Directed by Tancrède Ramonet • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes

This episode of NO GODS NO MASTERS opens with the United States during the Depression, and the galvanizing role of the conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was a period during which anarchists were characterized as bomb-throwers, drunkards, and Bolsheviks. And in a country that saw trade unionism and any fight for workers’ rights as an existential threat, anarchists could not be tolerated. Indeed, the government and police sometimes teamed up with organized crime to fight them.

IN MEMORY OF THE VANQUISHED traces the appropriation of anarchism by communists, and of anarchist symbolism by fascists in France, Italy, and Spain. It also takes an in-depth look at the Spanish Revolution of 1936. But with the defeat of the Spanish Republic, anarchists found themselves in disarray, with nowhere to turn politically as the Second World War loomed. The anarchist movement seemed doomed. But was it? 

NO GODS NO MASTERS offers an in-depth historical perspective on the anarchist movement, but also make implicit links to the present and raises the question of whether anarchist thought could appeal to a new generation of activists too.