Pedagogies of Print and Person: Anarchist Newspapers as Social Media in L.A. and the Borderlands

• In Event: Creative Dissent: Radical Pedagogies in Twentieth Century Grassroots Movements

Abstract

The vast cultural production of the transnational radical community in Los Angeles, California and the borderlands is exceeded by the overlapping network of individual and organizational connections that sustained it. By the early twentieth century the shrinking of space and time through technological change facilitated the ability of anarchists to turn a global movement into reality. Through interpersonal networks, mass meetings, and print media, anarchists in Los Angeles formulated the terms of their struggle, coordinated their actions, broadcasted their views to a broader tier of supporters and sympathizers, and attempted to spread their message to the public at large. During this period the leftist press as a whole fostered an imagined global community of radicals, which served as the base for expressions of solidarity. Newspapers functioned as the most public manifestation of a layered radical community spanning individual association, organizational solidarities, and the printed page. In this sense, anarchist newspapers in the early twentieth century functioned as “social media” in a remarkably similar way as digital social media today. The social and peer-to-peer communicative function of these newspapers increased their value as tools to teach internationalism that supplemented the many anarchist community schools. This paper will provide an examination of the pedagogical methods and the value of newspapers within a movement that remained analogue in its communication technologies, but global in its reach.

Author

• David M. Struthers, University of Copenhagen, Denmark