In an interview with Carlos Taibo after the publication of his book «Los
olvidados de los olvidados. Un siglo y medio de anarquismo en España»(Ed. Catarata, 2018), Rubén Caravaca asks him: «What does it mean to be
a libertarian in the 21st century?». The answer is overwhelming because
it is so true: ---- «In my opinion, it means defending self-management,
decommodification, depatriarchalization and the definitive
decolonization of our societies, from the awareness of the challenges
that arise from a collapse that may well be imminent».
If we try to do a survey in the street to find out about the collective
ideology of terms such as «self-management», we will actually see how
far society is from concepts that, for people who are part of or have
been part of grassroots groups, are the ABC of our way of proceeding or
understanding the world. Meanwhile, anarchist collectives have grown
inward, devouring ourselves, often incapable of adapting or defending
our model of struggle to a reality that is increasingly distancing
itself from the ideal that we have always considered would free the
working class from any model of economic oppression. The firmness
maintained in the face of pacts between unions and the state that have
done nothing but reduce the possibility of reaction against the abuses
of capital and its unitary model of representation; the refusal to
modify in any way the receipt of subsidies or any public economic aid
reduces our capacity for mobilization, the hard and voluntary work of
militants exhausts us, and the press, with the voluntary invisibility of
our victories, depletes us. Because what is not spoken of is already
known. It does not exist. And we look at each other in astonishment,
without understanding how our message, so clear, so necessary, continues
to fail to penetrate the people who walk down the street with their
necks bent, immersed in a life that is frightening because of its
virtuality, its fatuousness. And we continue to grow inward, in an
ideological endogamy that condemns us to disappear.
Because words fail us.
In the essential article by Darío Adanti: «Libertarian: Or how the
semantic plunder of the far right is leaving us speechless» in the
edition of El Diario of October 7, 2023, we attend in a humorous tone a
brief diachronic study of the terms that today are perverted by the
collective of the little red and yellow flag made in Bangladesh at the
ready and with the Black American Express Centurion card in their
pocket, howling (literally) and dragging into their vindictive madness
anyone who is not able to understand that rights and privileges are not
terms of the same equation.
Freedom, the libertarian, associated since the appearance of a breast in
a French oil painting with workers' struggle and social vindication, was
linked to the anarchist model and its ideal. From the first decades of
the 20th century, anarchist groups expanded like wildfire and with them
a terminology was established that generated a semantic field tinged
with red and black.
Adanti reminds us that it was Roosevelt in the 1930s who "(...) began to
use the word liberal to identify the Democratic Party, becoming fixed as
a synonym for the progressive policies that he put into practice to get
his country out of the crisis," lulling the groups of workers' struggle
who did not see the trompe l'oeil.
From there, madness. Market freedom as a synonym for wholesale worker
slavery; economic liberalism as an analogy of wages of misery and
subsistence, not existence, raising the dogma of the demolition of
market barriers in a society that continues to raise them against human
rights. Products cross borders; people bleed to death on razor wire.
And the parade of horror continues. Presidents-elect who deny the more
than thirty thousand victims of the dictatorship in their country,
twisting the linguistic curl and proclaiming themselves "libertarian
liberals", schizoid chainsaw included. Presidents of autonomous
communities who never look into the eyes of those who question them,
claiming the freedom to demand astronomical rent prices while the
networks are flooded with cheap anglicisms (cohousing, coworking...), to
hide under the carpet the reality of millions of people who invest their
entire salary in exercising their constitutional right to housing.
Far-right groups crowing about their freedom to insult and deny murdered
women while talking about the imposition and indoctrination of the
feminist lobby on their well-meaning heteropatriarchal minds in the
purest style of a stale Soberano brandy advertisement.
Presenters of television shows who in prime time denounce the lack of
freedom to be able to mock members of the LGBT community or disabled
people, longing for a past that for them was always better, but for the
glorious Nieves Concostrina it was always only before.
And of course, freedom of conscience, the spearhead of Catholic doctrine
regarding the relationship of its supreme being with its creation, man.
(Yes, man, who already makes it clear in their magic book that woman was
a revelation a posteriori, something like a culinary rehash from the
main dish).
And this writer is an amateur connoisseur of the economy and its world,
but she knows a lot about moral conditioning, and about the impositions
and perversions that those with the mitre and the cassock impose in
pursuit of individual freedom. Because if we talk about chiringuitos,
the church's is the largest precisely because of what is intangible.
Because for the church, man is free in thought, word and deed. But the
sword of Damocles always hangs threateningly. You are free within the
fold that marks the promise of paradise. Free to act according to your
own rules, but your soul is condemned to eternal damnation for having
dared to exercise your freedom. "But now that you have been set free
from sin and have put yourselves at the service of God, you reap the
holiness that leads to eternal life" (Romans 6:22). Freedom at the
service of someone, of something. Freedom as a moral currency.
Returning to Darío Adanti's article, we read the following in the closing:
"Perhaps it would be good not to buy into the semantic framework of this
reactionary far-right disguised as new and alternative and to continue
to claim the word libertarian as part of the working-class tradition, in
memory of those who literally gave their lives so that we today have the
rights that this same far-right wants to snatch from us by demolishing
the only dam we have to contain its depredation: the Welfare State."
Because we are libertarians. And so were others before them.
«Libertarian Fury» is the title of the documentary that bears witness to
the CNT rally in the San Sebastián de los Reyes bullring in 1977, after
40 years of repression and silence. And despite the obstacles, the rally
was a success, more than 25,000 people filled the square and another
15,000 were left out due to lack of capacity at a time when trade union
organisations were not yet legalised. And the CNT put its foot down. The
workers' organisation that came to gather two million members during the
civil war, the one that stopped the armed uprising in the first
instance. Today it seems as if we had never existed. Or at least that we
live on the margins of what we were, or could have been.
At that meeting, Fernando Carballo, a veteran of the union, a member
since the underground in 1936 and the son of a militant shot by the
dictatorship, addressed the youth present in the square:
«You young libertarians are the ones who have to liberate Spain, the
ones who have to make the confederation powerful, the ones who have to
make a libertarian movement capable of destroying fascism and
capitalism. Do not destroy your hands applauding the speaker. Destroy
your hands destroying international fascism».
Flexing their muscles, that same year, in July, more than one hundred
and fifty thousand people gathered in Montjuic, Barcelona. Federica
Montseny, the first woman to hold a ministerial post and another
historic militant of the union, finally left her forced exile to
remember with her first words all the people buried in the graves "(...)
of this mountain of Montjuich crowned by a castle where so many of our
comrades and so many men of the left have given their lives for
freedom." She also recalled the collectivizations of Catalonia as the
only example of self-management in the world, and she harangued the
people present to join unions beyond the large mobilizations and
meetings, becoming a real weapon of struggle for the working class. And
she concluded: "Let us go then, towards libertarian communism."
And despite the solemn and exalted rhetoric of these recordings, which
take us to a not so distant past, there is a truth that overflows every
minute of footage, and that reconciles us with the fact of being an echo
of an era that seems framed in sepia. Because we were, we will be.
Because we fight, we will fight. Because the libertarian ideal will not
be perverted as long as there are those of us who want to continue
speaking out, from outside or from within, militant or in the rearguard,
but always anarcho-syndicalist. Because our fury is born from the
certain awareness of the common ideal, beyond that freedom that they
sell us, prostituted by egotism and individualism. Because our fury is
like Camus's invincible summer: "in my world there is something
stronger, something better, pushing back."
And even if we are only the embers, BURN. And remember that fire casts
no shadow, and that freedom is not lit by any torch. It is carried in
the hearts that remember other possible presents and futures.
«There is nothing so incredible that oratory cannot make it acceptable»
(Cicero)"
https://www.cnt.es/noticias/aunque-solo-queden-rescoldos/
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