Frank Jacob and Mario Keßler's edited collection, Transatlantic Radicalism: Socialist and Anarchist Exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries, is a valuable addition to the broadening area of transnational labor history. The nine contributions in the volume address several analytical and methodological questions on the nature and the dynamics of transnational radicalism and some apparently contradictory views presented in these essays are in fact further evidence of the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of political exile.
Reflecting two of the most current approaches to studies on transnational radicalism, the volume is organized into two main sections. The first section addresses the role played by the press in building organizational networks; the second examines the use of biographies and the reconstruction of individual trajectories in “the attempt to combine biographical studies with a historical analysis of the international labour movement” (15).
The first four contributions focus on the organizational connections created by the radical press between Europe and the Americas, while also posing the central question on the enduring impact of these efforts and the role played by individuals. For example, Lutz Häfner reconstructs the crucial role played by existing networks of exiles and supporters of the struggles against the tsarist autocracy in the remarkable success of the Russian socialist revolutionary Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya during her six-month fund-raising tour of the United States in 1904. However, Lutz Häfner points out that the success was also due to the favorable but fortuitous support emerging from transatlantic public opinion, reminding the reader that contingent factors should always be taken into account in the evaluation of transnational propaganda tours, one of the basic features of the transnational labor movement.
In the detailed reconstruction of the Italian anarchists’ network in São Paulo at the beginning of the twentieth century, Carlo Romani and Bruno Corrêa de Sá e Benevides provide three points meriting attention. The first is the significance of regional identities in transnational radicalism, prompting reflections on the need to include translocality in labor studies. The second is the importance of language. Besides enlarging readership, further exploration should be undertaken to explain why Italian anarchists in Brazil published some newspapers in Portuguese. This practice, for example, was much less frequent among the political exiles in the Anglo-Saxon world and comparative studies could be quite fruitful in scrutinizing differences within the transatlantic radical experience. The third point is that “it was the openness and flexibility of the activists that allowed them to build a strong movement” (79). However, polemics were still a significant feature, particularly in the world of exiles where personal rivalries could be exacerbated by coexistence within relatively small communities, with negative consequences for the whole movement. This is what emerges in James Michael Yeoman's exploration of the anarchist press networks between Spain and the Canal Zone at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yeoman touches upon several critical issues: the interconnectedness between (Spanish) economic and political migration, the strategic role played by the press, specifically in connecting Spain and the Canal Zone, and the roles played by individuals, such as M. D. Rodriguez, both in giving impetus to the action in the Canal Zone and in disrupting it through his editorial initiatives.
Hillary Lazar documents the strategic role of the press in building transnational networks. They reconstruct the trial of the editor of Man! A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement and his two associates, arrested in 1934 in California, along with the subsequent transnational campaign of defense that emerged. The newspaper is a unique site of study as it was the organ of the International Group, “which was far more multi-ethnic in character than any other organisation in the U.S. anarchist network during this era” (112). This experience deserves further examination, again in comparison to others outside the United States.
The second section, focused on individual experiences, highlights the relevance of economic and political push factors, personal relationships, and elements of casualness in the creation of transatlantic radical networks. In his reevaluation of the controversial figure of Terence Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor, Steven Parfitt demonstrates not only the importance of individual friendship bonds but also of the interconnectedness between different political transnational networks. Parfitt documents Powderly's role in transforming the organization into a global working-class movement also as a result of his close friendship with Irish radicals.
Jacob provides another powerful example of the role played by individuals in spreading radicalism and workers’ solidarity across the Atlantic. In his reconstruction of the fascinating, though disappointing, attempts by Herbert Calvert to create an autonomous industrial colony in Kuzbass in Siberia in the early 1920s, Jacob depicts how hundreds of American workers attempted to fulfill their dream to “experience true communism” in Soviet Russia (152).
The story of the modernist architect Hannes Meyer and his experience with German Communist exiles in Mexico in the 1940s, analyzed by Georg Leidenberger, reveals the link between economic and political push factors in the creation of exile communities and how this affected the perception and the relationship with the host country. Leidenberger also shows the negative impact that internal ideological warfare—in this case between Trotskyists and Stalinists—had on the community of political exiles. The same divisions deeply affected the life in exile in America of two important members of the German labor movement: Rosi Wolfstein and Paul Frölich. Riccardo Altieri draws on their correspondence in his contribution to underline, once again, the methodological relevance of using biographies to reconstruct and examine transnational networks. In the final contribution, Keßler shows the influences that the experience of exile had on the life and ideas of the political scientist and futurologist Ossip K. Flechtheim.
It is likely that the variety of themes addressed in this volume will, as hoped by Jacob and Keßler, stimulate further interest in the transnational perspective of studies of radicalism (252).
