Public controversies between anarchists and socialists in the early twentieth century: a counterhegemonic discursive practice

Abstract

Public controversies between socialists and anarchists became an usual practice for both groups; in 1902, when these controversies are relatively settled and regulated, they were frequently performed in theatres located in different Argentinian cities and they managed to attract large audiences. The anarchist journal La Protesta Humana and the socialist La Vanguardia published many articles not only to announce those political meetings but also to inform about them once they had been performed. Those articles frequently reported passages of the speeches, provided details about the events and made evaluation comments. These controversies have been studied in some historical researches; in this paper we assume a discourse analysis approach, particularly from a glotopolitical perspective, to study the articles both papers published on the controversies. Two research objectives guide this survey: on the one hand, we aim to understand why this practice emerged in these counter hegemonic organizations and what benefits they consider they can gain from it, considering it was not usual in those times political struggles. On the other hand, we will analyse controversy practices as glotopolitical interventions each of these groups made. To answer these introductory questions, we intend to define the genre considering its historical environment and the hegemony and subalternity dialectics in which controversies were developed. To address the second objective, we focus outstanding features of its formal plurisemiotic configuration in the light of discoursive ideologies that guided its development and its relationship with the political value each group searched in or attributed to this practice.