Evora’s Rural Workers and Anarchism in the Republican Revolution

the union reorganization attempt and propaganda between the strikes and the war

Abstract

The presence of the rural worker in portuguese anarchist thought, in addition to provoking a discussion of the relationship between rural proletariat and urban proletariat, transposes concepts to another space, the rural, whose social reality will be reflected in the propaganda developed by anarcho-syndicalism centered in Lisbon. In 1912, after the peak of rural strikes from which the unionist organization of rural workers was violently repressed, the anarchist intentions of mobilizing rural workers resulted in a “propaganda tour” through the Alentejo which, in turn, resulted in the constitution of the Federation of Rural Workers, which will publish the periodical O Trabalhador Rural. However, the dichotomy “peasant vs. worker” that will guide all the thought produced. Little knowledge of the environment and rural space, combined with the progressive decline in union membership, will determine difficulties, conditioning the development of anarcho-syndicalism in the Alentejo.