Below is the first in a four-part series about the development of anarchism in Cochabamba, Bolivia, by Cochabamban resident and independent journalist Wilson García Mérida. I will translate the subsequent parts shortly.
Cesáreo Capriles’ legacy
Cochabamban anarchism
By Wilson García Mérida
Los Tiempos
February 1, 2009
Translated by Scott Campbell
“Art and Work” (Arte y Trabajo), the weekly publication born during the golden age of the 1920s, and which disappeared for its opposition to the Chaco War, is the most paradigmatic intellectual precedent of Cochabamban anarchism. Its founder and director, Cesáreo Capriles López, published the first issue of the magazine on February 27, 1921, with a print run of 800 copies. The editorial page of that first edition contained a posthumous homage to Prince Kropotkin, who had passed away earlier that year. About the libertarian Russian noble Capriles wrote:
“He renounced his princely prerogatives, the flatteries of Nicholas II’s court, and all the advantages that his personal and intellectual conditions could have won him in European societies. Likewise, the Bolsheviks didn’t want him, because his libertarian dream went beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat. Like the man whose dignified words, perhaps from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘while the wretched exist, luxury is a crime,’ he has achieved immortality.”
The merciless hatred that “Art and Work” propagated against the powerful elite was an undeniable hallmark of this magazine which was unprecedented in the history of Bolivian journalism.
The philosophy of Cesáreo Capriles – notoriously influenced by thinkers such as Bakunin and Proudhon – aimed to strengthen civil society’s democratic expression and to counter the organized authoritarianism of the state, the church and the political parties. His animosity for lordly priests and demagogues of all types was obvious and in response to them he proposed communitarian and people’s strategies.
Anarchism, in the ethical vision of Cesáreo Capriles, turned out to be a doctrine subjected to the human interests of full development and communal happiness and well-being.
Because of this he took rational positions and elaborated on themes of municipal interest (understanding municipalism as the essential communitarian scenario inside of everyday life), as well as regional development and productivity (understanding the economy as a natural instrument for people to achieve and share material well-being), implying a libertarian action that defined the content and format of “Art and Work.”
Along those lines Capriles promoted, for example, the construction of the city’s first sewage system, affirming that “to make the city sanitary is such a primordial necessity that is should be, by today, the only concern of authorities and citizens.” In a critical tone he also said that, “health and ornamentation, essential attributes of the civic body, have been totally neglected by the cliques which, imposed by governments, carry on without any innovation than the party nomination.”
Wilson García Mérida is an independent journalist in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Director of the Servicio Informativo Datos & Analisis. His email is [email protected].
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