org/library/review-anarchists-casas-viejas
This is a wonderful book. For those who do not already know, Casas Viejas was an Andalusian village whose CNT branch rose in revolt in January 1933. Two civil guards were killed in the course of the uprising and, after a few hours, assault guards arrived to retake the village. Using torture, they discovered a family implicated in the uprising and a siege soon occurred at their house, in which one assault guard and eight villagers died (two of whom were gunned down trying to escape the house after the Assault Guards had set it on fire). Most of those involved in the uprising fled the village in the face of these superior forces -- including, eventually, those who were in the chumbas (cactus) firing on the troops conducting the siege. Once the siege was over the troops then rounded up 12 campesinos (rural workers and peasants) who had not taken part in the uprising (and so remained in the village) and murdered them to teach the rest "a lesson" (as the leader of the Assault Guards put it).
The actual events, and the murders by the Assault Guards, eventually became known and helped bring down the liberal-left government. It was also used as evidence for Liberal and Marxist interpretations of Spanish Anarchism (and Anarchism in general). Mintz's book demolishes these interpretations and exposes them as the myths they were.
the historians who maintained that there was a connection between anarchist strikes and sexual practices are quickly and effectively dismissed -- "the level-headed anarchists were astonished by such descriptions of supposed Spanish [anarchist] puritanism by overenthusiastic historians." Mintz traces the citations which allowed the historians to arrive at such ridiculous views to a French social historian, Angel Maraud, who observed that during the general strike of 1902 in Moron, marriages were postponed to after the promised division of the lands. As Mintz points out, "as a Frenchman, Maraud undoubtedly assumed that everyone knew a formal wedding ceremony did not necessarily govern the sexual relations of courting couples."
So I think at first the farmers really were starving. But this was never some later formal strategy.
. Indeed, such an imposition which may be no accident -- "In his discussion of the distortions of anarchist activities by historians, Noam Chomsky [in Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship] warns that intellectuals may adopt the attitudes of their class in describing popular movements and the presumed need for elitist supervision."
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