"We are muscle workers and we are also libertarian thought workers." Notes from Chile to the debate on workers and intellectuals in the anarchist movement (1917-1939)

Abstract

The article analyzes the figure of the anarchist intellectual based on his written participation in newspapers, pamphlets and books. For this we will refer to a period of organic consolidation and increased transnational connections of this movement. Thus, it is proposed that anarchism in Chile conceived intellectual activity and function from workerism, that is, from the preferential valuation of the production of ideas that arose from the workers themselves, claiming their capacities for theoretical exercise and distrusting who devoted themselves solely to reflective work. Therefore, unlike what happened in Argentina and Spain, in Chile a group of self-taught workers, without abandoning their trade and union work, devoted themselves to tasks of thought and propaganda.